Where Are the Limits?

by Jean Roberta

Thinking of going beyond limits, I had some thoughts about this post several days ago, but life got in the way, so I’m late again. I hope I’m not trespassing on someone else’s time-slot.

The word “transgressive” has been slung about excessively to tempt readers to buy erotic stories. Every sexually-explicit narrative could be considered boundary-breaking because some conservatives still think sex should not be openly described at all, especially if it feels good for everyone involved. In that sense, erotica involving married and/or procreative heterosexual couples could be considered transgressive. (I’ve written that kind of erotica, and it doesn’t seem more acceptable to conservative types than the most elaborate BDSM scenes.)

Actually, I’m not sure my real life would shock more people nowadays than any of my erotic stories. I’m in a long-term lesbian relationship for almost thirty years, and we’ve been legally married since 2010. Anyone who finds my lifestyle perverse and unnatural would probably go into a swoon if forced to read any of my descriptions of sex, including the most traditional.

Among other pieces, I wrote about the conception of King Arthur in “Under the Sign of the Dragon,” available on Excessica, and a thorny but ultimately satisfying relationship between a man and woman with competing claims to the same plot of land in “The Way to a Man’s Heart,” in Like a Sword, a collection of “high fantasy” stories from Circlet Press. But I digress.

I believe that writers and fans of erotica should support each other, regardless of the diverse pairings and genres we write or prefer to read. There is M/M erotica, there is F/F erotica, there is M/f, F/m, various multiple arrangements, and various types of power exchange. It’s all too much for those who would like to silence us all.

Years ago, I taught Lysistrata (in a modern English translation) to first-year university students. This work is an ancient Greek comedy by a one-name playwright, Aristophanes, who imagined an ingenious way of ending the war between Athens and Sparta: the married women of both city-states go on a sex strike until the men declare a truce. In the fantasy world of the play, this works, and the grand finale is a feast and an orgy to celebrate peace. In effect, this play predates the 1960s slogan “Make love, not war,” by over 24 centuries.

A young male student spoke to me after class. He was clearly in distress, and he told me he was offended by the assigned text because he was a Christian. He then said that he thought sex should only take place between a man and a woman in holy matrimony. I reminded him that the numerous raunchy references to sex in this play are surprisingly marital as well as heterosexual. It’s all about sex between a man and a woman in a long-term relationship as a mutual source of pleasure and bonding, and a metaphor of union between different entities.

I suspect that young men like my former student are less offended by graphic descriptions of slaughter in battle than by descriptions of sex. Bring on the spears, the blades, the catapults, the burning destruction of buildings, crops, livestock and humans! (And while we’re in imaginary ancient Greece, I could mention a substance that sticks to clothing and burns the wearer alive, which is sent as a gift by Medea to her faithless husband’s new bride, and which sounds uncannily similar to napalm.)

Never mind the Song of Solomon, or any other evidence that sexual love and mutual pleasure are not opposed to Christian ethics. Conservative Christian parents don’t want their offspring to be seduced or corrupted by subversive types like us. Some of them would like their sons to be encouraged to voluntarily join the military so they can fight in the latest war.

The boundary between me and the Anti-Sex League (to borrow a term from the dystopian post-WW2 novel 1984) seems much bigger than any limits between different types of consensual sex.

------------------------------------------------------

Friend at First Sight

by Annabeth Leong

I had recently separated from my husband, and a big thing I wanted, not just that night but with my life, was to go dancing.

The moment that led to my divorce happened at someone’s wedding. The DJ started playing Justin Timberlake and Bon Jovi and it made me want to join the party. My husband wanted to keep sitting at the table, and he wanted me to stay with him. I was bored and frustrated, and I guess something had slowly been breaking in our relationship, because I stood up and left him there. I kicked off my shoes at the edge of the dance floor and air guitared to “Livin’ On a Prayer,” jumping up and down until sweat soaked through the sides of my dress and I could hardly breathe.

It took a couple months after that for me to actually leave him, but when I did I started going out. I’d married young enough that I was perplexed by the scene I found. Who knew that shit doesn’t really get going at the club until midnight? How are you supposed to deal with that when the trains stop running at one? What do you do with your purse? How do you let someone know when you want to dance with them, or when you don’t? What do you do when you start dancing with someone and you get a feeling like a punch to the lower belly because there’s something so exciting about being close this way to a living person that it’s like your clit is trying to crawl out of you and jump them independently?

