Happy Hump Day! Now here are 10 Things You Didn't Know About Vaginas.

Rejection

I’ve got rejection on the brain. Last weekend, I really wanted to have sex. I had recently reconnected with this hot bartender/circus performer whom I used to have casual sex with. Well, we did it twice. Back then, I dubbed him my “Sunday fuck,” but on the second Sunday we were already doing a “quickie” and the following week, when I tried to booty call him, he texted back, “Well, I don’t know. I started seeing someone so we’re going to have to chill on that for a bit.” This guy is like catnip for me. Not only does he have a beautiful face and incredibly tight ripped body, I love kissing him, I love his smell, I love his cock. Needless to say, when he shut it down, I was disappointed. Also, a little embarrassed. I sustained a bit of an ego bruise on that one, believing that his “seeing someone” was just a way of getting rid of me, that I was getting too clingy coming to the bar every week to stare at him. I never returned to his bar after that—it had been my local favorite. I also moved out of the area (unrelated), so that helped me forget about him.

Then, a couple weeks ago, I asked my Best Guy Friend if he wanted to go to dinner at this particular bar, for old times sake. He actually had been the one to originally point out Bartender to me, and at the time I declared him “not my type.” Now, basically every man I’m attracted to looks like him: short-ish, lean muscular body, dark hair, beautiful eyes. Best Guy Friend knows what I want before I do.

We arrive at the bar and, sure enough, he’s working. I catch his eye and smile. I thought it would be awkward for us to see one another again, and I had mentally prepared myself. But he looks genuinely pleased. He gives me a cute, playful little wave and asks how I’m doing. He catches my eye several times throughout the night as my friend and I eat dinner. I wonder if he thinks we’re dating. I can’t decide if this is the message I want to send or not. We leave at a reasonable time and Bartender looks, dare I say, a little disappointed to see me go.

The moment we leave, I want to text him. He looked so hot and I want to see if I can weasel my way back into his good graces. I’m starting to think maybe he was actually seeing someone back then, that he wasn’t lying to me after all. He looked thrilled to see me—a quality I don’t usually associate with this person who keeps his emotions pretty bottled. I text him, “It was good to see your face,” which I think is flirty and neutral all at the same time. He doesn’t write back that night, and I don’t care as much as I might have last time around.

The next day, I’m still hanging with Best Guy Friend (we have sexless adult sleepovers; our friends always want to know if we bang—we don't, he’s like my brother), when I hear back from Bartender. He says, “Good to see you too. You look like you’re doing well.” Polite and decidedly non-flirty. But he did add a second sentence when one would suffice. My friend tells me, if I want to fuck him, I should put sex on the table. He tells me to write the following, and so of course I do: “Yep. Not getting laid enough but besides that doing good.” I squeal as I press Send. I don’t expect to hear anything back. Within minutes, I do. “Lol. Maybe we can figure something out on that end.” I’m so excited I could do cartwheels. I scream and throw my arms around Best Guy Friend. He smiles at me, “You’re welcome.”

I don’t hear from Bartender the whole week. Which is fine. I’m busy too, and I have my period, and I figure I’m the one that needs to have sex so I’m going to have to be the one to orchestrate it—it’s always been this way with us anyway, I’ve always wanted it more. Friday night, it’s Halloween and I decide instead of getting dressed up as a slutty version of something, going out and getting trashed, that I’ll stay in with Best Guy Friend and watch scary movies, drink beer, and eat pizza & candy. We watch the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (terrible), the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake (better), and The Conjuring (fucking terrifying). We order two large pizzas from Papa John’s, eat peanut M&Ms, Fun Size Mounds and Snickers, and drink Hefeweizen. It’s a great night. The Conjuring gives me nightmares, but it’s worth it. We sleep in the same bed (we always do), and no we don’t have sex, or even spoon (as my roommate specifically wants to know when I return home).

The next day, I’m horny as fuck (unrelated to my adult sleepover), and decide I need to have sex tonight. I don’t think Bartender is working, so I figure tonight is the night to attempt this fuck buddy orchestration. Best Guy Friend encourages me to wait until three to set it up. We take the dog on a long walk around the neighborhood in the deliciously crisp Fall-ish weather. We have a long debate/argument involving Feminism and Law of Attraction and the viral video of the woman walking for ten hours through New York City and getting catcalled 100 times. We get in the hot tub and talk about 2014 and how it has planted a lot of seeds we’re looking forward to harvesting in 2015. By two, I can’t wait any longer. Based on my mood, which is more desperate/needy than flirty/fuck me, Best Guy Friend helps me formulate the following text: “You still down to help me out with that little problem I’m having?” I press Send and wait. Best Guy Friend and I end our extended date and I head home. I feel very unmotivated and decide to take the day off, not do any work and just chillax with myself. It’s easier said than done in the state I’m in. I keep checking my phone every five minutes, wanting desperately to hear back from him. I stalk him on Facebook and see that he’s “Active." Meaning he got my text and ignored it. I knew that anyway, but now it’s been confirmed. At five, as the sun is already beginning to set, I decide to take a walk around the reservoir by my house. I need some fresh air. I text Best Guy Friend, “Still haven’t heard from the little fucker,” with an angry emoticon.

