The Girl Whisperer

I was just going to write about how I'm masturbating a lot. I sent a rough draft to my friend Sadie.
“What's up with Gaffer Guy?” She asked. “You're not having sex anymore?”
I realized I had skipped over this little detail. That I wasn't much interested in talking about it. It's more of the same, except that now we're not even having sex. At all. And even I'm getting bored of the charade.

Our last 3 exchanges, initiated by him:

8 days ago, GG invited me to a party at his house that I had zero intention of attending. At 11:30pm, my phone buzzed.
GG: “Where you at fucker?”
Me: “Hi fucker!”
GG: “So I guess you ain't coming. Word up.”
Me: “You having fun?”
GG: “Yeah. All 40 of us are.”
Me: “40 of you?! Whatcha doin texting me??”
Felt really good about this response. He promptly followed with this:
GG: “Because I've got 3 horny single guys you can hook up with.”

4 days ago:
GG: “I want a goddamn beer.”
Me: “So order one.”
GG: “Yeah. I am.”
Me: emoticon thumbs up!
GG: “I'm gonna order 2 and hope someone I know shows up and pays!”
Me: “Good luck with that!”
VERY proud of myself for not getting dressed, putting on makeup, going to meet him, and spending the night trying to get him to fuck me.

3 days ago, I saw him hanging out with a new girl at an unrelated event. I was with another guy (my most recent potential sex friend whom I have only made out with thus far), and not that interested in playing across-the-room eye games with GG. I left before him, drove home, put on my Pjs, and just as I was removing my makeup, I received a call.
GG: “Where you at?”
Me: “Home.”
GG: “I'm going to get a couple beers. You can come or not, I don't care either way.”
Me: “Okay...?”
He mumbled some other nonsense and hung up. I put my phone down and wiped the makeup off my eyes.

So, that's what's been happening. Sometimes he comes by my work and we have tea time in the afternoon, and we don't talk about anything of substance or what's going on between us. We act as though we haven't spoken or texted since the last time we had tea time. It's better this way – we don't fight as much. Sometimes I enjoy his company in these platonic meetings because he drinks tea instead of beer and he's less of a dick. Sometimes I wonder what I'm doing there – what do I want out of this? The other day, we laughed as we watched a tiny little snail make its way across the concrete between us. I took a photo with his finger for scale.

So, I guess GG and I are “just friends” now. And I've decided to stop sleeping with my ex, and also still just flirting with my new potential sex friend (he's got a very busy schedule and – ahem – a teenage son). So, I'm not getting much action. And I masturbate a lot.

I've heard of this phenomenon whereby some people – albeit usually teenage boys and middle aged men - masturbate too often and end up losing interest in the real thing. I mean, if I can get myself off quickly and efficiently in under 5 minutes, why go through the whole rigamarole of actually having sex with another person – which often requires work to organize in the first place, potentially takes over 30 minutes of my time, and might very likely end in no orgasms for me and a very sticky bottom...  Why not skip all the beating around the bush?

And, to be quite honest, my pearl rabbit is better at sex than a lot of the guys I've slept with in the last couple years. A LOT better. An evening spent with my rabbit and a nice James Deen flick is an evening well spent in my book.

The other night, I was in the midst of a steamy little carseat make-out session with my new potential sex friend (the one with the kid – I will call him DILF), when he had to leave to go pick up his son at baby mama's house. So, there I was – all hot and bothered with nowhere to go. I resisted the relentless temptation to hunt down GG, or the nagging thought that my ex is readily available and very effective at getting me off – but rather than crawl down either of those equally complicated rabbit holes, I decided instead to crawl into bed with my rabbit.

When I'm with my rabbit, I have to try not to come. This is something that I don't recall ever having from sex. I don't know about most women, but for me having an orgasm from sex usually takes a lot of concentration and is not something that simply overcomes me uncontrollably. I wish it would. With my rabbit, the vibrating ears can make me come in like 2 seconds, so I've gotta be careful to drag out the climax for as long as I possibly can. If this level of intensity exists in sex, will the real Christian Grey please stand up??

I know the reason GG often doesn't want to have sex is because he's worried he can't please me. And I think he's haunted by the fact that he's never given me an orgasm. He doesn't quite believe me when I say I don't care. He's even apologized after sex for being a “dud.” I'm sure he'd rather just masturbate... guilt-free.