Christ, it was messy. It had been almost a decade since someone really hit on me, and suddenly I had people telling me they thought I might be the one, saying they wanted me to have their children. At what age did guys get so intense? The last time I’d been a free agent, the big question was whether I did anal.

And I wanted to go dancing, not just that night but in my life. I felt like I was having a second adolescence. Please, for the love of God, don’t tell me you think you’re falling in love with me. Tell me you know where there’s burlesque. Tell me you know where that good DJ is going to be, the one who knows the difference between goth-y noise and stuff that’s danceable. Tell me you want to try nipple clamps. I had spent so much time thinking about nipple clamps that just the words made me tremble.

I went out that night because Femme Bones had posted on Facebook that her new burlesque troop, the Slaughterhouse Sweethearts, would be performing at this club downtown. I wanted to support a maybe-friend, and I wanted to see breasts, and I liked the way the Sweethearts could turn you on and make you uncomfortable at the same time.

Much as I wanted to have fun in my new life, I still felt like I was missing a manual. The club was right next to Fenway, where the Red Sox play. Before my divorce I would never have dared to drive there, but now there I was in wild gridlock on Yawkee Way, dressed like a schoolgirl, shirt way unbuttoned, lipstick a shade of plum that made the whole thing look obscene, trying to figure out how the fuck anybody parks while there’s a baseball game, and wondering if I ought to just give up and go home.

I circled the club several times, shaking, clock ticking. Finally, I found street parking and went in. I discovered this wasn’t just a burlesque show—there was also dancing. I hadn’t known, but I went with it, purse tucked awkwardly against my body while I tried to move (where the hell are you supposed to put that thing?).

Gradually, the building filled. The challenge of dancing with too much floor and too many lights focused on me gave way to the challenge of dancing without accidentally clocking anyone with my elbow.

Then I looked up and smiled and waved, chest warm with recognition. My body reacted the way I do when a dear friend walks in while I’m having a sad day. I was flooded with relief, the sense of finally being able to let go of things I’d been holding in. Refuge. Sanctuary. The pleasure of being yourself with someone who can do the same with you.

It took a few seconds for me to realize I didn’t actually know that guy I’d just waved to. He was coming toward me, though, invited by my smile and my gesture.

We danced until his friends made him leave. I kept thinking maybe I shouldn’t do this, maybe I wanted to just dance tonight and not get into any romantic messes. I really wasn’t looking for a relationship, or even a hookup. On the other hand, I couldn’t shake that feeling of goodwill I’d had when I first saw him. I liked him so much. We were doing sexy things, sure, and that was working for me, but there was that powerful sense of friendship underneath it all, like we’d known each other forever.

He asked for my number before he left, and I sort of wanted to refuse him, but I was afraid that if I did he would think I didn’t like him, and I couldn’t bear that, because I did.

It was that way for months after that. I kept thinking I didn’t really want to be dating someone. I probably shouldn’t see him again, I’d decide. But I liked him so much I’d tell myself I’d just do it one more time.

I don’t want anything serious, I told him. I’m getting divorced. I want us to have fun together, not plan for the future.

That sounds great, he said, and he was the only person I’d met who knew how to be with me without applying pressure.

I did think he was hot, don’t get me wrong. But things didn’t click when we went to bed. The blow job technique that was at that time driving other people wild made this guy lose his erection. On the other hand, he had a way of thrusting that kept me from feeling him any of the places I wanted to. We struggled to settle on a brand of condom we both liked.

The thing was, though, we figured all that stuff out. Then we started checking out the nipple clamps. Then he caught me one day with the porn I’d always been ashamed of, and his nonreaction to it healed me more than I’d thought possible. And I think what was going on through all this was that the liking was good. It made us able to talk about anything, and the thing about sex is it works best if you can talk about it.

A few years later, I married him. I’ve never liked living with anyone, but I like living with him. People say marriage should be based on friendship, but this is a friendship I felt right away. It was so instant, it had the sense of something resumed. In my spookier moments, I’ve wondered if past lives are real and he was some sort of dear friend before.

After we got married, I realized, partially thanks to the way he encouraged me to really be myself, exactly how serious my attractions to women are, how my sexuality seemed to be changing. Fuck, I thought. Don’t people always have to ruin something? Here’s a person who accepts me like I didn’t dare to dream of, and now I can’t be with him because I think I might be gay.

And I did think about leaving, because I really felt I might not be interested in men anymore. I wanted to be fair to him, and to me, and I cried every morning because I couldn’t imagine living my life while suppressing my attractions and I also couldn’t imagine living my life without him.

