Cunningminx went off to review the play “Multiple O” put on by Broom Street Theatre in Madison, WI, and uncovered some interesting controversy within the cast about the use of safer sex techniques on the stage.
Listen to the whole podcast here, or you could always subscribe to Polyweekly (entertaining for the monogamous and not-so-much alike) via iTunes.
In other news, I’m excited to get a review copy soon of Rachel Kramer Bussel’s new anthology “Rubber Sex,” available now from Amazon.com. I mean, if everyone’s covered in rubber, it’s automatically hot and safe, right?
“She got a special little grin on her face, and moved over to a drawer next to her bed. My cock was hard from her nuzzling, but she’d still not taken me in her mouth - so it was just glistening with a little bit of cum at the tip.”
“As she rummaged in the drawer, her face fell. ‘Where’s my Probe?’ she demanded, half to herself. Then, as she drew out a pale latex glove, she smiled. ‘Ah, well, Liquid Silk to the rescue,’ she almost sang. The bottle looked almost empty, but she seemed confident as she again knelt on the bed between my legs. I watched her merry face as she put on the glove and heard, rather than saw, the bottle squeezed as she dolloped it out on her fingers. I held out my hand as well, and felt a cool pool of lube fill my palm.’
” ‘I like your bum,’ she said, almost conspiratorially, and again flashed that beaming smile. I took my cock in my hand and moaned as the first finger pushed inside of me…”
Sometimes hot safer sex just comes from an honest expression of desire.
One of the proudest aspects of being a Madison native is that we are home to a former champion. No, I’m not talking about the Olympics, or boxing, or any other sport - I’m talking about a title holder of a different sort (get it?). T (as we’ll call him to protect his anonymity) was the title holder of the 2006 Masturbate-a-thon. I actually found this out while manning a gate at the San Francisco LoveFest with Dr. Carol Queen herself.
So how can you get involved this year? Well, if you’re lucky enough to be in San Francisco, go to the event. If not, sign up to participate at home. Hell, you can even join the Twitter group TheBiggestO and follow the orgasms of the participants…or be in the know and twittergasm yourself.
Personally, I’m going to be at Shibaricon that weekend, and busy as a…well…beaver, but I’m hoping to throw a ropegasm in there somewhere…
Remember, masturbation is the safest sex around. It’s impossible to catch a disease from yourself, and if you’ve never seen your partner masturbate - or done it right alongside them - you have missed out on an incredibly intimate experience.
Here’s a video of Carol Queen talking about the event. Remember, Wank Hard, Wank Often!
When windowshopping with my lover recently, we went into a bead store, and this box caught my eye:
It was beautiful. It’s sold, but some like it are available, if pricey. And I couldn’t help but compare it to the messy drawer I have at home, which is helpfully full of condoms, but which is plastic and rickety and SO not elegant.
How much hotter would safe sex be if the simple opening of the box containing the condom, the tactile act of revealing it, was in itself a pleasure? A box like that is something begging to be opened. It makes you feel like you have something special.
For more portable elegance, how about a condom cozy from A Woman’s Touch? Everyone lovingly hand made by a pleasure specialist…I don’t see them on the site, but I know they have them. Give them a call, ask for them, and be sure to tell them Graydancer sent ya!
Got this via Viviane’s Sex Carnival who got it via Dan Savage: June 7 is “Protest the Pill Day ‘08.” You can get a t-shirt, a sticker, and are encouraged to go to your local Planned Parenthood to protest.
Really, though, why are they going to the trouble of finding Planned Parenthood? Wouldn’t it be easier to just go outside of every pharmacy? Walgreen’s, RexAll, oh, and let’s not forget the health clinics that have pharmacies inside. Oh, and I suppose while they’re at it, they should picket any bars that have condom machines with spermicide…well, ok, that’s a bit further. Spermicide doesn’t kill the fertilized eggs, it kills the spermies. Kind of like the pill fools the body into thinking it’s already pregnant and therefore…can’t get pregnant. So an egg is wasted. Or killed, I guess, in their argument.
Unintended Uses
It’s interesting that they talk about how the pill can be a chemical abortifacent - true enough, I suppose. I’m not really clear on the precise mechanics, but I have heard old wives tales of people taking 5 pills at a time to try and stop a pregnancy. From what I’ve been told, this makes the person hella sick, too. Of course, I’ve also heard that that can misfire and turn into a fertility stimulus (in fact, it may have something to do with why I have twin daughters).
Listen to me, with all this “I’ve heard” stuff. Let’s go to the font of wisdom, Scarleteen, which has a lot of info about the pill, including this part:
The combination pill is called that because it uses two synthetic hormones — estrogen and progestin — to prevent pregnancy through an oral medication. Those hormones work in three ways: to prevent ovulation, to thicken cervical mucus to make sperm less able to get into the cervix, and by making the lining of the uterus thinner and thus, less hospitable for a fertilized egg to implant in. It works in all three of those ways to basically provide backup in case one of its mechanisms doesn’t work at a given time.
