I showed Wolf two photos that I’d taken and was editing for Boobday.
His comment on the first was, “That’s good.”
And on the second: “Thaaaat’s gooood.”
So I present to you the second photo.
[Flashbacks to the optometrist. “Which is better – one? Or two? … One? … Two?” “Uh, two, I think. No wait, let me see one again.”]
More Boobday here.
It’s overcast and wan, a midday twilight. The quality of light is objectively like that of the midnight sun just on the wrong side of the Arctic Circle, but the mood is bleak rather than wondrous. The air has turned chill.
Yesterday, when the light was better, I took a raft of photos but when I went to peruse my haul, I discovered that I’d forgotten to put the memory card back in. That killed my enthusiasm rather effectively. (Though if I was going to make a mistake like that, better to get it out of the way early, I suppose.)
My experiments today haven’t yielded results. I don’t feel like taking risks. I want something that works.
I think I need chocolate, maybe a cozy cup of hot chocolate under blankets on the couch.
While out walking his dog by a river close to town, a friend of ours came across a stack of deer antlers and collected some for Wolf, who was crafting with such materials at the time. I selected this one for display and have been eyeing it up for a photo for some time.
Simple question this week:
How much does penis size matter?
The beginning of this answer starts in an odd place, but bear with me.
Everyone is familiar with bust–waist–hips and these are the horizontal measurements that tend to be most often mentioned in relation to clothing. A couple of years ago, I ran across a style blog that had a post about vertical proportions. There is also a set of ideal vertical proportions, and the post explained the landmarks to use and how to figure this all out. Being an analytical sort, I cheerfully measured myself up and found to my surprise that overall my proportions looked fairly balanced, but there were a couple of odd details, including the fact that the distance from my bellybutton to the thigh/hip crease was remarkably short. Who knew?
That means that my pelvis is proportionately very short. Add to that the fact that I’m 5’2″ (157 cm), and, well, you see where I’m going with this, don’t you? Getting back to the topic, I suspect that I just don’t have the room to accommodate a great deal of length.
I suppose most of the guys I’ve had sex with were of average size. There was one guy whose noticeable smallness pleased me well enough at the time because it meant that, despite my relative lack of arousal, I wasn’t uncomfortable. (This was a shitty week-long “relationship” with someone who in the light of day turned out to be a jerk. The fact that he didn’t actively hurt me is about as good as it got.)
But the only penis I’ve known in a very long time is Wolf’s, and he’s above average in length and girth. Both dimensions used to be challenging, in fact. I definitely need to be aroused and even then he bottoms out easily.
(Somewhere in his research he ran across a paper about a medieval wooden, um, cock-washer (for lack of a better term) that appeared to be used as a spacer when the sword was too long for the sheath. He hasn’t been able to locate the paper again, to my utter dismay.)
Anyway, I’m not a size queen and I find myself confronted with an embarrassment of riches. If I was building the perfect man from scratch, I’d probably choose an average penis, but small has potential too. In other words, it doesn’t much matter.
When I started reading about BDSM, I kept running across the advice that both partners need to be able to trust each other and, in particular, the sub needs to be able to trust the dom. No problem, I thought. Whatever we might get up to, at least I’ve got the trust angle totally covered. Hadn’t I just become aware of how trustworthy he was and how deeply I trusted him? Sorted.
We continued to have sex and then started experimenting a bit with BDSM, and the backsliding I’d feared never materialized. Over the years I had gotten so used to being the source of bedroom difficulties that I was a little surprised to finally discover that Wolf had some issues of his own, but they’d never come up before because we’d never been in a position to test his limits. So, yes, we ran into a few glitches, but trust was never a problem, at least.
Fast forward to my vacation with Gawan, whom I felt I knew better than any of my friends and most of my family members. It was novel, an adventure. I was confident that he wouldn’t pressure me to do anything I didn’t want to, although I was less confident that I wouldn’t pressure myself.
Then we finally — finally! — met up and travelled to our little slice of sunshine, thousands of miles from whomsoever might think badly of it… and all my hard-won sexual open-mindedness seemed to vanish in a puff of diesel exhaust.