We’ll figure this out, he said. This is what marriage means.

Christ, I thought. Is it? That sure as hell wasn’t what marriage meant before.

We’re polyamorous now, and our sexual connection has changed but it’s still there, and I still like him just as powerfully as I did that first moment, at first sight. All that stuff I felt was true. He is my refuge, my sanctuary, that place where I get the pleasure of truly being myself. I hope all the time that I’m something similar for him.

And if the music starts playing, literally anywhere, he is the first on the dance floor.

Failure Condition

by Annabeth Leong

When I divorced my first husband, I ran into lots of people who wanted me to talk about what my mistakes had been. I realized eventually that the path to feeling decent about myself and my ex was to consistently refuse to think about it like that.

This is what I say about my ex-husband when asked: We weren’t compatible partners.

I would perform an elaborate ritual to express my gratitude for no-fault divorce. I think it’s one of the best legal innovations to have ever happened. After growing up watching my parents tear each other to shreds in a contested divorce, which went on for something like three years, it was an incredible gift to be able to write “irreconcilable differences” on the form and call it a day. I am so, so powerfully glad that I didn’t have to go to court and try to prove what was wrong with my ex-husband or with me so that we could be free of each other.

Let’s talk about this mistakes idea a little more, though. My sense from the many conversations I’ve had about this is that I’m supposed to pony up my mistakes for several reasons.

For one thing, it’s supposed to show that I learned something from the failure of my first marriage and am in a position to never screw up exactly that way again. I also strongly suspect that it’s supposed to reassure my listener—if they can check out their own life and see that they’re not making the same mistakes, then they know they’re safe from the trouble that’s hit my life.

(By the way, I’m constantly resisting the urge to put scare quotes around everything. I’ll spare you that visual scourge, but please keep in mind that I’m using all words like mistake, failure, and screw-up with a sense of deep skepticism in this post).

So that idea that I learned something… I definitely did. I learned so much from being married and from getting divorced, and I carry those lessons with me every day. The most important stuff that I learned, though, forced me to change my worldview significantly.

I went into that marriage with a lot of beliefs about how marriage was hard work that I was prepared to do. I believed at the time that any two people could work things out between themselves. Maybe they wouldn’t stay madly in love, but with a strong commitment, they could remain effective partners. I believed there was deep value in this exercise.

It’s that set of beliefs that drives the desire to hunt for mistakes after a failure of a marriage, I think. Noticing mistakes and learning from them protects you in the future. Accepting the mistakes you made in the past makes things your fault, which means you should have known better, which means you had or should have had control over painful events.

I don’t think things really work this way, though. I don’t think that avoiding specific actions I took with my ex-husband will inoculate me from relationship difficulties in the future. I don’t think there was any way he or I could have or should have known better in the past than to do what we did.

People want to believe in recklessness, too—that either our marriage or divorce was hasty or insufficiently considered. To which I say, welcome to my brain. No one thinks more than I do. I promise I applied all my best effort and thought to both situations.

***

The idea of a failed marriage contains the idea that there’s a successful marriage. The success condition is to die married. Anything that deviates from that path means that mistakes were made.

This year, a relative of mine died of cancer. He and his wife had a lot of unhappiness in the many years they were together, and they had always worked things out. My relative and his wife were often congratulated for their commitment to marriage. What I saw, though, was a pretty sad scene at the end of his life. His care was in the hands of a woman he didn’t really seem to trust, who didn’t seem to trust him. There were all sorts of fights in the family as he lay dying, often instigated by the tensions between my relative and his wife.

Seeing that brought some of these things into sharp relief for me. I’m not inclined to call that successful. I honestly wish my relative had released himself from that difficult marriage years before so he could have felt safer at the end of his life. Now, I know I’m not in his head. He might strenuously disagree with the way I’m characterizing things. What I will say is that I don’t think that situation would feel like a success to me.

***

The idea of a failed marriage suggests that a successful marriage was always possible. It is only mistakes that stopped that from happening.

My parents brought out the absolute worst in each other. I don’t think there is any world where that would not have been true. Each of them was much better off without the other. I can’t see their divorce as a failure. I can’t see the trouble between them as a series of mistakes.

At the same time, I appreciate that my mother doesn’t characterize the marriage as a mistake altogether (another thing that people sometimes seem to want me to do). My mother resists labeling thirteen years of her life that way, or calling the connection a mistake when it produced the children she loved.