I thought about taking you through the ins and outs (haha) of my masturbation sessions but my friend Sadie reminded me that masturbating is not that interesting. There's no conflict. As any writer knows, if there's no conflict, there's no story, and there's no conflict when I'm fucking myself. I know I'm going to get off – there's no tension there. And there's no mystery about what my partner might do – because my partner is an inanimate object whose actions I control. No expectations or disappointments, no reciprocation or guilt trips. Just pure pleasure. And pleasure without tension does not provide nearly the same relief.

I felt so great about myself a week ago because I really thought I would never text him again.
“I'm over it,” I declared to anyone who would listen. They all looked skeptical but encouraging. I really thought I was done. Then, I threw my girlfriend's bachelorette party. I drank a lot of Greyhounds and watched a lot of sexy burlesque dancers writhing on poles... and my fuzzy head got the better of me. I reached for my phone.
Me: “Watching burlesque... Putting me in the mood...”
Silence. I waited a half hour. Still no response. I took a photo of one of the dancers in full splits, gripping the pole between her legs, and sent it to him. A totally irresistible and boner-inducing shot. Or so I thought.
My phone buzzed.
GG: “This guy probably cares. Text him.”
Followed by a shared contact, his friend JC whom I'd talked to the other night at the event.
JC had asked about what was happening between me and GG. I told him it was over, that I didn't like the way he treated women. Even as I heard the words “we don't deserve it” come out of my mouth, I knew I was full of shit. JC listened intently, then responded remorselessly:
“You love it. He's the girl whisperer. You don't want a nice guy.”

I knew he was referring to himself. I could tell he was interested in me, and also a much nicer guy than GG. But he was right, I wasn't interested. Because I like the conflict – as frustrating as GG is, he always gives me something to push up against. The tension keeps building and building and I'm still waiting for that sweet relief. In my brain, I know it will never come. Maybe if it did I would lose interest. That's what's fucked up about this whole thing, and my dirty little secret – if I got what I want I probably wouldn't want it anymore. Oh well, at least he makes for a good story.

Rapture, Blister, Burn-ed

A couple nights ago, some friends and I saw Gina Gionfriddo’s Rapture, Blister, Burn at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood… and we haven’t stopped talking about it.

In the play, Catherine, a successful feminist theorist, returns to the small college town where she grew up and reconnects with Don, her college boyfriend, and Gwen, the friend that “stole” him from her, now married with two children. She is smacked in the face with the life she could have had if she hadn’t followed her career, and this dilemma of the road not travelled becomes the central question of the play, the age old crux faced by women everywhere: is it possible to have both a successful career and a well-cultivated marriage/home life? Gwen, too, is disappointed with her life, especially with Don as a husband, and she longs to return to school and pursue the career she gave up to become a mother. When Don and Catherine start having an affair, Gwen gets on board with the idea and decides the two women should essentially switch lives. Don moves in with Catherine and Gwen goes back to school in New York, on Catherine’s dime.

I found myself relating to Catherine to the point of discomfort. When she and Don shack up together, she basks in his sloppy, teen boy lifestyle – they stay up all night watching porn and horror movies, fucking, and eating funyuns. Then, in the morning, she encourages him to write that book he always wanted to write and never did because of his laziness and inertia. An older man I spoke to after the play expressed that he didn’t quite buy that a woman as smart, independent, and put together as Catherine would engage in behavior like this. Clearly, a woman wrote this play. For some reason, I don’t think men can quite comprehend the seeming contradiction of an intellectual, independent woman getting sloppy in a love nest with her “loser” boyfriend. I understand because I am this woman – I will stay up all night with a guy, smoking pot, eating pizza and watching The Devil Inside – then, in the morning, I’ll hop out of bed because I don’t like sleeping in, and I’ll want him to get his act together and live up to his potential.

In the play, this contradiction becomes too much for Don and he inevitably goes back to Gwen, a woman whose expectations are not too high or too low for him to live up to. “Gwen holds me to a grade-C achievable standard,” he explains to a devastated Catherine. She doesn’t allow for his sloth, but she also doesn’t expect him to ever write that book he’ll never write. I found myself sucking back tears at the curtain call because I can see this exact thing happening to me – choosing my career over a man and then being rejected because I wouldn’t do the woman thing and sacrifice for him and because he knows he can’t live up to my expectations.

