On Exactly The Wrong Person For You

I've been pondering an email from Pamela Madsen, author of Shameless: How I Ditched the Diet, Got Naked, and Found True Pleasure

I'm not sure if it's kinda genius or the Worst Advice Ever. What do you think?

I think the search is for that perfect wrong person. The one whose scars you want to lick and kiss and love. This person who is wrong in all the right ways. That person who has horns on his or her head that fit into the holes in your head. You want to know that they are a problem that you want to have in your life. That wrong person should inspire you to gaze at them with love. To make your body yearn to touch them. And yes, you will shake your head at it all. This wild wrong person! You know, that person who is wrong for you in all the right ways.

The advice sounded a little screwy, not at all sensible or wise, but then she threw me this line: 

You have got to be willing to not only dance with your demons you have to be willing to fuck them.

So. Fucking your demons. What could be more alluring, really?

And yet.

Is succumbing to what (or who) you actually want to do--damn the wisdom or lack thereof--the key to living life fully and passionately? Or is it a complete rationalization for being in a screwed-up relationship?

Anjelica Huston, who dredged up memories of her turbulent years with Jack Nicholson in  Watch Me: A Memoir describes the relationship as having "that kind of faint uncertainty" of being with someone who is never truly yours: "But that doesn't stop one from loving somebody; it just makes it a different kind of negotiation. You can have a hard time with somebody and say, 'That's it,' but you have to be able to leave the room, and I was never able to do that."

Was she wrong to spend 17 non-consecutive, non-monogamous years in a semi-compromised position? Or was that exactly what she was into, and on a very basic level, what she wanted/needed? Is it possible--or even advisable--to avoid someone when they offer compelling mental fuckery, personalized to your exact flavor of vulnerability?

You can make a decent argument for either side, I think. On the one hand, viva life, jump into the fire, go where the passion is. On the other, well, the tension/wrongness aspect can easily veer into much, much darker territory.  A reader once wrote me to say her (ex-, thankfully) husband constantly told her how "ugly" her vagina was so she was looking into surgery so as not to subject some future beau to the supposed horror between her legs.*

I usually think of Wanting the Wrong Person as a gender issue but it's probably a universal condition for any slightly-harmed human. That is, pretty much everyone. Consider this exchange between Marc Maron and Dr. Drew on WTF, on falling for people who put you in a position of repeating traumatic patterns from childhood.

Dr. Drew: "You can't really ever cure this--you're going to be attracted to people that put you in that position. And you just love them. That's just how you're wired. It's your love map. The way to mitigate it is to go after people you're not that excited about--but then you're sort of withholding something from yourself.

Marc Maron: But you can't do that because it's sort of like a phantom limb.

Drew: It's hard. You can also go for people who are very exciting but realize it's going to be traumatic.

Maron: My therapist said that that's they way it's gonna be and the best you can hope for is that [the other person is] willing to do the work.

Drew: Yes. I absolutely agree with that. Because that's life. We're not perfect. We're not healthy all the time. It makes life interesting.

Maron: You can't be with someone that you're not going to connect with on that level.

Drew: You can, but...

Maron: You've got to be very disciplined not to go out and fuck the lunatic!  

Drew: Correct. A lot of people do not understand this and it's where a lot of the craziness comes from. The things that were traumatic in our childhood are the sources of attraction.

Maron: Not only the sources of attraction, but you want to recreate it.

Drew: Well, that's the conscious experience of it. But I think there's something far more profound. When people start talking about it in therapy, they always go, "I guess I want to master it. I guess I want to make it right this time." No, that's your brain trying to make sense of bullshit motivation.

Maron: It's comfortable. It's what you grew up with.

Drew: It's your map. It's love. It's where you find love.

Maron: Is it love?  

Drew: Yes. That's your version of love. It's not the healthiest version. But I've got the same one [he's been with his wife 23 years] so it's all good. I have found in the craziness, passion and renewal.

"I have found in the craziness, passion and renewal." Who knew? Square ol' Dr. Drew embroiled in a crazy passion-based relationship? And advising, basically, "fuck the lunatic"(!)

What do you make of all this? It is wise to seek health and balance (with accompanying possible tepidness) in relationships? Or do you go for the great passion/great trauma combo? And how has that worked out for you?

xoxo
jill

*Obviously there's a continuum between the delightful frisson of senseless ardor and someone truly hurting you physically and/or mentally and you want to be way way more toward the "delightful" end of it. (If you're not and you're ready, The National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.)

On Masturbation. And My Two, Possibly Three, Favorite Sex Toys.