***

I spent my entire first marriage working on it. I scanned myself relentlessly for mistakes and tried to fix them. I consulted others for advice. I spared myself no scrutiny. If there is something I would call a mistake, it is that. I wish I had seen my misery for what it was sooner and trusted it. In my life since that marriage, I have tried to believe in myself more, to stop operating that pitiless radar, to open myself to the idea that sometimes, when a relationship is work, it means it’s not a good one. There is an ease and a joy to things I want in my life. There is a magic I can feel in the background, even during a difficult conversation. It’s not that I never take the actions that might be called hard work, but they don’t feel so hard. I no longer feel like I’m trying to dig a ditch with a spoon.

I remember the day I decided to get a divorce. I was writing a pro and con list, trying to solve for the right answer as if my life were a math problem. And I saw it in a flash. To me, my life was a set of correct answers, colored in green, and mistakes, shaded red. But what if getting a divorce was just an action, something that couldn’t be classified so simplistically? What if red and green would always mingle to color everything I did? What if life didn’t have a right answer?

That was the moment that freed me from a paralysis and obsession I’d been living under for many years. I understood something about courage, what it means to step forward without knowing what the outcome will be. Suddenly, there was space in my life for my heart, my desires, my feelings.

The Illusion of the Never-Changing

by Annabeth Leong

In times of deep grief, I fear that if I begin crying I will drown in an ocean of tears. I will lie on my couch forever and never get up again to go out to the park or to the mall or to wash my dishes. If I so much as whisper the names of those I have lost, the howling will tear me apart on its way out. I must fight the wall of sorrow that threatens to close me off from the rest of the world forever.

In times of deep joy, I fear that the slightest motion of my pinky finger might destroy the thing that is growing between us. With my head on your shoulder, I want to stop walking or even breathing. In this moment, I have all I want—I'm not even worried about the sweaty acrobatics we could get up to naked. I want to rest here forever.

A person is not an object at rest.

And so a moment comes when I can no longer hold back my grief and the tears begin, rolling in and out of me like a tide. I find I am not in the middle of the ocean. I am on the shore, buffeted but still standing with toes sunk into the sand. I get up and go to the park, sit on a sticky, rickety set of bleachers, and cry while the sun strokes my face dry.

And so I get a crick in my neck and have to lift my head to check the expression on your face. I learn all your names and meet your parents and engage in tortured descriptions of what I actually want from you, only to change my mind six months later and try again. We fuck, sometimes giggling, sometimes sobbing. Sometimes I can't come and other times I can't stop coming. Each time I return to you, I find somewhere to rest my head. Tonight, I turn my cheek to fit it on your thigh. It feels different every time. In the back of my mouth, I taste the way it used to feel.

I don't think a person can stay at rest.

Sometimes, I think I have the answer. I've got my work flow figured out. The words will run out of me like water from a carefully calibrated faucet. They aren't flooding me, and they aren't trickling. Now that I know how to do this, I will never have to struggle again. If I stay in motion just like this, I can write perfectly forever.

Sometimes, I think I'm going to get trapped. When you get on the marriage train, it's an express, not a local. A ring is on my finger and people have been invited. I look back toward the depot where I began the journey—in a state of love and naivete, I believed I wanted to take this ride all the way to its conventional end. But now here I am, and I am going to wear white and my stomach will swell and I will have babies and I will be safe and secure except for all the silent hate that people seem to grow. If I stay in motion just like this, I'm going to wind up thwarted and bitter forever.

A person is not an object in motion.

And so I discover that sometimes the words do flood. Sometimes, they come so fast I choke on them. They tell me things I'm not ready to hear and they keep me up all night, drugged and confused by unrelenting revelation. And sometimes, my heart is empty and barren, and I sit and very carefully type the word "the" and then very carefully erase it. Every law I thought I'd learned has been repealed. In both cases, I am eventually reduced to starting over, reinventing who I am and coming up with something new to say.

And so I discover that as relentless as the marriage train seems to be, there are a thousand decisions along the way. I can go to the doctor and have my IUD taken out, and then panic and start researching sterilization. I can discover that I don't want to be hit anymore, not even if it makes me come. I can discover that I want to be touched, even if it makes me cry. I can care for another person in intimate ways that I never thought I would be willing to care for someone. I can be cared for, so much that it becomes okay for me to walk down the street holding another person's hand. Every word is reinvented.

I don't think a person can stay in motion.

The concept of inertia as applied to people contains so much implied helplessness. The reason an object at rest will stay at rest, or that an object in motion will stay in motion, is that the objects in question don't have internal motivation. Inertia is a natural law of resistance to change, a requirement that force must be applied from the outside. But my self is full of struggle. My limbs will not be still. And when the journey becomes long and hard, I must rest my head.

