Semen Strips are Still Not Candy, Vaginal Oppression, and other Reader Mail.

Grapes: A more suitable snack choice

--Semen Strips--Still Not Candy
"This stopped me dead in my tracks," wrote the apparently recovered William Quincy Belle, sending a screen shot showing IBWMW is the #1 hit on Google Canada for "semen strips are not candy." (Sadly, we still languish at number 3 here in the U.S.)

Still, I stand by the "not candy" statement regarding Masque--a kind of watermelon fruit-roll-up product that you place in your mouth before giving head to neutralize the taste of your lover's very Life Essence--despite the company's confusing assertion in their FAQs: 

"They are certainly not candy and were created for an intended purpose. However, we have many people in our office that eat them merely for the taste."

Which indicates to me less about semen strips' deliciousness and more that the Masque corporate offices are in dire, dire need of a decent vending machine.

--The Misguider Googler of the Day
The dear soul who found us via the search term "woman has fat camel toe vagina."  

--My Work Sullying Other Places
The brave and beautiful Erica at A Sexy Woman of a Certain Age is running my piece The Appeal of an Older Woman. She also called me a "debauched ninja" which I fucking love. Look for her piece about her 7 most erotic experiences appearing here anon.

My article about Trisha Borowicz's bad-ass film Science Sex and the Ladies and how it's pretty much biologically impossible for most women to reliably (or ever) come via p-in-v fuckery is currently running in Salon as The Simple Secret To Making Women Orgasm No One Understands and AlterNet as The Simple "Secret" to Making a Woman Orgasm That Way Too Many People Don't Get (it's the number one story!)

I made the mistake of reading the hatey comments, which for the record is not a good way to start your day, and got all bunged up when people said stuff like "I come vaginally--that's BS, you're oppressing me, etc..." (Note:  If the majority of people have an experience but you don't, that doesn't mean the statement is untrue, it just means you're in the minority.  Because that's how statistics fucking work.)

Anyway, tons of nicer, more logical people shared the story via Facebook and Twitter and totally got it, like Jane Rising who wrote this today: 

I was raised Mormon, and Mormons are taught that masturbating is BAD BAD BAD. I was a good Mormon girl, so I never ever touched myself. For reals. I got married at age 22, and was expecting all of my sexual frustration to come to an end in holy matrimony. But my husband didn't seem to know anything about sex, either, and it just never felt that good to me. We were just doing it the way we saw people do it on tv or in movies (the PG-13 ones, of course). It took about 5 minutes, and for me it was just wet and slimey and didn't feel like anything other than a mess. He seemed pretty happy with me, though, so I patted myself on the back for being a good wife.

As time went on, he seemed less and less happy with me. He wanted me to be thinking about sex all the time, and I wasn't. He wanted me to want him, and I didn't. He wanted me to "get into it," and I couldn't. So he sent me to a sex therapist, who was supposed to "fix" me. Nothing really changed.

After 16 years unhappily married to this man, I filed for divorce. And about a year later I stopped being Mormon. Imagine my surprise when I had sex for the first time with someone other than my husband. This new guy spent a few minutes with his fingers on my clit and I was through the roof. I started weeping. He wanted to know if something was wrong. Why was I crying? Because I had just had my first orgasm at age 39, and it was so easy. After all those years of anger, blame, frustration, guilt and pressure, I finally realized that I was not broken. Not broken one bit.

I haven't had a chance to watch this movie yet--I just read about it today for the first time. But the message of this film needs to be spread far and wide, and hopefully make its way to women like I used to be--women trapped by ignorance in a miserable sex life. We need to know our own bodies, claim them, and love them.
****
Huzzah!

--"Gigantic and Instantly Fun"

Murca, a blogger in Estonia, wrote this about In Bed With Married Women:

Minu see lemmik väljamaa blogi peab juba mõnda aega suurt pidustust avaldades ja taasavaldades lugejate päris (voodi)elu lugusid. Ja see on nii hiigla tore ja kõhe ja huvitav ja veidral kombel haarav, et ma just mõtsin, et üks blogi ei saa enam paremaks minna ja siis see läks.

which according to Google translate means:

My favorite Väljamäe this blog has been for some time, and big parties by publishing a pretty taasavaldades readers (bed) life stories. And it is so gigantic and instantly fun and exciting and strangely captivating, so I just mõtsin that one blog will no longer get better and then it went away.