I was nervous, on my guard. The things we did together (well, other than the spanking and flogging) were things that I’d first done with boyfriends way back in high school, a fact that left me feeling simultaneously vaguely comforted and slightly unsettled. OK, so I’m no libertine, but the extent to which my prudishness was resurrected took me by surprise.
There were so many variables on that trip, some directly relevant and some merely coincidental, that it took quite a while for me to finally parse my feelings about it all. It didn’t seem to be about lack of chemistry, or fretfulness about non-monogamy. But whatever it was, I felt torn, and my head and my heart were clearly in disagreement about something. Eventually, it occurred to me that the vague anxiety I’d felt around Gawan seemed really familiar: it was, in fact, a lot like how I’d felt with Wolf before the epiphany.
Hear that? Yeah, that’s the sound of the other shoe dropping. Ugh.
Wasn’t I done with that particular variety of angst? What the hell was that epiphany about anyway, if not this? I was sure I hadn’t been mistaken about the source of my sexual shame, but what else was there?
I retraced my steps and recalled that pre-epiphany realization about trust. Perhaps it was more important than I’d thought at the time. So here’s a theory: What if the epiphany hasn’t actually dislodged my maladaptive script about sex and it’s still actually in place? What if I fundamentally feel just as vulnerable about sex as I always have? What if it was my profound trust in Wolf that allowed me to create an exception just for him? If Wolf was the only person I was sexual with, I wouldn’t be able to distinguish between an exception for him and “100% fixed”.
From my own experiences, I know I feel comfortable establishing a relationship and having the sex happen later. Living vicariously through the writing of other sex bloggers (non-fiction works so much better for me than does fiction for this purpose) has given me the opportunity to get a sense of how I’d react to activities outside of my range of experience. But even when the accounts are full of glowing post-coital bliss, I’m certain that I’m turned off by one-night stands, sex with a complete stranger, BDSM play with someone I hardly know, swinging, or leading with sex while hoping for a relationship. I’m ambivalent about the idea of friends with benefits. All of this is consistent with my theory about my sense of vulnerability and the role of trust, so I feel like I’m on the right track.
If I’m right, it would mean I couldn’t fuck someone without having first established a deep trust, and that I’d have to go through this trust exercise with any boyfriend.
Such as Gawan. We’ve spent less than two weeks together in person, so my trust in him is based mostly on about a year’s worth of words, typed or spoken, which is a good foundation but it’s also primarily an intellectual experience. Trust doesn’t seem that efficacious when it’s just in my head — I need to feel it in my gut.
So now the question is why do I need so much trust? Why do I feel so profoundly vulnerable? In other words, what am I afraid of?
Photo courtesy of A Dissolute Life Means
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More Boobday here.
When I was in university, I took an art class and one project was to make an image using only shapes cut from black and white paper. I found a little black and white nude photo in a fashion magazine illustrating, in a very tenuous way, some health story or other, and reproduced it for the project.
I liked how it turned out so I got it framed and it now hangs in my bedroom. It has become part of the wallpaper, as it were, and I only recently noticed that it matches the theme of this blog rather well, both in subject matter and style.
My interest in nudes is not new, it would seem.
Edit: Guest judge Innocent Loverboy chose my photo for the Sinful Sunday Weekly Round-up! Here’s what he had to say:
One of the things that I like about Sinful Sunday is how differently people take it, and this is a great way of showing off the body without taking off your clothes. Like Zoë, I was taken by the brilliance of this picture, the curves and contours of the model brilliantly contrasted in stark black and white.
Thanks ILB!
After I originally posted this image, I was having a hard time figuring out why it looked a little off to me. I’m sure it’s not an issue of wonky proportions. I eventually realized that the location of the picture in the bedroom means that I never look at it straight on as in this photo — I’m often looking up at it, which creates a foreshortening effect.
Also, I’m not the model for the image, though I think I look similar. I seem to have subconsciously noticed those similarities, snagged on the differences, and then concluded that the picture must be wrong! I think that means I’m feeling content with my body, and that’s a good thing.
It’s pretty much impossible for me to identify a single moment that represents “the beginning” of my new, healthy sexuality. My epiphany — when I realized that I had inherited my mother’s sexual shame — marks the moment when I took full ownership of my own sexuality, but that was only the last step in a long and complicated process.