When Catherine, her mother Alice, and her student Avery reflect on Don’t actions, they reference anti-feminist theorist Phyllis Schlafly who argued that independent career women who are too “easy” will be the end of marriage because, as Alice so eloquently puts it, “No one buys the cow if he can get the milk for free.” Catherine theorizes that this behavior goes back to cave men, because cave men wanted to conquer a woman and keep her by their fire, but if a woman was too easily conquered, she might get bored and go fuck another caveman. As my male friend put it, “Guys don’t want a girl that wants casual sex because they are supposed to be the ones that want casual sex and if the girl is too casual about it they lose control.”

I asked my married friend what she thought was the message of the play. “I think it’s that maybe we have to stop expecting so much from men. We can’t expect them to provide the love and comfort we need. Maybe that’s what our female friends are for.” Tears streamed down her cheeks as she opened up to me in a way I’ve never seen before. “There’s just a lot of disappointment.” I thought a lot about this and, although I have a different perspective and I’m not married, I do think there’s something to be said for this theme of women’s expectations and disappointments in life, and especially in their dealings with men. Because I honestly think we expect more from them than they expect from us, and we’re constantly setting ourselves up for disappointment.

My married friend and I started talking about the upcoming wedding of our engaged friend.
“All this wedding stuff is bullshit.” I was surprised to hear such vehemence coming out of this woman who usually keeps such a constrained demeanor. “It has nothing to do with what marriage is really like.”
I had a Woman’s Studies teacher in college who talked about how a wedding is to marriage what porn is to sex. It’s like a hyper-realistic, fantasy version of the thing itself and the two really don’t have much to do with each other. Again, I think there’s a huge expectation-disappointment cycle going on here, because weddings raise women’s expectations for marriage to Disney movie happily-ever-after extremes that make some level of disappointment inevitable. And weddings are often more a fulfillment of the bride’s fantasy than the groom’s. Because, again, men simply have less expectations. I think they accept their reality much more easily than women do and they don’t spend half their life thinking about the what ifs and the what could’ve beens.

The play ends with the three generations of women standing together, sans men, raising their martini glasses in a toast.
Alice: “To Phyllis Schlafly! She said you girls would pay for your independence and your whoring. She said men wouldn’t stay with you and she was right. You’re free. You’re free… I think it’s wonderful!”

I left the play feeling exhilarated, energized, and on the verge of tears. I felt empowered, like a dialogue had been started and my values were shared by a group of strong women, and even some men. That progress was possible and imminent. Then, I left the theatre and found myself at a party… with Gaffer Guy. It seemed my newfound feminist strength was being tested. And once again I found myself, involuntarily, with expectations. For what, you might ask? What could I possibly expect from this individual who had proven himself again and again to be nothing but disappointing? We had known each other would be at the party, and he had even said he was going to ask me to go with him. I didn’t want to go with him, or anyone, because I wanted to be a free agent that night, but I did expect there might be a little fun flirting or at least some kind of sexy attention from him. And yes, I know he’s a proven dick, but typical female that I am, I’m riding the expectation-disappointment-expectation merry-go-round like there's no tomorrow, and this guy is like CAT NIP for me. And guess what, he showed up with another girl. She was by his side all night, and he kept walking past me and catching my eye across the room, but never left this girl’s side, and never came to talk to me. Until I ran into him at the bar and I met the girl and a couple of his creepy male friends, and Gaffer Guy looked from me to his date and said excitedly, “I see a wrestling match about to happen.” I shook my head, picked up my drink and walked away.

I think this might be another crutch of being an “easy” independent woman – I feel like my one night stands sometimes don’t think I deserve respect. Because I let them fuck me on the first night and they don’t have to work hard to conquer me and I’m never going to sit by their fire. Or they think because I come across as strong I don’t have feelings. I suddenly felt like Avery, the 21 year old in the play. She is this brassy young woman with all these contemporary views on female empowerment and sexuality, and then her boyfriend dumps her for a Mormon girl who is definitely NOT giving it up on the first date – and Avery is crushed. Despite all my independent woman bravado and my loud vocalization of strong feminist values, I am still human. Underneath it all, I am a vulnerable woman who wants love. And, in the face of men like Gaffer Guy, sometimes it’s really hard to admit that.