Which, for me at least, could also use a Google translation. If you speak Estonia, let me know what it means. Unless Väljamäe means "you're vaginally oppressing me," in which case, keep that $%## to yourself.

--Why I Can Never Get A Real Job, Reason #47
A friend who moved away said her daughter remembers me as "the penis and vagina pals lady." Which is awesome and totally what I'm doing the very next time I'm called upon to do an animated feature and/or children's puppet show.

xoxox
jill

Real Sex Lives, Severene: "I just had the most fucked up sexual experience."

Inhospitable

(You have arrived at the end of a grand celebration in which we're running IBWMW's favorite Real Sex Lives, stories in which readers anonymously share the truth about their sex lives, or lack thereof. Please don appropriate viewing goggles.)

*****
This new one is dark and raw, but with some beauty and Life Lessons--just the way I like it.

Here, then, today's entry from Severene: 

I just had the most fucked up sexual experience and I don't know what to do with it.

I'm just gonna write it down because I need to purge it or codify it or maybe just see if written down it makes better sense. Here goes:

I had a fight with my husband and I left. From the car, I called my old lover. The one who three months before had decided he would just never call me again. It would have been nice if he would have informed me of this, but he is not nice. That was part of his appeal.

Since he'd disappeared on me, I had been completely lost, weeping inconsolably every night. Yes. Every. Fucking. Night. For three months. I walked hollow-eyed through my life like a specter, tears welling up at any reminder of him. This happened a lot since my reminders included:  doctors, the city of Houston, pretty much any song on the radio, references to following your instincts/heart, hospitals, any mentions of fucking in general, the entire Jewish people... you get the idea.

Perhaps fleeing was just an excuse to see my lover again. I wanted him to hold me in his arms and tell me everything was gonna be all right--even though it wasn't gonna be all right. He has a big hairy bear-like body and I just so needed to be near him. Physically, close to that big body, like it would heal me.

I called him hysterically crying and asked if I could stay for two nights at his house in Houston. He told me things were going well for him but he could "always fit me in" or something like that that made me feel like shit. He sounded pleased though. He told me it "wasn't going to be free" and I was going to end up licking cum off my tits. It seemed like a good deal to me.

I drove like crazy, speeding for hours, weeping and/or feeling elated that I was going to be well-fucked by this man again. I was a mess. You don't have to tell me that.

I arrived at his house before him and waited out front for a few minutes. He pulled up and, for a moment, smiled and looked happy. I met him in his garage, hugged him and burst into tears.

We walked inside and he sat down at his table and started going through his mail. He looked up at me, as though surprised I was still there. "You look ragged out," he said, disapprovingly.  I had been crying intermittently for several hours--a few months, technically--but he wasn't giving me any slack. I instantly felt a million years old, haggard and foolish in my suddenly too-short skirt. He gave me a sort of dismissive gesture so I left to wander his house.

His house was a smallish McMansion, which is not an oxymoron. It's the kind of place that has a grand showy staircase entry that makes odd-shaped, uncomfortable spaces below to accommodate this bourgeois idea of grandeur. He still lived like he did in college, even though he is a grown man, with milk crates as storage and half-read papers scattered haphazardly on the floor. He was using a loose garbage bag leaning against his kitchen cabinets instead of making the commitment to a real trash can. He was just crashing there, not making a life there, as he probably had in every space he'd inhabited in his 48 years on the planet.

He was incredibly uncomfortable that I was in his space and clearly wanted me to be...not there. This was horrible and obvious and I should have just left immediately, but I desperately wanted to fuck him and win him over and just have him stop wanting me gone. How was this so awful to him? We'd gotten along famously the last time I'd seen him--albeit in the neutral territory of a hotel--how was having me there suddenly so fucking unbearable to him?