Emphasis mine-I guess that’s the part that the PillKill people are talking about. It doesn’t kill the egg directly, it just sort of refuses to give it a place to rest. Scarleteen also directs us to Princeton’s Emergency Contraception page, which helps with that other idea I’d heard.
Yeah, but where’s teh HAWT?
All of this info is very good, but falls outside of the intended purpose of this blog: that is, to make Safer Sex Hotter. So here’s some ideas for promoting the idea that the pill is not just good for health, but actually improves your sex life:
Less stress. The pill improves the quality of marriages and other relationships by enabling the couple to share the intimacy of sex without worrying about the chance of a baby.
How about making it a ritual? I’ve known some people embarrassed to have their pill case out in the open. What about taking out the pill, a glass of water, and looking your lover in the eye as you take it and say something along the lines of “I’m taking this so I can concentrate on fucking you harder tonight.“
Remember the idea we had a while back - using the pill container as an “orgasm counter” to get your “one-a-day.” (or more if you’re greedy). So pop the pill out, show it to your partner (or friend or hell, the bus driver) and say “No babies means more time for orgasms! Whee!”
Those are all somewhat passive on the male end of things…so any suggestions for what guys can do to make the pill less of a chore and more of an aphrodisiac?
Counter-Protest
Seems to me we have one more thing to do: on June 7th, we need to get some chocolate, or some kind of thank you cards to give to our pharmacists and others, saying thank you for providing the means to more freely make choices about our sex lives. I don’t think that it would be a good idea to actually stage demonstrations - but more to just give a little extra “thank you” to the people who actually help us get the pills. Flowers. Candy. A note that says “Thanks for making my kid’s life better. We can give two kids so much more than if we had six!”
I’ve been working on putting together the final chapter of the Podiobooks version of my novel Nawashi, and while doing it I came across this passage:
Physically he lifted her, pushing her astride him, letting his cock gently rest against her mons, the pale color of the condom hiding the thin strip of pubic hair that led into her vulva. Her breasts pressed against him, and he wrapped his arms around her…
Now, I’m not here to debate the relative hotness or not of this scene (though it is the climactic sex scene, a long-distance fourgy sex ritual). No, I realized that when I wrote it I was adamant about having the condom in it, just as adamant as using the word “vulva” instead of “vagina,” but I wasn’t too concerned with how it appears. There’s no part in the beginning where we talk about the “tiny plastic wrapper” next to him, or anything like that.
No, the condom just is there, a part of the description, so that it sort of registers as a part of the entire piece, as much a part of the setting as the hue of the skin or the fact that Sally has breasts. And here’s my dilemma: is that cheating? Is having the condom just magically appear as silly as not including it at all?
Contrary to popular belief, I don’t read a lot of erotica; I can’t think, offhand, of any other literary examples of condoms showing up in the sex scenes. But I’m going to take a look at Susie Bright’s How to Write a Dirty Story and see what she says…
Now, I can put down the first few to “youthful exuberance”, as our legislators like to phrase it. As a teen, and even as a young monogamous adult, I rarely used condoms; especially as someone who had a vasectomy at age 21, it didn’t seem all that necessary. AIDS was not nearly as understood and known, and I was in that “young and invulnerable” stage. And I was lucky; the one partner who actually was unsafe gave me, at age 18, two of the mildest and most curable of the sexually transmitted infections, gonorrhea and crabs. Of course, being not the brightest young stud on the block, I didn’t learn the lesson of “always use a condom, and know your partner’s sexual history.” I did learn the lesson, however, of “What your best friend doesn’t know can hurt him, because he will eventually find out that you slept with his girlfriend.”
Which did instill a policy of scrupulous and painful honesty in me, in all aspects of relationships, but especially sexual. So I suppose it did some good, establishing an ethical standard at a young age that has carried me in good stead for the last two decades. But using a condom? All the time? Didn’t really take hold until my girlfriend and I decided to open our relationship into a polyamorous practice. And that, my friends, was only 9 years ago. The motivation was quite strong, though; the thought of infecting my “primary” partner with something was so horrifying to me that I was very, very careful - and it helped even more when I became intimately involved with a woman who was even more fanatical about condom usage than I was, and also much more careful about thoroughly knowing not only her partners’ sexual history, but their partners as well, ad infinitum as far as she could. A long-term friendship with the sex educator Heather Corinna, among other sex-positive role models, made it even more easy to simply accept the condom as a part of life, as important a part of having sex as an erection or lips.
As my daughters grew, they understood it to, and joined in the fight, with my eldest arguing passionately in health class when a young man regurgitated the old saw about how “the AIDS virus is smaller than the pore in a condom, so it’s not effective!” My middle daughter became a peer educator, teaching at various schools with the classic banana-and-blue-condom, and is now studying pre-med, still actively educating her peers about safer sex. It has become, quite literally, a family affair.