The walk cheers me up and I stop at my favorite coffee shop for a cappuccino. I’m enjoying the Fall-ish weather and my new sweater from Grandma. Almost finished with my walk, I decide to go see Birdman tonight and, on a whim, I text the Hot Guy I fucked at my party, inviting him along. Regardless of the fact that I haven’t seen him since, he’s made zero effort to reach out, and even ignored my last text, I still think there’s a chance he’ll respond. He’s a movie buff after all and this might be exactly what he wants to do on a Saturday evening. Even if he’s not interested in me romantically, I feel we could be friends. I don't hear from him either. I decide to text someone I know will respond, because my ego needs a little stroking. I text the Music Manager from my party—the one I made out with and then ditched for Hot Guy. I ask if he wants to go see the movie with me. Nothing. I take a bath and listen to Dido and feel sorry for myself. I’m fully prepared to go see Birdman by myself. Fuck it. I’m a grown ass woman. But my roommate says she’ll come with me, so we have a lady date instead. Which is lovely and overdue, and fuck these men anyway.

Later that night, I hear back from Music Manager who says he’s been away from his phone, but with more notice he totally would have come with me. He says we should hang soon. Still haven’t heard from Bartender or Hot Guy. Typical. The two guys I want most are MIA. I had told Best Guy Friend that if I didn’t hear from Bartender, I would hit up the little Jewish Man I met on OKCupid. At this point, I’m too disheartened to pursue even the easy lay.

On Sunday, I wake up still feeling shitty about the whole situation. I take my phone off Airplane mode and really hope I’ve heard from either one of these boys. Nope. I understand with Hot Guy, he’s doing the Fade Away. He never gave me any indication he was interested at all, and the Fade Away is a move I’m familiar with. But that’s no excuse for Bartender. He was the one who fucking planted the hope of a booty call in my head in the first place. I don’t understand. Even if he's just busy, at least fucking text me back goddammit. I decide to leave my phone on Airplane mode for the whole day so I won’t be tempted to check it every five seconds, and whereas leaving it off should be a relief, it proves tortuous. I go to a yoga class, make myself a healthy lunch, eat some Fun Size candy leftover from Halloween, watch the first episode of the depressing new British TV show Happy Valley, and fall asleep for a couple hours in the middle of the day. At four PM, I can’t take it any longer, and the clock has fallen back so the sun will set in an hour. I decide to walk around the reservoir, again, and I call Best Guy Friend on my way.

I complain about the rejection, about my bruised ego. He tells me it’s probably not as simple as Bartender not liking me anymore. “Life is never simple,” he says. He tells me I have no idea what he’s going through, so I need to stop speculating about it. “He probably got your text and he was in the middle of something, and he didn’t know how to respond, and then he put it down and forgot about it.” This I don’t understand—guys’ ability to just forget about girls like this. As my roommate says, “They’re goldfish. They swim around their little bowl and they’re like ‘ooh a castle,’ and they just keep swimming and when they come around again: ‘ooh a castle.’” I wish I could be a fucking goldfish. It’s a lot of work to be a woman.

All of the young single women I know do this. And it’s not that we have nothing else going on in our lives—we have jobs and career ambitions, and hobbies, and friends, and a lot of shit to do. But we still find the time and energy to obsess over some fucking guy who probably isn’t even worth our time. In fact, I find that my smartest, most ambitious girlfriends are even more likely to do this. Maybe it’s that we know what we want and we go for it, whether it be sex or career. And we don’t give up until we get it. And it’s just frustrating when what you want is another person because you can’t control how they respond to your wanting, and the resistance they put up makes you work even harder to get it. And the energy of that probably pushes them away even more. 

Despite this incredible amount of distraction and energy spent, we still manage to get our shit done, and we’re a pretty accomplished bunch. It makes me crazy to think how successful we could be if we didn’t get so distracted by dudes. For sure we’d be running the world. Women are masters of multi-tasking after all. Imagine if men focused this much on women, they’d never get anything done.