I don't know if it was my "ragged out" appearance, the invasion of his space, my general hysteria or that his heart was now elsewhere (jeez, writing it down now and seeing all those things together, the answer is clearly "e. all of the above"), but he was now clearly Not That Into Me. I was wretched and humiliated but somehow still there like an asshole. I just couldn't accept what was happening and that he didn't love me or want me anymore.

He came over to me, bent me over the couch and hit me on the ass, hard, a few times--something he'd never done before. Then he walked into his kitchen and started looking around in the fridge. He's kind of like that. He will stick his dick in your mouth for a few minutes, pull his hard-on back out, then go sit down and have a bowl of grains or something.

Despite my humiliation or perhaps due to it, I was super turned on and still trying to act like everything was normal. He put a Lou Reed record on the turntable and pulled his dick out of his scrubs, making the universal signal for 'suck this.' I did, willingly and greedily.

His dick is tremendous. My eyes well up just thinking about it, it's really that good. So thick and fat and fucking huge. His dick is like if you took another man's dick, and inflated it with 2--maybe 3--big good puffs of air. I can feel it in my mouth still. I fucking love that thing.

"OK, I will fuck you then," he said after a bit, like I just earned something. He grabbed me and took me up his staircase to his bedroom, shoving my panties into my mouth along the way.

As he took off his clothes, I looked at his wide calves dispassionately. His legs are short, very stocky and nearly hairless. I don't really like them at all. I marveled for the billionth time why I was so fucking attracted to this man who, objectively, was not attractive to me. Unlike him, however, I did not say out loud the leg equivalent to "you look ragged out."

In bed, he asked if I wanted him to hit me again. I said no, and he said, "Beg me." "Please don't hit me," I whispered, not entirely sure that that was actually what I wanted. "Beg me to fuck you," he demanded. That wasn't going to be a problem for me. I really was hysterical, in both the modern and early 20th century interpretations of the word. I completely lost it, crying even more, begging and begging him, over and over. I completely lost my shit. In truth, it was strangely liberating. All that needy open-wound stuff that you try to hide from the world is what I was presenting to him. I was a fucking endless chasm of need and lust and desperate wanting and I let him see all of it. After bearing
witness to that... whatever the fuck it was, he seemed satisfied that I'd begged sufficiently.
He went into the restroom and came out, rolling a condom on. I burst into tears again.. "Why are you so sad?" he asked. "Because you have to wear a condom," I wept. The condom meant he'd been with other women and everything was different now.

He slid inside me and we barely moved. I came quickly and softly, twice. I looked into his huge brown eyes and said, "Can you feel how much my pussy loves your cock?" He nodded. The look on his face nearly killed me. It was so, I don't know, just open and dear. Or maybe I imagined it. It felt like we were making love, but maybe only I was.

Once done with the fuckery, things deteriorated further, if you can believe it. I--like an ass--or you know, like a fucking human being, grabbed on to his big hairy back and hugged him, wanting him close. And he couldn't fucking take it. "Hmmm, I'm oppressing you," I said, letting go and moving to the other side of the bed. But even that wasn't far enough and he got up and went downstairs. After awhile he came back and got into bed, willing me silently not to be there anymore. "You need to sleep, I'll go to the couch," I said. I did and we were both relieved.

He is the head of a serious hospital unit and got calls throughout the night. I could hear him up and down, all night, restless, taking calls, advising the night staff, working on the computer. I saw that his life, brain and probably his soul were filled with agitation and chaos, and it scared me. He wouldn't, or maybe couldn't, allow himself peace or comfort. It was like he was on coke, but without the happy or euphoric part. Two of the patients died that night.

I woke to the sound of him again moving around the house. He finally walked over the couch, pulled his cock out of his scrubs and stuck his huge hard-on into my mouth. "You are so hard," I murmured, taking him in as deep as I could. He pulled back out and said, "Got to go to work." Me, lustful, rejected, miserable, hopeful, and a million other things I still can't figure out, suggested that I could take him out dinner that night after work. He looked pained.

