venus without furs

I turned your head towards me. You were looking away, and I was so close to you, staring into your eyes. I used just my fingertips to coerce your chin back. I kissed you very lightly, just nipping at your lips, sucking them gently, making it clear I was not about to let you kiss me at your own discretion. You turned your chin away gently, I brought it back and continued. Your cock twitching and growing against my leg with each suck and nip of your lips. You turned your head away again. I bring you back, lock your blue eyes to mine. I have no idea how else to break your anxious preoccupation. You have asked me for sex; why not let yourself overcome your mind, your thoughts, and come to the moment, and why not let me guide you, getting turned on in the process? I finally feel in sync with you, after so many times falling out of sync, your rejections that you don't call rejections, the way you seem to want me and then change your mind. The loss of your lust.

Finally you break contact with my eyes and turn away. "It's too intense," you say numbly. Angry? Depressed? Why can't I seduce you anymore? Could I ever, to the extent I wanted to?

I pull your chin back again, testing-- can I be the leader here, is this something to be overcome? But you turn your head back away, this time with decisive force. You're done.

Don't ask me to love you anymore. A lukewarm love that satisfies you and leaves me empty. I don't want to hope to make love to you again. I don't want to look forward to it. I don't want to ever believe it will happen again. Because now, even when we begin with your consent, you become unresponsive, weird. And then we stop. And you say nothing is wrong. You're just preoccupied. You're just not a highly sexual person. Highly sexual meaning having sex more than thrice a month. I start to distrust myself. I send you away because I am too aroused, I am afraid I'll touch you even though I know you're disinterested. You begin to tell me I pressure you. My heart breaks with remorse at those words. I do not wish to hurt you. I cannot be your platonic boyfriend.

I need to be needed. I need to serve through dominance. I need, I need.

We will be separated by December. Then the winter will come: cold winter in our little attic. And we will be friends, but there will be pain. It will not be new pain, created by separation; it will be the reminder of the inability of love to erase what we already were.

zines chapbooks & poetry @ the alchemist's closet: free shipping!

Happy Valentine's Day from The Alchemist's Closet! I am offering free domestic shipping from today until the end of March. I'd love to have you stop by and see what I have to offer.

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Call for submissions! APMT 1.2: this is what we call family

Call for Submissions!

Alchemical Postmodern Theorist: explore no-identity politics, radical culture & queer liberation



Issue two of my zine, APMT, is about family. APMT 1.2: "this is what we call family" explores family in all of its brilliant permutations. Is family defined by one man, and one women, and kids? By two married people of any gender? I am seeking to move beyond the gay marriage debate, and into the territory of chosen, post-nuclear, extended and queer families that break boundaries and practice radical new forms of support and encouragement. At the root of the revolution are groups of people who depend on each other, who are imagining and re-imagining 'family' all the time. I would love to have you be a part of this zine. Share your experiences with family: contribute a story, photograph, artwork, poem or article.

Stories, artwork and photography related to more traditional families (about having a child, marrying, or about parents, siblings, and grandparents) are more than acceptable, but these stories will be only part of the zine. Whatever your usual or unusual family structure, I would like to hear about it.

Deadline for submission is December 30, 2009. I'll accept pieces up until Jan 7 if you let me know beforehand.

Transmale/Biomale parenting in mainstream news

Andey (left) and Leaf Nunes with their son Antonio. "We're a gay male couple that got to have a child the old-fashioned way," said Andey, a transgender man. Leaf is biologically male, while Andey was born female.
(ABC News)

bathroom disclosures

My horoscope for today reads something like: Everyone can see how you're feeling today. The best idea is just to express yourself as you go through your day.

Funny thing about Wal-mart is that I'd never worked with so many people before, who were not much like me superficially but that tried to treat each other like family. In my two months at Shaw's, I never made even an acquiantence, and no one made an effort, either. At Wal-mart, people try to connect. They sometimes even act more comfortable with me than I am with myself. The most common example of this is telling me to smile. Somehow, if I am feeling shitty, no matter how much I try to keep to myself, some random employee will tell me to smile.