Best Guy Friend encourages me to lift some weights or something, to get some testosterone in my system. I joke that I should just start taking hormone injections. But I actually think this would be a great product for women—a hormone to shut down this part of our brains that emotionally attaches to the penis we fuck. Something that would allow us to treat sex more like men. We have it, it’s fun, but it’s not so serious and if we don’t get it, there are a hundred other things we could do that would interest us as much if not more. “Sex is great and all, but if we don’t get it, we’ll just go and play video games and that’s just as fun,” says Best Guy Friend. Really? Fucking video games?

My best friend Sadie was going through a similar torment a couple weeks ago where she was obsessing over this guy and this sequence of Lost in Translation texts sent between them. I encouraged her to "just say what you want" and "stop playing games." Not sure why I'm unequivocally incapable of taking my own medicine on this point. I guess I'll just blame biology.

On Monday, I decide I can't not say anything. So I text Bartender, "You failed at being my booty call this weekend." With a winky face emoticon so he knows this is to be read with a light tone and not interpreted as "I spent all weekend obsessing about you." Because that would be disturbing. He writes back right away: "Haha. I was just thinking about that while I was walking up my stairs. This weekend was crazy. What's your schedule like this week?" If only he had just said that on Saturday, I wouldn't have spent Sunday being a crazy person. If only he knew how crazy of a person I actually am. If only I would learn a lesson from this. If only.

Sticky, Sweaty, Salty, Sour: Sex and Marriage on Caye Caulker

I count the turns as I ride into town – 2^nd left, 3^rd right – watching for the telltale signs that guide my way.  Lazy Iguana B&B, Cocoplum… there are no street signs and the locals won’t give me a map.  They say I couldn’t possibly get lost on an island as small as Caye Caulker.  Try me. 

“Hey baby, where you going?” The friendly and leering Belizean boys reach out their arms to catch me as I pass.  I avoid them and the potholes in the white sand road as I try to keep my skirt from flying up.  I just showered and I’m already sticky from sweat, my skin burning after 6 hours spent in the relentless sun.  I feel good, clean and alive, and ready for anything.

My ex-boyfriend Henry told me before I left on my solo adventure to Central America that I was going to “fall in love with some Belizean guy.”  This is part of our relationship now – we tell each other the stories of our sexcapades and laugh at each other’s sluttiness.  I would classify him as a fellow Slutty Feminist.  We broke up when things were still good between us, just because we wanted to explore ourselves and other people.  We still have sex and spend whole days together.  No one understands that we’re no longer “in a relationship”; we seem more in love than a lot of couples I know.

“I’m gonna get you drunk tonight,” James beams, placing another grapefruit rum cocktail down in front of me.  He’s a local.  This is his place, his nickname’s on the wall.

Anita, his Norwegian wife, smiles coolly and looks away.  James’s expression hardens as he turns to her.

“You want something?”

Anita points to my drink. “Yeah, I’ll take one of those.”  Instantly, the energy shifts.

“What the fuck?”  James is pissed.

I turn my attention to the local woman working the grill.  The smell of fresh charred lobster pours over me in a smoky wave.

“Well, you didn’t ask me before so…” Anita laughs it off, biting her lip.  I shouldn’t be here, I think.  The third wheel to their marital spat.

I had a relationship like this once.  The hateful little jabs, the undercurrent of sarcasm and frustration, the inability to keep a lid on it even in public.  I ended up cheating on that boyfriend.  And then I broke up with him, albeit months and possibly years after I should have.  And I had thought about marrying him.  I thought we were soul mates and would have a baby and be together forever, even though a lot of the time I wasn’t happy. 

                                                   

It seems like all the local guys on Caye Caulker cheat on their wives.  At least that’s what one of them told me.  By day, they are tour guides taking American and European tourists out on fishing/snorkeling/diving trips; by night, they fuck white women.  And their local wives stay South of the island in the ramshackle huts where tourists don’t go, and take care of their children.  It seems like a pretty shitty arrangement to me and it makes me ask myself once again the question I’m constantly asking myself: why are these people married?  Because I understand very well the human impulse to fuck different people, but I don’t understand at all the impulse to commit to fucking the same person for the rest of your life.  I don’t actually believe this is a human impulse; I think it’s an antiquated tradition that has no place in the ever-changing world of today.

Take Anita for example.  Anita is this cool, independent woman who used to work some serious, business-y job in Norway before one day finding herself in Caye Caulker where she fell in love with local man James and decided to completely change her life.  Now she spends her days cleaning the rooms they rent to tourists, hanging out with their two dogs, and turning the other cheek when her husband hits on 20-something white women.  But Anita is clearly not meant for this lifestyle.  She’s tall and serious and strong and smart.  She’s intellectual, and now that the honeymoon’s over, I can see that she’s fucking bored.  I don’t blame her.  In fact, I feel a certain kindred connection with Anita – a mutual strong woman/ tall-blondeness that makes us inherently understand one another, and we talk freely.  Except about the one thing I’m really curious about: her marriage.  This is the subject we don’t broach.  Because she and James are not happy together and James obviously wants to fuck me.