Yet even with that habit - even with access to free condoms and a deep understanding of exactly how much they did and didn’t protect, I’m not perfect. About 10 months ago, in fact, I let myself, in a romantically nihilistic fit of idiocy, be talked into unprotected sex with a person I knew to be a risk.
Why? Well, I could give you all sorts of reasons, both rationalizing it as not really that much of a risk due to our histories, or weaving some romantic tale of how this person seemed to be someone that I thought I could really be with in a long-term relationship and blah blah blah…but none of that matters.
The fact is, I was irresponsible, and stupid. And, as it turns out, lucky. I’ve had two complete STI screens since then, and I didn’t come away from the experience with any unwanted gifts, as far as anyone can tell.
But that’s not the point of this article. The point is what I did after. Because the repercussions were pretty strong.
I talked with the young woman in question the next day and told her that I was not ok with any more unprotected sex. This sparked a big fight, with the standard “Don’t you trust me?” and “I can’t believe you think I’m unclean!” type of arguments, but the one that really stuck in my head for a long time after, the one that I’ve heard, since then, from several other people in similar situations, was this:
“What does it matter now? We’ve already had unprotected sex!”
That’s a myth that I think really needs to be faced. The idea that if you make a mistake, if you have unprotected sex once that you might as well throw in the towel (or condom, as the case may be) because all the fluids have already been shared…well, it’s proof that statistics really should be taught more thoroughly in schools.
There’s an old probability question: if a coin is flipped 9 times, each time landing heads up, what are the odds that the next time it’s flipped, it will land tails? The answer, of course, is that the odds are the same as they were every other time: 50/50. The prior events have no effect on the odds of the next toss.
Every time you have sex, there is a chance that something will go wrong. That’s why this blog is called “hot SAFER sex”, not “SAFE”. Even with your best efforts, condoms break, pills get lost, patches come off, partners lie, shit happens. Hell, the Virgin Mary proved that even abstinence is only 99.9% effective.
We use safer sex practices - condoms, gloves, knowledge of our partners, saran wrap, whatever - to reduce that risk. But the risk is still there, every time you have sex. That risk doesn’t change after you have unprotected sex. The odds that you will get an STI are no greater or lesser the next time you have sex.
So my answer to the young woman was that it mattered because safer sex is a habit, not a vow. It mattered because even if I was always going to be lucky with her, maintaining the habit of the condom would, in the long run, help protect her and me and others.
I wish I could say that had been the end of it. That argument precipitated the end of that particular relationship, as our safer sex practice began to take a toll on her feelings of intimacy. There were other more awkward but necessary steps. As a poly person, I had another partner and a responsibility to let her know that I’d had unprotected sex, and what the risk was, and over the next few months, until the STI screen came up negative, that particular incident was a part of every conversation before sex.
“I have to tell you that X months ago I had unprotected sex with someone who was a risk to give me an STI. I don’t have any symptoms, and my STI screen came up clean, but I thought you should know before we decided whether or not to have sex.” That was the hard part. But here’s the part that became much easier: “I’ve been very careful and used a condom every time since then, just like I would want to with you.”
Now I don’t bring it up any more - there comes a point where you have to accept the evidence that the incident has no more effect on the risk than any other partner. And I am, in fact, “fluid-bonded” with one partner now - a choice we made together, knowing each others histories and risks. That’s something that I tell all other partners long before we actually do the deed. There’s that lesson in honesty again. And if someone asks me if I’ve ever had unprotected sex…well, the story is right here on teh interwebs, so it must be true, right?
The lesson I learned - that I think needs to be shared - is that with safer sex, it’s not all or nothing; if you fall off the wagon, you pick yourself up, dust yourself up, say “Wow. That was one helluva bump.”
Then you get back on the wagon and enjoy the ride.
Thanks to Graydancer for sending me my first chuckle of the morning. I’ve never actually seen Italian mustaches acting as pubic hair, but someone had to do it, right?
I was laughing my ass off the whole time, enjoying the perfect parody with decent sex education, and then it came. The sentence. The sentence that I hate. The sentence that made both me and my roommate (who was watching over my shoulder, wondering what all the laughing was about) groan aloud and yell, “Nooooooo!”
Take a look. It’s funny. It’s educational. It’s creative and independent. And at the end, they still say, “But remember, the only way to avoid STDs, AIDS and teen pregnancy is to abstain from sex all together.”
One of the proudest aspects of being a Madison native is that we are home to a former champion. No, I’m not talking about the Olympics, or boxing, or any other sport - I’m talking about a title holder of a different sort (get it?). T (as we’ll call him to protect his anonymity) was the title holder of the 2006 Masturbate-a-thon. I actually found this out while manning a gate at the San Francisco LoveFest with Dr. Carol Queen herself.