"I am out of sorts. I think you will be happier at a hotel," he said. Oh... We weren't, then, playing some sort of high-level psycho-sexual game, like the ones we played back in college that had turned on us so much. This was real--he really did hate me that much. I went red-faced with the realization and shame. Perhaps reacting to the look on my face--though that would be unlike him--he added. "I'll come tonight after work and stay with you."

Then he took a handful of twenty dollar bills from somewhere and dropped them onto me, one by one. They floated down, landing on me silently.  

Yeah.

And I was completely broken.

It's so beyond humiliating that I hate admitting how it all really happened. But I am telling you, both because it's true and because it has a happy(ish) ending.

That is,

After he left and I was alone in his terrible, tortured space, I finally got it that I could and needed to leave.

As I walked out and saw his yard, covered with gravel instead of grass or anything else living or beautiful or life-giving, I felt elated, like in the final scene of "It's a Wonderful Life." I didn't have to be in that barely lived-in house or try any more with this man I now realized was far too broken for me to fix. I drove home, crying yet again, but this time with gratitude. I had built a rich life and had a real home with gardens and fruit trees and pictures on the wall. I could even sleep through the fucking night. I was incredibly lucky.

In Shamanism, there is this idea of soul loss. That is, that you can lose a piece of your soul or vital essence after a trauma of some sort. Only through a soul retrieval, often done by the shaman, can that part be returned to its owner. I am not necessarily a subscriber to this point of view, but I do feel like for those three months I had lost a part of myself, of my heart, to this man.  And without it, I was so so lost.

But somewhere in our extremely fucked up sexual transaction that night, I got that part back and was whole again.

Maybe I went so low that it somehow circled back and became good. Or maybe my self-esteem got so fucking battered and kicked in the ass that it actually gave me self-esteem. I know it doesn't make much sense but that's what happened. It's like my re-set button was pushed and I was suddenly ok.

I still sometimes dream about his cock and wonder whether the sex, at least, was as hot for him as it was for me. The sex felt huge and dark and sexy and scary and horrible. We'd generated this terrible big awful energy and brought out each other's darkest sides and probably scared the shit out of each other. I don't see how it couldn't have affected him somehow. 

And now that it's really over, he will never tell me how it all was for him and why it was so hard for him. That makes me sad. I guess it doesn't make much difference though. I know have to go forward and not look back. That's what you do.

But I now know I have this huge scary amazing passion inside of me and that I may have a penchant for some fucked up shit. Still not sure what I'm gonna do about all that.

****
Have one of your own? You know what to do. 

xoxo
jill

image: Andre de Dienes, "Nude", c. 1960

Real Sex Lives, Reader Question Version: "What's the sexiest thing someone has done to get you into bed?"

One wooing technique.

(You have arrived in the midst of a grand celebration in which we're re-running IBWMW's all-time greatest Real Sex Lives stories.)

Hey you, a reader needs our help! Let's hop into the IBWMW Rescue Van!

Today's problem: Getting in the mood, with a emphasis on proper boner presentation. Here, let's let this improperly-wooed reader explain her predicament.

Dear Jill,

I need some advice from you and the thoughtful IBWMW readers if you would be so kind.

My husband is terrible at proposing that we have sex. The sex itself is good but I usually need a little time to warm up to the idea-- a little convincing-- and he can bring it up in a way that is a total turn-off (seriously, he recently walked up to me while I was doing the taxes and tapped me on the shoulder with his boner with a defeated expression before wandering off to the kitchen to consume a can of beans).

But here's the important part: he's a good listener, a sweet guy, and perfectly willing to try to change his approach. It's just that I can't come up with any really specific requests for him. We must be the two most unimaginative people around (before we jump in bed together, anyway). So I was hoping for some help from the IBWMW community: what is the sexiest thing someone has done to get you into bed? How do you get in the mood and initiate sex? I'm all ears for ladies initiating sex, too.

-Anonymous lady whose husband would be super embarrassed if he figured out this was about him.

Ok, I'm gonna be no help here because I actually like the whole primal Presentation of Arousal thing, though maybe without the can of beans aspect.