Photo by Jimmy Detroit

"Your kisses are as wicked as an F-16/and you fuck like a volcano and you're everything to me," Liz Phair, Supernova.

Do you know the grand fuckery of which she speaks? The insane lust, the deep primal wanting, "Lips sweet and slippery/Like a cherub's bare wet ass." God, I do.

The thing is, most of the time I'm not there. And, given what you've been telling me lately, I think the same might be true for a lot of you.

If your sex life is such that masturbation is what's happening, and you'd like to fuck around (quite literally) with some new technology, I have a couple toy suggestions for you and that lonely bed of yours.

Why should you listen to me? Well, I'll tell you, smarty-pants.

--Between writing for Cosmo, AlterNet and this blog, I have had to put a fuck of a lot of whirring, sucking, vibrating things between my legs. Because that is MY JOB. Yes. God, or The Force or whatever, is good.

--Something about Malcolm Gladwell's theory of putting in 10,000 hours at anything to become an expert. 

Yes, my friends, I have been to the mountain top, sex toy-wise, and I've come back down, limping a little but full of Wisdom, to tell you my top two suggestions.

--If you are only buying one toy:

Oh darlin', I will rock your world.

The LELO Ora 3 The World's Most Sophisticated Oral Sex Simulator is expensive as hell but, damn, the thing is an excellent lay. It ministers to you via various vibration patterns and a little ball that makes lazy little circles or half-circles exactly where you want it to. You can just cycle though the patterns, and it feels like the best lover you ever had. I'm totally serious. It even seems to know exactly how long to pause before you completely lose it.

On the other hand, I looked at the Amazon reviews and some other people said it was weak, or unsuitable or whatever, so remember that everyone's body is different and just because I tell you to put something between your legs doesn't mean you'll like it as much as I did. (You should, however, DEFINITELY listen to my advice to never put that Sqweel whirlygig thing anywhere near your cooter. Trust me on this.

Man, that smarts.

(Further disclaimer: if you buy the Ora through this link, Amazon will give me like 2% or something. So if you buy like 28 million of them, I should be pretty good. Trickle down economics in action!)

--If you want to spring for 2 toys:

Allow me

I'd recommend the Womanizer, used in tandem with a g-spot vibrator (any will do, I use a Butterfly Bliss because I got it for free.) Between the gentle sort of suction motion of the Womanizer (maybe give it a different name in your head) and the low throbs of g-spot vibe on the inside, you will be a wreck, in the finest of ways.

(And yes, if you use the link to buy Das Womanizer and/or the Bliss, Good Vibrations will send me a 20% kickback, so you'd only need to buy about 3 million of them.)

Anyway, I'm not telling you this so you buy some merch, I'm saying it to sort of mark a shift in my head. Sex can be beautiful and scary and transcendent and super hot (or not.) And yes, of course it's preferable to have someone going mad for the way your boobs look when you unhook your bra, and being with someone brave enough dive into that Unknown with you, and just sort of bearing witness to whatever goes down. (Perhaps an agreeable Quaker, experienced in bearing witness, would be good here....though perhaps I'm not fully understanding the concept.)

However, even if it's just you, sans pervy Quaker, that sexual force is still there. And it seems hugely important to activate that power, whether by hand, sexy sucking toy thing or any non-Sqweel partner.

Henceforth, when loving the one I'm with is just...me, I am hereby ditching my previous habit of taking note of all the ways I am not sharing that experience (i.e. "Holy hell, they'd love to see this, hear this, feel this...") and getting all tragic about it. (For the record: Sobbing and coming at the same time is indeed dramatic and occasionally hot, but not that great as a Everyday Lifestyle Choice.)

Instead I'm going to revel in what does go down. It's still good. Sometimes damn good. And like jMadsen, but less naked, I will transfer that energy out into the damn world.

Huzzah, motherfuckers.

xoxo
jill


P.S. If you'd like to order a print of the Jimmy Detroit photo above, email him at JimmyDetroitx@gmail.com or contact him via  Facebook. Friend of the Blog, Great Guy! Plus real Art, highly affordable!

Hysteria

(Before)

I hadn't had a really good fuck in months. And I'd been a bit of a mess, if you must know-- agitated, unduly short-tempered and had taken to drinking obscene amounts of Diet Pepsi (a vice I supposedly kicked years ago). My work suffered and I was prone to random outbursts of weeping. I was, in short, hysterical. In both the current understanding of the word and, possibly, the 19th century sense.

Yes, hysteria.

