Betty Dodson with Carlin Ross

Better Orgasms. Better World.

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On the particular Sunday on which this conversation occurred, I'd tried a new hairstyle where I'd coiled my hair into not one, not two, but three little buns across the nape of my neck. I loved it, it looked like a band of rosettes, and I'd gotten a number of compliments on it at work. And thus I left work to pick my children up from their other mother.

The Oldest (currently 6 years old): Mom, why do you have THREE buns in your hair?

Me: It's a new hairstyle, I think it looks pretty cute, what do you think?

The Oldest: It's not very normal.

Me: Ok, but is it cute?

The Oldest: Yeah, it's cute. But it's not normal. Normal is one or two buns, not three.

Me: That doesn't matter to me, what matters is that I think it looks cute.

We Suggest: 

Viva la Vulva

“This is the First Time We’ve Outed Ourselves & We're All Pretty Nervous”

Why Can't It Just Be "Scouts of America"?

Body Image, Eating Disorders & Parenting Daughters

All this hype around the transgendered girl in the Girl Scout troop in Colorado, and the attempted cookie boycott because of it, and everyone vowing to buy EXTRA cookies in response, has me thinking. Thinking hard.

First off, I want everyone to know that this post of mine does NOT indicate that I am not supportive of the Girl Scouts of America. I think they're a great organization that's done a lot of really positive, wonderful things for girls over the course of its existence. Even IF their cookies are too cleverly marketed and grossly overpriced.

Over a decade ago, I met a girl. Well, I met two girls, and I have to start with the first girl even though this story isn’t about her; but without the heady mix of hormones and confidence that I got from her none of this would have come to be.

And by none of this, I don’t just mean the story that’s about to unfold, but all of everything around me: my wife, my child, my writing – all would be different or missing entirely if I hadn’t been entranced enough by some bouncing dark-walnut corkscrew curls to wander aimlessly along behind them during intermission of a one-day seminar evaluating differing productions of various plays by Shakespeare.

I’ve gone back to therapy. I took a year off because it just feels like first world indulgence, but my psychiatrist refuses to give me meds refills unless I’m in regular therapy, so there you have it. I like my therapist, I just hate to pay for it, or take time out of my schedule for it. I figure I should just be able to think my way out of my emotional issues.

Yes, you may laugh at me now.

Anyway, my assignment for this month was to come up with a template for my ideal relationship(s). Since this IS a poly, sex, kink, relationship blog, I figure this makes for a good post idea. So here is what I wrote for my homework.

So a lesbian goes into a drugstore to buy a condom…

It sounds like the opening line of a joke.

Now, lesbians use condoms, too. We use them to cover toys to keep them clean, to cover the ones made of porous materials to keep them hygenic, and for quick toy/partner/orifice changes in mid-fuck. No need to get out of bed to wash the fluids of one partner off, just peel off one condom and pull another one on.

I sat down this morning to scan facebook when I was confronted by this picture of three women wearing vulva costumes. It was the thumbnail accompanying an article titled "The Unnamed Genitals Have a Name: Vulva" that a number of my friends had shared. Instantly I was reminded of Liandra's post Viva la Vulva and her desire to spread the image of Vulvas everywhere. And here, look! Vulvas on parade on facebook!Hooray!

I work for a Unitarian Universalist church. This past Sunday I saw a family there that I hadn’t seen for a while. I was happy to see that family because the two little boys in it are adorable and always add so much to the Religious Education classes they participate in. I waved at the boys as they sat down and they smiled at me.

I am so in love with the idea of siri. It'll be years before I break down and will let myself purchase a phone with any kind of technology like that, but for now I watch the commercials, and dream, and think about how cool it is that Star Trek technology is coming so close to home.

Which is why I got a nasty little jolt when I saw this article a friend shared on facebook. It served to remind me that computers, no matter how cool they are, only ever do what programmers (and the corporations behind them) tell them to do. The implications behind what siri has clearly been told to do are depressing:

Puberty hit me hard the summer between 6th and 7th grade when I was 12. Suddenly my body was alive and pulsing with the need to touch and be touched.

I’d been reading my mom’s paperback romance novels for a couple of years but this summer whole passages made SENSE in a way they hadn’t before and I began looking at my playmates in new, distracting ways. Two of them in particular: a girl and a boy.

I used to call myself a 95% lesbian. Now I’m a queer femme who sometimes sleeps with men. This fact still bemuses me. I wasn’t a Gold Star lesbian — I’d slept with 2 men. But I hadn’t really enjoyed sex with them. And it didn’t really matter; I was married to a woman and would be spending my life with her. And though our marriage would sometimes flex enough to let a third person into our bed (indeed, that’s how I slept with the second guy) whether or not I could actively desire a man was irrelevant.

I was almost 24 before I lost what some people refer to as my “virginity”. But that I mean that I was almost 24 before my hymen was broken. And I broke it myself. I broke it myself so that someone else wouldn’t get to.

Ok, so here’s the thing. When I came out as lesbian, my parents freaked out. And my mom made me promise that if ever a guy asked me out, unless I had a good reason to say “no”, then I’d say “yes”. Umm… what about having a good reason to say ‘yes”? What about not wanting to being a good reason to say “no”? Those are quibbling kinds of questions. I was 22 at the time, my parents were freaking out, I agreed to try so we could get back to peace.

Ok, I’m going to say it: I prefer the word cunt to pussy.

I prefer it in conversation, and I prefer it in bed.

I don’t want you to lick my pussy; I want your face in my cunt.

Now, I knew that this was not the majority’s preference, but it seemed to me that it wasn’t such a radical word choice. But perhaps that’s because I’ve been a lesbian for so long. My friends were mostly split on the word, but even the ones who didn’t care for cunt, didn’t usually, actively, think the word was vile.

But now I’ve been moving more in heteroville, and talking sex with a wider range of people than my crunchy, green, lesbian mom friends, and it seems that my love of the word cunt is… not widely shared. That the word cunt is hated by quite a few. And I just don’t understand that.