So my smart and lovely friends, you're in charge. Can you help this wordily-monikered Gentle Reader?

xoxo
jill

(photo source) 

Real Sex Lives: "In Praise of the Hand Job" by An Anonymous Husband

(You have arrived in the midst of a grand celebration in which we're re-running IBWMW's all-time greatest Real Sex Stories. Feel free to hang out awhile and look around.)

In Greek mythology, Hera and Zeus were arguing over which gender got the most pleasure from sex. Zeus said it was the women and Hera claimed it was the man. Tiresias, who had spent time as both a man and women, sided with Zeus. (For this, Hera struck him blind, adding further complications to already becoming overly eventful life.)

What I take from this is that the Gods are kind of jerky but have interesting conversations. There's also the takeaway idea of experiencing sex from the perception of the other gender.  Wouldn't it be interesting to have the body of the opposite sex for an hour or so? You could sort of ravish yourself and see what everything felt like.

That's why I like the following piece.  It puts me into the mind and body of a man, without the muss and fuss of expensive surgery or intervention by angry gods. But I'll stop yammering and get to An Anonymous Husband's take on the hand job:

The hand job doesn’t get much press, especially when compared to its more popular and storied cousin, the blowjob. Oh, I imagine the subject is still big in high school, where a quick gf/bf handy in the backseat of the car or on the family room couch is as close to sex as a lot of kids get. But married folks who have long since moved on to the main event tend not to think too much about the humble wife-wank, and I think that’s a shame. Because hand jobs, when done right, are awesome.

My wife enjoys sex more than any other woman I’ve slept with, but her overall libido, at least as far as quantity goes, is far lower than mine.  I’m in the same boat with millions of married men: I’m an every-night guy who happens to be madly in love with a once-a-week girl.

Unfortunately, I don’t do particularly well with “not getting any.” Without sex, I get cranky, irritable, and mildly depressed. The change is subtle- I don’t turn into a raging asshole overnight- but it’s there. It’s as if there’s a reservoir of happiness and contentment that, for better or for worse, can only be refilled with orgasms. Since one orgasm a week isn’t going to come close to meeting my wants and needs, I’m more than happy to go it solo when time and circumstances allow. But finding such

Real Sex Lives: Kat, "Let the horrible erotica begin."

(You have arrived in the midst of a grand celebration in which we're running IBWMW's all-time favorite Real Sex Lives.)

Kat wrote this for no other reason than to illustrate what bad smut is. Or perhaps to purge herself of the sentence, "He proceeded to kiss her with the fury of a toddler throwing a temper tantrum." Writes Kat, "Let the horrible erotica begin."

The couple walked along the edge of the water. They had only just met but knew that they were soul mates because that is how soul mates meet: on the beach at night.

They sat down on the blanket that the man, a massive Adonis with flowing gold locks, tanned skin and arms like a coal miner, had brought with him, knowing that he would meet the one who would complete him and would want to immediately to ravage her body as the ocean high tide ravaged the beach. He didn’t bring a condom though because he didn’t want any latex barrier between the woman’s love cave and the purple headed womb ferret that he was going to burrow into her.

He grasped her face and proceeded to kiss her with the fury of a toddler throwing a temper tantrum, and then laid her back. Their lips smelt together like two pieces of metal and they knew their bodies had been created to come together and create a single beast with two backs.

Her lips tasted better than his favourite bottle of beer and he was thirsty. He started to strip her clothing like removing old paint from a priceless antique desk. He kissed and munched on her neck as if he were a vampire and going to suck the blood out of her, except that she would like it. His hands wandered over her corporeal form like they wanted to touch her everywhere.

The woman hadn’t worn panties because she, too, had known that she was going to meet her soul mate on the beach and would spread her ivory appendages for his man-stick to enter her love-socket and create a piston of passion. The man looked up at her making sure she was ready for his tongue to do a Charleston on her pleasure button. She looked at him with eyes that would devour him if they were mouths. His hands spread her legs wider so that he could look at the entrance to her tunnel of love. His mouth moved closer and he blew lightly on her slices of salami displayed before him as if in the window of a fine deli. She shuddered at the sensation as if she were having a seizure. He gazed up her and whispered that he had skipped dinner and was starving, and would she mind if he sated his hunger with her womanly sauce. She replied that her highway to heaven was starving too: for his mouth and his tallywhacker.