A couple of months before the epiphany, I’d had an important realization that turned out to be highly significant, even though at the time it didn’t seem especially earth-shattering, and in some ways it struck me (afterwards, of course) as blindingly obvious.
After Wolf and I had been together for about two years and sex had already become infrequent, I continued to get more and more tense about physical displays of affection. I had a set of incorrect beliefs that amounted to a twisted and unhealthy logic. Touch was a continuum, from non-sexual at one end to sexual at the other. If I consented to Wolf touching me in a non-sexual way, that seemed to automatically include (or dispense with the need for) consent to be touched in the most intimate way I had ever agreed to be touched by him in the past, i.e. sex. In other words, if hug then sex, if that’s what he wanted. That conclusion is patently ridiculous, but through a combination of family history and dating experiences, that’s what I subconsciously believed and it scared the shit out of me. This flawed logic led me to conclude that the only way to effectively control or avoid sexual contact was to control or avoid all physical contact. So Wolf agreed he wouldn’t initiate hugs or anything else and would leave that to me.
By instituting this rule, I felt a certain amount of relief because it meant that I didn’t have to be on my guard against unwanted contact. But of course I wasn’t much inclined to initiate. After some time, I mellowed on the hug issue, but still felt uncomfortable with most forms of physical affection.
Years passed.
While Wolf was in the UK not so long ago, I had lots of time and space to think. There was no one around who I could possibly need to protect myself from, so after about two years my guard eventually came down. I didn’t consciously let it down, because I didn’t know how. It simply atrophied from disuse.
Once my guard came down, I got thinking about this history of ours and I calculated how long it had been since I had imposed the no-touch restriction. It had been ages, the better part of two decades, for fuck’s sake. And in the spring two years ago, in that quiet moment while I was leaning on the kitchen counter and just thinking, it finally bubbled up into my awareness that Wolf had faithfully followed the rule I’d laid down for all that time. Was he trustworthy? Yes, obviously! I couldn’t imagine what else he could possibly do to prove it any further. He had gone so far above and beyond. Did I in fact trust him? Yes. Unreservedly.
Because of other difficult things that were going on in my life, I had been reading and learning about boundaries, a concept that was entirely new to me. In some areas my boundaries were too porous, but this was an example of one that was too rigid. Like a person who is too focused on dodging other pedestrians on the sidewalk, or simply on her own feet, I’d failed to notice this 20-foot tall emotional wall made of grey cinder blocks and topped with barbed wire. Huh. Time for some demolition work.
I first imposed that rigid boundary to keep me feeling safe, then maintained it for years out of habit. It had become obsolete without my noticing it; it had served me for a while but I didn’t need it anymore and it had become a hindrance rather than a help. I didn’t have to police Wolf. Rather than maintaining that wall, I could just draw a line on the ground and leave it to him to respect it.
Wolf had been demonstrating his trustworthiness for ages; I had developed a certain amount of trust in him, but not as much as he had earned. After becoming aware of both the trustworthiness and the trust, I allowed myself to relax into my trust of him, to allow myself to be vulnerable because I was perfectly safe with him.
Until very recently, I had thought that this realization about trust was a precondition for my epiphany about sexual shame, but now I think that trust and sexual shame are separate issues and not connected in a linear fashion. Instead, I see them as parallel strands that are equally important. If I’d worked out the sexual shame issue first, perhaps trust would have been the epiphany. Either way, I figured it out.
My new knowledge and attitude was in one sense hard-won: sexuality had been a troublesome issue essentially all my life up to that point.
In another sense though, it couldn’t have been easier. I’d been doing reading and work on personal growth, spurred by some incidents that were entirely unrelated to any of this. I started with interpersonal relationships and “know thyself” type reading, and then, because I decided to follow where my curiosity led, I ended up reading about sex and relationships too. When I finally stumbled over my grand solution, it felt like an unlooked for gift, like a duffel bag filled with stacks of unmarked bills in a garbage can in the park.
Maybe it seemed too easy and thus necessarily superficial. For a while I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
And then, after I’d forgotten about it, it did.
Anne Katherine, Boundaries: Where You End and I Begin (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1993).
Jan Black & Greg Enns, Better Boundaries: Owning and Treasuring Your Life (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, 1997).
Sex Is My New Hobby 