I hate being told to smile, especially when I'm feeling crappy.

Well, today, I had been feeling really low. Angry and low-energy and antisocial and depressed, for no particular reason. I know that I feel that way not because of anything happening in the present, but just because I've been through hell and feeling low is my body's way of slowly helping me heal. I expect to be depressed. I don't need to be forcibly cheered up, although I understand that that makes sense to some people.

So anyway. That first part of my horoscope was so true today, because my heart truly was on my sleeve and this woman, this other employee, could instantly see that I was depressed and told me to smile and be bubbly and that would make me happier. Hearing this I felt about ten times worse. The personell manager walked by and called me Ma'am, even though I've told her to please not do it. At this point I felt like I was about to walk off the job or hit my head on the wall.

I wandered for a few more minutes, and then went back to work. I felt my spirits lift a little, because it can be genuinely nice to interact with customers and help them, and this does cheer me up a bit sometimes. Then I had to go to the bathroom.

I usually hold it for as long as I can before I make my decision whether to go and which bathroom to use. This time I opted for the public women's room. I saw an elderly woman walk in, and then waited about ten seconds, the time I figured it would take for her to enter the stall and close the door. I try to get in and out of there without anyone seeing me. Management forbids me to use the men's room.

I timed wrong. I walked around the corner just as she was closing the door to the stall, and thus was facing me. Her mouth fell open and she stared. I usually just ignore things like this, and go about my business in a pissed off and put upon way. But for some reason, perhaps because she was staring and there was no one else there, I said "Hello."

She startled at my voice and started to explain that she had thought I was a boy because my hair was short, but then hesitated and became unsure of whether her second assumption was true, either. I started to talk to her.

"I have a lot of trouble with restrooms. It's because I'm so androgynous. Whether I go in the men's room or the women's room, I have problems. People stop, and stare and gasp," I told her. "If I use the women's room, especially, people are shocked and offended. I have had people call security on me."

She looked completely shocked. "But why?" she said. "Are you--are you a male--? Or?"

"No," I said. "I am, physically, female."

"I have no experience with this," she said. "I mean, I have heard about it on TV."

"I work here," I said, fingering my badge. "The management will not let me use the men's room in the staff office."

Again, she looked shocked. After a long pause, she turned to go into the stall. "Well," she said, "You just do your best."

Her words were still echoing in my head as I used the men's room later that day, and every day after that.

"Hey, I'm here."

I am on a beach, having a therapy session. Myself, my mom, my grandmother and my great aunt are there. My great aunt seems to be expressing fears for me; we are talking about my transgenderedness. Then, it becomes apparent that she is not talking about that at all. Instead, she is talking about herself: her own feelings of suicidality associated with my being transgender. Sometimes, she tells the therapist, she just wants to suffocate herself. The therapist is understanding and moves to come over to her. I debate internally over whether to go over to her as well, and I plan to have a sassy attitude and assert myself best I can. I distinctly imagine the way my foot tracks over to her, defiant, will look in the sand.

Suddenly I tune in again to what she's saying. She's turning to look at me, and says suddenly and in a voice dripping with anger, "And sometimes I want to take a chainsaw to her [sic] while she is sleeping." She seems utterly serious. She repeats her threat once or twice for good measure. And I decide to escape.

I run from the beach into a warehouse. It is large and dim, and filled with huge rolled up rugs and long, low tables. I run though the warehouse, trying to think of how to get away in the smartest way. I suspect that she can run faster than I. I escape the first room, but for some reason I decide to go back and create traps that will cause her to fall while she chases me. I place a slippery, loosely rolled under-rug sheet on the floor and hide under a table to watch for her. She doesn't slip much, but she does wheel around and start searching the room I'm in. I am hiding under one of the low tables, and I keep moving to keep my body in the shadows as she runs around the room. She reminds me of Wanda's Seeker in Stephanie Meyers' book The Host.

After a little bit, I see that I can't hide from her much more. It's too stressful, anyway, the fear that she will catch me and my desire to protect my dream body from the fear induced by her hurting or killing me. It seems like she sees me anyway now, but I'm not sure. I lock eyes with her and stand up. "Hey, I'm here." I say, and as she starts to come for me I wake myself up.