Like a convict escaping from prison, his tongue darted from his mouth and attacked her love-bump like it was the getaway car. He sucked on her man in the boat and held it with his teeth and rasped it with his tongue. Up and down, back and forth, up and down, back and forth. And up and down, back and forth a lot more times.

He pressed his mouth into her center burrowing his tongue past the toll booth and up the highway. It was like having a threesome with his tongue being his wingman who got the first round. Her power of speech failed her when the pleasure came as scattering bunnies taking off for Wonderland.

He slid back up her body, the grit from the beach sticking to their skin like sandpaper. His bayonet stabbed her strawberry short cake and they began to rock back and forth as if traumatized by the ecstasy of each other. Her legs clamped around his hips like the jaws of a great beast and they lovingly bruised each others nether regions until he erupted into her like a tube of vanilla icing.

"I'm so glad we made love instead of fucking like people in other erotic pieces, my shining unicorn," the woman said.

"I would never degrade our spiritual connection by fucking you. Or asking your name," the man replied.

Fini

She hasn't posted in a few months but you can read more from Kat at Kat O'Nine Tales.

(The Th'ayes Have It, image courtesy the dear and generous Chaffyn. No implication of badness by its proximity to the bad smut, for the record.)

Real Sex Stories: Alyssa Royse, "Orgasms Aren't That Big A Deal"

(You have arrived in the midst of a grand celebration in which we're re-running IBWMW's all-time greatest Real Sex Stories)

Here, Alyssa Royse writes about the aftermath of an accident that left her largely orgasm-less, and how this have affected her sex life.

For me, her piece brings up all sorts of delicious issues to ponder like: What is the goal of sex? How is physical sex different than emotional/spiritual/passionate sex? What constitutes sex? What (if anything) differentiates sex from the sexual?

***
I pretty much don’t have orgasms. I am not alone in that. I have felt guilt, fear and shame around that fact, and I am not alone in that. I have faked it, and I am not alone in that.

Orgasms were always hard to come by for me. But after really learning my body, I could get there, both on my own and with lovers. However, after a car-accident and resulting brain injury, they all but disappeared. And I was, frankly, glad to see them go. As good as they felt for the short time they were happening, the drama and pressure around getting there never seemed worth it to me. I never understood what the big deal was. They’re awesome, but they’re a tiny part of a much larger picture.

If I just needed a quick orgasm, I would rely on porn and a vibrator to get me there quickly. But if that was all I wanted, I would never bother having sex with other people. When I’m having sex with someone, I want it to be an unencumbered journey of exploration with a very specific person. I want no map, no “to do” list, no expectations and no goals. Just all in, focusing on the moment, not on the finish line.

In my mind, the focus on the orgasm rather than everything leading up to it, is like focusing on the wedding but not the marriage – pretty much missing the point.

When I finally figured out that the absence of orgasm was very likely one of the many changes in my body connected to my brain injury, I was almost relieved. But in a culture in which men are trained to win awards, conquer challenges, and be victorious, it’s awfully hard to get guys to accept that an orgasm just didn’t matter. Now I could blame it on my injury, which was totally justifiable and no guy could possibly take personally.

“So, you just don’t have them, at all,” one of my friends asked. “Sometimes it happens, but it’s unusual, and I usually tell lovers that it’s not possible, just because it’s easier, and pretty much true.”

“I’m sorry,” my other friend said.

“Don’t be,” I explained. “It’s great.”

In unison, they both said, “how can that be.” 

I did my best to explain the performance pressure around having an orgasm. That in many cases, women feel like they have to get there to please the guy, like the guy will feel like a failure if he can’t make you cum. And, of course, we feel like a failure, or like we are flawed and not good enough if we can’t get there. Then the whole focus becomes this one thing, and it’s just too much pressure. Frankly, it’s incredibly hard to have an orgasm under that kind of pressure.