Anita and James close down the restaurant and we head to the karaoke bar, the only joint still serving booze after midnight.  At the bar I stand uncomfortably sandwiched between the unhappy couple.  James keeps buying me drinks and I wonder what his plan is – take me back to their place and tell Anita to wait outside while we have sex?  I’m acutely aware of the awkward symmetry in the situation.  I’m the 20 years younger version of his 40-something wife, and James, in the primal tradition of men everywhere, wants to feel young again by fucking me.  I also don’t know how to diffuse the energy because I’m really bad at not flirting.

This is why I’m down on marriage.  Because I constantly find myself in the position of the Other Woman.  And it’s true, I don’t always diffuse the tension and, to be honest, I have no qualms about sleeping with a married/unavailable man because I don’t think it’s my responsibility to save his relationship and, if he wants to cheat, he’s going to cheat whether he does it with me or not.  Also, it shouldn’t be discounted that sexually I have very little self control – when I want it, I want it, and no one can stand in my way. 

But it just so happens that I don’t want James, and I really like Anita, so I choose to walk away.  Literally.  We are standing there in the bar and, without saying a word, I walk over to this cute local guy wearing a cap that says LA.  He’s been eyeing me all night.  This is the same guy that later tells me about how all the local men like to fuck white women.  I can feel James watching me as we talk, his disappointment is palpable.  Man, your wife is standing right there – why don’t you try to fuck her for a change?  It’s so totally depressing I can hardly stand it.

LA Cap Guy speaks Creole, Garifuna, and broken English.  I ask him to say something in Creole, a language that sounds a lot like English but is virtually impossible for me to understand.  He says he will if we can walk out to the end of the pier.  I know this is a ploy but at this point I’m into it, and I’d like to escape James’ penetrating gaze.  The pier is overpopulated with couples looking for privacy so we head back and walk along the dark shore.  I suggest a night swim.  He says it’s going to be cold but, thinking he might get laid, starts to take off his shoes.  I pull my dress over my head and wade in.  He’s right, it is cold, and shallow and mucky.  We sit in the muck and he pulls me into his lap – I can feel his huge erection poking into my back.  He kisses my neck and paws at my breasts and asks if I’m “enjoying” myself.  I know this is his hospitality training and I wonder if he asks the same during sex.  I decide I don’t want to find out.  I pull away and head for shore. 

“I’m cold.”  I actually am.  My teeth are chattering, I’m ready to go home.

After he’s done meticulously getting dressed, he pulls me in close and asks if he’s the only local boy I’ve ever “dated.”  I explain that we’re not dating, that I’m single.

“Why are you single?”

“Uh, because I want to be.”

He can’t believe this.  Actually, no one here can believe that I’m single by choice. 

His dream is to marry a white woman and move to LA.  I hope this isn’t a hint-hint.  He admits he’s got a bet on me with one of the other locals.  $30 Belize ($15 US) he’ll fuck me.  I tell him he shouldn’t have told me that, but I also find it hilarious that he did.

“I bet your lips are sweet.”

“They’re not,” I tell him.

He laughs and asks for a kiss.  I let him because his boxers are wet underneath his jeans and that can’t be comfortable.  His tongue tastes like sand paper and cigarettes.  His lips are squishy and sucking on mine.

I retrieve my bike and ride beside him as he walks back to the hotel room he keeps next to the dive shop where he works.  He talks about how he’s a dive master and a “boss” because they gave him his own hotel room.  He’s proud, he loves his life, he’s not married and he gets to fuck white women.  Don’t move to LA, I pray for him.  He wants another kiss.

“I really love you,” he says.

I hope this is a language barrier thing.

“Goodnight!” I shout, and scoot off.

The next morning, I run into James in the street.  For some reason, I find myself expecting to be scolded by him.  For running off with another guy.  Why I feel I owe him anything is totally beyond me.  But he seems cool and gives me a high-five.

He had said he’d come by the cabana to take me out on his boat this morning, but he never showed.  I ask him why. 

“Oh, I didn’t know if you’d still want to.”  I feel like we’re in high school.

I was actually totally relieved when he didn’t show up this morning.  I realize now if I find myself alone on a boat with him, it’s anyone’s guess what he’ll do, and I don’t want to make the situation any more awkward and depressing by rejecting him.

But as I watch him now coolly surveying the spill of tourists walking along the road, I realize that I’m just another blonde woman from the States to him, and there will be another boatload of us coming in by noon.  I feel better, because I didn’t really hurt his feelings.  He won’t miss me when I’m gone.  I’ll just be another white woman he didn’t get to fuck.