Sure, maybe it was hormones, maybe it was a chemical imbalance, maybe I needed more Vitamin B or something, but I really do think it was/is hysteria. Something related to my body and my passion and my heart.

“Your pussy is your pilot light. It is your central life force energy,” says Pamela Madsen, a woman who says "pussy" a lot and someone I interviewed for an AlterNet article. “If our pilot light is lit and we're turned on--that's were we write our books from, that's where we bake from, that's where we decide to be farmers or artists. We can learn to use that power and put it out into the world."

And as Naomi Wolf writes in my well-fingered Vagina (haha, yes, I know, I am a child) "Female sexual pleasure, rightly understood, is not just about sexuality or just about pleasure. It serves also, as a medium of female knowledge, and hopefulness; female creativity and courage; female focus and initiative; female bliss and transcendence; and as medium of a sensibility that feels very much like freedom. To understand the vagina properly is to realize that it is not only coexistence with the female brain, but is also, essentially, a part of the female soul.” 

It feels like they're on to something big here (as are Anais Nin, Erica Jong, etc...)--something primal and true. In my own life, I've discovered this amazing passion which is, for better or worse, wholly connected with sex, my creativity, my body and my heart. When my passion is engaged, it is beautiful, sublime and yeah, scary as fuck. When it's not, all is meh, or worse (see above: hysteria.)

And while it pleasingly tragic to haunt your own life like a specter, or as Billy Bragg puts it "a little black cloud in a dress," after a while weeping in the car to Joni Mitchell's "All I Want" grows tiresome. So I did stuff to heal* and my humours, or whatever, seem more balanced now.

And yet.

In Madsen's fascinating book Shameless: How I Ditched the Diet, Got Naked, Found True Pleasure...and Somehow Got Home in Time to Cook Dinner, she talks about seeking sensual touch--something similar to a "happy ending," but for women. She ends up with a gay male bodyworker named Tiger who, despite his semi-repellent name, sounds quite amazing. He tends to her body and psyche and, like a human Pandora, knows what she wants before she does. He's like the best lover ever, but also not a lover. He's somewhere in between lover, therapist, massage therapist, and magic fairy godmother.

Sexological bodyworkers give whole body massages to help you get....wherever you need to get. And I mean that in the prurient way--if you want/need to cum, you are certainly welcome to and will be aided in that way--but it's mainly about exploring issues in your life, your sexuality or general spirit. In a way, it's a more loving and aware descendant of Ye Olde hysteria treatment.

I put out the call on the IBWMW Facebook page (Now 97% less tawdry since I purged it of weirdos!) and Matthew told me he did Tantric Bodywork. I'd met Matthew years ago on my blog, which is probably a horrible place to meet anyone--not as bad as the Facebook page, but still... I knew him, but didn't know him, which seemed just about right for this kind of thing.

He gave me the password to his secret web page (email him and I'm sure he will be happy to do the same for you). Writes Matthew:

Tantric bodywork is a beautiful and brave act of care and self-care. If and when you decide to receive this type of touch and attention it is an acknowledgment of yourself as a sexual person regardless of your sexual preferences or the level of sexual activity in your life. This choice shows an openness to be present with yourself and your body in a space it may not always have a chance to inhabit. I think that's pretty fearless choice, and it's a pleasure and privilege for me to be a guide, facilitator and space holder for you or you and your partner.

I love doing this work and am moved to do it because I adore the deep humanity of it. A chance to deeply see people and be seen at their most raw and most tender and to show up the same way. I am moved by the power of sexual energy in all of its forms and wild expressions. I am captivated by the mysterious and sacred power of sexual energy to shift what longs to be moved inside us and in so doing heals and connects us.

Um...yes. When women go to spas, shop, drink too much, inject fillers into their face, etc...this is what they actually want.

So, I am going to meet with Matthew and for two hours he is going to talk to me and touch me in a present, sensual way.** I have no idea what's gonna happen. I think I will probably cry or come or maybe just be in my head and be anxious. Female desire can be scary. When you tap into it, it's such a huge overwhelming life force—intense, emotionally overpowering and not something you can manage. You're not in halfway. And the only way to work with it is to ride it and see where it takes you, accepting that it may take you places you didn't think you wanted to go.

I don't know what the fuck will happen and that's part of what's so good about it. I want to be in that space and see where it takes me. I feel completely confident that whatever does come up, Matthew can handle it.

So yeah, I'm meeting a virtual stranger, alone, and I will be completely naked. In all kinds of ways. It may be the smartest thing I've ever done or the dumbest.