Real Sex Lives: Betty Fokker, "Even I, schooled in feminist thought and the rejection of fat-hating bullshit, wonder why he would ever WANT to fuck me"

(You have arrived in the midst of a grand celebration in which we're running IBWMW's all-time favorite Real Sex Lives.)

Today's guest post comes courtesy of the lovely Betty Fokker, penner of The Stay-at-Home Feminist Mom. (The slogan on her blog-- and just one of the many reasons I love her so--is: Don't try to oppress me with your patriarchal values. It will not go well for you.) 

Betty is hilarious, smart, and takes my breath away with her adept cussing. She is also fat. Oh, don't worry, she'd tell you the same thing herself.  

Now normally, Betty is well aware of how smoking hot she is, and rails against the whole stinkin' fat-hating society, but in the following post, dear Betty briefly succumbs to self doubt. Here she's talking about fat, but I think a lot of chicks could say the same thing about their stupid straight and/or curly hair, freaky pointy ears, or whatever.

(An aside: It took me like an hour to find a decent image (above left) to convey the concept of sexy zaftig womanliness. By contrast, it took me .00000004 seconds to find an image to convey the idea of "lady with big boobies.")

I also like her post because not only does Betty use the term "asshat" with typical aplomb, but she also lays down this sentence: "Even when I walk out of the shower and he pops a boner that you could club a baby seal with, I still wonder if he likes what he sees."

Here now, ladies and gentlemen, Ms. Betty Fokker:

Turns out that almost 1/3 of the women of Britain feel that they are too fat to have sex, and that (strangely!) has a negative effect on their libido. Imagine, if you will, the concept that you loathe your physical self so much you don’t feel you should have sex since some poor male (or female, since the Fokker doesn’t care one way or another who shares your bed. I am not an asshat.) would have to look at your nekkid flesh, and touch your smooshy body. I don’t have to image, considering the fact every time my Sweet Babou wants to tear up the sheets doing a nekkid waltz, I am surprised and bewildered.

Even I, schooled in feminist thought and the rejection of fat-hating bullshit, wonder why he would ever WANT to fuck me. I’m fat, therefore I am undesirable.

I have always, in my heart, operated under the assumption that he loves me so much he is willing to make the sweaty pretzel with me despite the fact I am repulsive to look upon. Moreover, I see that love as a sign of his quality as a superior human, not as a function of my worth. I just feel lucky. Like a lottery winner, not someone who invented the next-big-thing in computers and got rich from my efforts.

I was a well-loved and petted preschooler, so I always had the hope, maybe even the assumption, that I would be a lottery-winner in love one day. After all, I had been loved, so it wasn’t beyond the realm of reality. But as all the cultural messages of my ‘ugliness’ because of my obesity hammered at me for years, I assumed it would be one of those miraculous events – like a reverse beauty and the beast. I dreamed that one day a man would love me in spite of my hideous outward appearance. Which is better than the idea that I would never be loved, I guess, but is still all kinds of Fokked up.

Maybe I would have been more sanguine that Sweet Babou desired me is he had been a chubby-chaser. Then it would have made sense to me why he wanted me. But no, his prior girlfriends could be used to skewer cocktail hors d'oeuvres. So I have always believed, on some level, that loving me was a great sacrifice on his part, done because his heart was pure. All the rumpy-pumpy since we met has failed to convince me otherwise. Even when I walk out of the shower and he pops a boner that you could club a baby seal to death with, I still wonder if he likes what he sees.

This is not what I want to feel. I want to believe, as well as understand, that my fat does not devalue me. I do not believe it devalues others, but I cannot shake that feeling about myself. It makes me all the more determined, as a woman and a mother and a feminist, to fight fat-haters on every front, since this is horrible and I don’t want my daughters or any other woman to ever think of themselves as less because their body is more. Fat–hate and discrimination is BULLSHIT, y’all.

But I still wonder if he secretly thinks I’m yucky.

*****

See also: My Wife's Body by An Anonymous Husband, in which a husband examines this phenomenon from the male point of view.

xoxo
jill

(image source: http://lacontessa.tumblr.com/post/907275831/tamara-de-lempicka-le-modele-1925)