I Want to Know What Love Is

I've been dragging my metaphorical feet on writing this post because the topic-- "What Women and Men Know About Love"-- stumped me. I keep hearing that 80s song in my head, those plaintive words, "I want to know know what love is/I want you to show me." What do I know about love? How can I speak on what men know about love? Despite nearly 21 years of marriage and several long term friendships with men, I can barely comprehend how men think about simple things like pantry organization and holiday gift buying, much less love. The male brain is supposed to be simple, right? At least that's what men have told me. I guess I don't understand simple.

Then I started considering whether I know anything about what women know about love. I'm not sure I do. I've often found myself bewildered during lengthy chats with female friends over their relationships-- relationships that sounded more like fodder for the Jerry Springer show or the contents of a police report than that powerful, all-encompassing emotion known as love.

What do women and men know about love? Hell if I know. (Which seems to be how some of my fellow Grippers feel about the subject, as well.) Much like religion and politics, I'm not sure I've figured out my feelings about love. I know who I love, of course, but I think knowing how to love and how to express that love is a lifelong process.

I grew up with my mother's version of love, which was of the tough variety (to say the least). If I got sick, there were no meals served in bed, no pampering or coddling. If I was too sick to come to the table, then I obviously wasn't hungry. Pampering and coddling would only make me weaker-- I needed to tough it out. If I got my feelings hurt by a friend at school and dared to shed tears (as my overly emotional self is wont to do whether I'm sad or angry), I was weak and needed to stop being a baby. If I was happy about something or succeeded at something, my mother was always quick to remind me that happiness was fleeting and there was always someone better, smarter, prettier and funnier than me. She was good at knocking me down a notch or two, my mother. Sometimes, she was so good she managed to knock me down farther than where I started. All that tough love was supposed to make me stronger, more independent, better able to handle pain, disappointment, sadness, illness, strife, etc. I suppose it worked to a point-- I'm pretty tough, which comes in handy when those rejections roll in.

The first time I really knew in my heart that Jay (my husband) loved me and would always be there for me was when he cleaned my scissors. I can see you cocking your head trying to figure that one out and I don't know that the explanation will help or not. Before we got married, I went through a crafting phase, making various things for the apartment, as gifts and whatnot, gluing stuff together with my trusty glue gun and gunking up my scissors with that same glue until they were barely able to cut air much less paper or ribbon or cardboard. We'd been married no more than a few weeks when I was sorting through my craft supplies and discovered my crafting scissors in pristine condition. Jay had sat down and cleaned every bit of dried glue off my scissors. Why? Because they were mine and they needed it. That was all. He didn't use them and I didn't ask him to clean them. And he wasn't (and isn't) a clean freak and doesn't suffer from OCD. He just wanted to do something for me and that was something simple and obvious. I knew it was love. He's proven it again and again over the years in a variety of small, simple ways-- most recently bringing me the royal wedding edition of People magazine just to give me something happy to look at because I was feeling sad and overwhelmed by all of the news about the killing of Osama bin Laden.

I think maybe everyone loves differently-- not just men and women, but every man and every woman. Love is subjective-- what I think is love you might think is madness. What you think is love, I might think is emotional abuse. How we learn to love is based on the sum total of our experiences. For better or worse, we learn about love from the people who love us.

Here's the thing I've only figured out in the past few years-- love isn't received or processed in the same way by everyone. What I might consider the most loving gesture I can make can be considered smothering or received as criticism. And I know I haven't always accepted gestures of love in the spirit they were intended. I need to be loved with words, because words are what I understand. I need to be loved with small gestures, like emails and text messages, because that constant emotional contact sustains my sensitive soul. I need to be loved with a single flower or one perfect cupcake, a song that reminds you of me, a 25¢ toy from a gumball machine, just because. It's remembering I said I wanted to go to that place sometime or that I really want one of those things-- and then taking me there or getting me one. That's what love is to me. I also need to be loved with the word "yes" because-- to me-- love is being supportive of any crazy thing I want to do. Saying "Yes!" to my madness is saying you love me. And saying "Yes!" to you is me telling you I love you and support you and believe in you. I guess my version of love is the opposite of tough love-- it's marshmallow fluff love.

I don't know if I've made any more sense out of this week's topic or that I understand any better how women and men love. But maybe I don't need to understand love-- maybe I just need to feel it.