Seduction, Dominance & Energy

I stumbled across a woman's blog today who is socially and intimately involved in a group which I had not heard of prior, called the Seduction Community. This network of "pickup artists" (men, generally), both online and in bars or "lairs," practices a set techniques aimed at helping them pick up women-- pre-scripted lines, dominance behavior, "female psychology."

It is not hard to see the positive and negative sides of the idea-- on the one hand, it corrects some erroneous notions that some men hold about women. The Seduction Community teaches men not to buy women things to try and convince them to like them. Good idea. On the other hand, it seems to espouse some appalling notions of the highest good in life as being the biggest player, the one who can sleep with the most willing females.

The whole issue, though, brings to mind something for me that has been tangentially on my mind for some time. As a girl child, I was socialized by my mother with a set of behaviors that serve me incredibly badly, and especially when it comes to dating and sex.

Like most girl children, I was taught to be polite. Polite at all costs. Polite and nice and girly and kind even when I felt uncomfortable, even when I didn't like somebody. Polite when an adult gave me a creepy feeling. I was chastised for rudeness, told repeatedly that I was rude if I didn't thank people, say you're welcome each time, accept invitations. This is the way, of course, that most of us are socialized; however, there are stark differences between the socialization of boy and girl children.

In a relationship, I was taught to be needy. of course, this was not said, this was not taught as such. But I was taught a particular type of insecurity about myself. When I got into a relationship with E., I learned about this trait of mine much more thoroughly. Five months into our "relationship," I realized my self esteem had fallen greatly. I was dating someone who slept with everyone in town, it seemed, except for me. I was tagging along in our relationship because I wanted to be wanted. And I was not. E., like some other people, based his need for someone inversely upon how much they need him. The more I needed him, the less he needed me. The less I needed him, the more he wanted me. I was deeply aware of this push and pull, yet he seemed utterly oblivious to it. Our continuum of need flipflopped by the day, or the hour. Neither of us were aware enough to stop it. Finally, we agreed to separate.

This neediness, it seems, is part of what the Seduction Community wants to help cultivate in women. What I am curious about is---is there a middle ground between needing and being needed, where a relationship is fun, a playful tug of war? Would that be an enjoyable game? That is to say, must we accept the paradigm of need (of dealer and addict, as Ruiz analogizes it) or can we transcend it entirely?

I guess I have been somewhat in favor of transcending it. It seems tawdry, a little, and unneeded. For awile, I have sought a "new paradigm of relationship," an elusive third option. Is this third option, of mutual benefit, a transcendence of the mental realities of needed and needer? Or is it a fine fluctuation between the two? And, if two people genuinely LIKE each other, is all of this rendered moot?

Seduction Community may help to empower men, and perhaps even help them to relate to women better, less desperately, with more balance. Yet, in its many practices, it seems to overlook that simple idea of mutual liking. Game playing CAN keep a partner off balance and interested for a long time. E. kept me off balance and made me THINK I liked him for a long time. But I eventually realized I did not. I was attracted to my own need.

With M., I put a fair amount of effort into our friendship at first, and did expend effort in making sure that I was coming on well, not overly needy, and guiding the depth and intensity of our conversations in a somewhat calculated way, yet it was not something aimed at seducing him. There is no reason for me to pursue sex or intimacy in this way.

Rather, I wanted to see if I could get a better picture of myself, and see what I was habituated into doing in a relationship. I learned a lot by breaking my habits. Something like the SC--or many other programs aimed at establishing social dominance--can be so valuable in helping you to see where your learned submission lies. Yet their real value is there--in the seeing--and not in your ability to adopt the "new program", the new habit, and become successful. That success is just as much a false image as the failure you were experiencing before.

With M, I have ceased my energy expenditure in guiding the relationship. I feel fairly lazy. I am not sure If I'm presently feeling a great attraction to him. If getting close to him results in finding that I genuinely like him, I believe it is worth it to expend a little extra energy.