And I can't fucking wait.

xoxo
jill

*Stuff I did to heal: Ate well, swam, started seeing a therapist (a delightfully masturbatory activity--I highly recommend!), took long walks with my daughters, talked to my husband, read good books (next up: Erica Jong's new book Fear of Dying!) and got down with my new toy thing (we are now going steady. If it had a varsity jacket, I'd be wearing it.) I've started looking for connection and depth in my encounters with whoever I come across in my day and I got the best fucking kitten in the world.

**The amazing thing about being a writer--you get to do whatever the fuck you want under the pretense of it being a story! It's total racket!

Jack the kitten, consulting the Oracle

Reader Question on Dirty Sex Talk, Joan Rivers on Saggy Bits, and Life Philosophies That May Or May Not Help You.

"Line, please."

1.  First, this question from reader G:  

     Hi Jill,
     Any chance of writing a piece on sexual insults that men would find a turn on?

     I love being called a bitch/slut/whore etc, whilst being right royally fucked, but I often struggle with how to respond without damaging the delicate male ego!  I'd love you to write about dirty sex talk that women could use towards men.

     Thanks :-)
    Kind regards,

    G

Okay, a) I am presently too lazy and stricken with "restless legs"* to write a whole big thing about dirty sex talk. (However, here's a vaguely-related, consolation one about a lover's moan and other completely lovely sex sounds...)

But b), and probably more importantly, these days I don't fucking know. (See also: I had sex with water.) However, I do love your phrase "whilst being right royally fucked" so let's throw your question out to the Strangers of the Internet. Strangers? Can you come up with anything, you dirty, dirty...um, selfish passive-aggressive fuckheads who can't recognize real love and big, earth-shaking passion when it stares you right in the fucking face, goddammit... Um, yeah.  So this is why I need you to handle this one. Anyone?

2.  A lot of people think that Joan Rivers was bitchy and mean, which she totally was, but she was also ground-breaking, ballsy and often hilarious. I laughed a ton reading her book  I Hate Everyone...Starting with Me especially this bit on why she hates old bodies:

Everything drops when you get old...boobs, bellies, butts, everything.  Last week my friend Miriam was sagging so much she tripped over her vagina. Talk about turning lemons into lemonade. She said she's glad her vagina dropped because every time there's an earthquake she's suctioned to the floor.

C'mon, the woman was a billion years old and saying completely edgy things like that. Viva Joan!

3.  And finally these two bits of Possible Life Wisdom I received today via mass emailings which, as everyone knows, is where all of history's great sages got their enlightenment.

This from Pamela Madsen in an email with the subject line: " The Vagina is A Gateway To Our Well Being," which as subject lines go, pretty well gets to the point.

Why do I believe that a woman's vagina and her erotic arousal is the gateway to her happiness? It's partly about a neurotransmitter we call Dopamine. Women are able to create and move Dopamine through their body themselves by engaging in a practice that I teach called "The Lotus Lift".

It's really the self stimulation of a woman's own genitals. When women are not moving Dopamine in their bodies they are more likely to engage in addictive behavior, have depression, low libido, sleep disturbances, "restless legs", a lack of ambition and drive and look a the world through a colorless glass. When women are able to bring their Dopamine levels up to a normal level they experience a feeling of well being in their body, their creativity goes up, they are motivated and happier with the little things in life.

What's the magic trick? Getting women to be willing to touch their own genitals on a regular basis and explore the power of their arousal as a healing life force energy.

Okay, if I ignore overly specific part about "restless legs"

Not shown: Time frame for "restless legs" cure.

and the phrase "getting women to touch their genitals on a regular basis" and especially especially that she calls it "The Lotus Lift" (dear god, woman!), I am completely down with the part about a woman's arousal being this sort of huge, amazing life force. 'Cause it so is!

And finally, this from Matthew Hussey who is a bit of a dating huckster, but I liked this nonetheless.  It's about taking chances, risking embarrassment and whatnot. Here he's furthering some metaphor about your ego being like an expensive camera--don't be so worried about breaking it that you don't get the shots or something. Anyway, he says:

People are so busy nursing themselves and cradling themselves and so afraid of the scratches that they never end up using all of their creative channels, they never end up saying half the things they could say to the person they’re interested in. They never go through half the experiences they could go through in life, they’re too busy avoiding the scratches.

Don’t be afraid of the scratches. 

***

Don't be afraid of the scratches, motherfuckers.

xoxo,
jill

*Only for the purposes of this joke. I do not actually have restless legs.  DO. NOT. HAVE. Ok?

(photo)