This weekend, while humoring my partner and seeing, “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” I was reminded of a “trend (?)” which incenses me. And that is, “The Bi-Phase”. For those of you who haven’t seen (or suffered) through the movie, the main female character tries to escape her past “ex’s”, which her none too bright, sorta boyfriend keeps referring to as her ex-boyfriends. Although she constantly corrects him by calling them her seven evil ex’s (we never learn why they are evil, despite how long the movie drags on, but that is besides the point), he never notices the corrections she makes. Nor does he make any connection to the female who accosts him, ninja style, in an alleyway.
Now, before you go all nerdy video-gangbusters on me here, I understand Scott Pilgrim was hardly a glowing example of anything other than “the nerdy guy beats every guy who ever beat up on him and still gets two hot chicks in the end” kind of movie, and that isn’t where my beef is (well, not in this blog anyway). What’s got ants in my pants, bees in my bonnet and whatever other trite expressions you can think of for being pissed off, is the whole concept of a “Bi-Phase.”
In this particular movie, you would have to be beyond a nerd or live in a darker cave than I do, to not realize that Ramona (female character with 7 evil ex’s) has had a relationship with a woman. That’s certainly cool with me and I speculate that it is probably cool with the nerdy 95% male dominate population in the movie theatre. What’s not cool with me; you know, me who identifies as bisexual, is that when it comes time for Ramona to ‘fess up about her relationship with her evil fem ex, she merely shrugs it off as, “I thought I was Bi. It was just a phase.” And, to kill the ending of the movie, much like “Chasing Amy,” Ramona decides that she’d rather be with a man. How convenient.
How sad.
How fucking much it pisses me off that in the few movies I’ve seen, bisexuality is still being presented as a phase, a joke, a temporary, desperate period of exploration until a man is found.
How oddly, eerily biblical-as if finding a man is the true answer to what every woman is really looking for, and yet, if she can’t find one, she might be able to get away with being edgy enough to be “bi,” but only if it is a passing phase. And of course, that discounts all the bisexual men in the world!
Clearly for me, this is a deeply personal issue. For most of my life I was torn, often to the brink of suicidal ideation, over my sexuality. My very first crush, as I’ve already blogged about, was on a boy my age that lived across the street. However, in hindsight as an adult, I often wonder if he would have been my first crush if I hadn’t had heterosexuality rammed down my throat and bashed into my head at least since the time my first, and only, male cousin was born- a mere six months after I was. We were constantly referred to as “kissing cousins” (whatever that means…By the way, it turns out he’s gay and I’m bi, so that whole forcing heterosexuality thing upon us didn’t turn out so well!) And ever since I can remember I was asked if I had a boyfriend-I mean from the time I was THREE or so on!
Come ON! Talk about inappropriate questions for kids! We don’t even give children a chance to develop their own sexuality in our American society. We form their sexuality for them: based on religion, based on fear, based on tradition and our own expectations of weddings and what have-you and we start bombarding them, at the earliest ages possible, that they are to be heterosexual and that is that. It is almost a carefully re-written version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”, except here children aren’t being taught to hate, they are being taught whom it is permissible to love and when and how.
Once my first crush moved away, my attention turned to a girl who lived on the next block from me. I was smitten with her in a way I’d never felt before, in a way part of me already knew I shouldn’t be, thanks to my Catholic upbringing. Yet on the rare times when we would walk to Sunday School together, the longing inside me to reach out and hold her hand was so intense I was certain it was worth any price that awaited me in hell. In our younger years I could get away with doing so under the guise of skipping to school to make it there faster, but all I really cared about was being closer to her. My crush on her lasted ages, or at least from second or third grade through fifth or sixth grade, when she turned to the ‘80’s Brat Pack and whatever boys Teen magazine told her where hot and I lost her forever. Two decades later though, I can still squirm in my seat as I think about my early childhood orgasms I’d have with her as we became too old for holding hands and skipping to school but not to self-conscious to avoid wrestling each other alone in my basement; our legs brushing, crushing each other’s clitoris’s, our barely developed breasts rubbing against each other’s breasts, hot, sweaty faces gasping for air, lips poised inches apart from lips, in a kiss we never dared.
Showing posts with label sex. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sex. Show all posts
Monday, September 20, 2010
Monday, October 5, 2009
Mr. Can't Get It Up, Part One
(The following is another excerpt from a book I am working on, currently entitled, "Dabbling with Dating Disasters" which I might some day get up the courage to submit for publication. The first excerpt, if you haven't been reading along, is entitled, My First Childhood Love.)
Mr. Can’t Get It Up remains one of my biggest regrets, and not, by the way, because of his unfortunate nickname.
I met Mr. Up when I was working at Kohl’s Department store in a town not too far from where I grew up. I had just moved back, temporarily, into my mom’s house and I was trying to get a job, a real job, doing something using my degree that I spend so much money for, as my mom liked to frequently remind me.
Since I wanted to use my degree and I was tired of waitressing, I naturally decided I would apply for a job at Kohl’s (or just about anywhere that would allow me to keep my clothes on and not have to serve food to people). Although I really couldn’t justify how a job there was using my degree, it was a paycheck while I was waiting to land the job of my dreams helping those less fortunate than me. (Really, I’m not that altruistic, but I really did want to find a job where I needed to have a bachelor’s degree, since it was long past time to start paying the loans back!) I was hired to convince people to sign up for credit cards and to run credit application checks on those people who were silly enough to actually sign up for them. It wasn’t a bad job. Interminably boring towards the end but I worked with some cool people and our supervisor was laid back.
I don’t recall meeting Mr. Can’t Get it Up at the new employee orientation meeting, where we were herded like sheep into a tiny room to learn about the benefits we would never be getting and watching movies about the proper way to lift boxes we would never move. If I had seen him there, that probably would have made the event far more memorable.
Mr. Up was unlike any guy I had ever been attracted to in so many ways. First of all, he was much shorter than me and while I’ve never been a stickler for a guy’s height, I still cringe when I think about my sisters dancing around with the family dog on it's hind legs, mocking the fact that my prom date was almost a foot shorter than me…before I put on shoes! In addition to being shorter than me, Mr. Up had (probably still has) the brightest red hair I’ve ever seen on someone and an explosion of freckles everywhere, or at least everywhere that I could see, and believe me, I wanted to see much, much more! In short, he looked like a little leprechaun and reminded me, with great longing, of the time I spent living in Ireland, and by default I guess, of a man I loved very deeply when I lived on the Emerald Isle and hadn’t heard from in ages. He (Mr. Up) even had an authentic Irish name to boot! I was smitten. Not instantly, of course, because I had been working really hard to ensure that kind of crap never happened again, but I was smitten nevertheless.
Mr. Up and I did not spend a lot of time working together at first. It was the store’s policy (or someone’s policy) that there had to be two greeters at each entrance trying to get people to apply for a credit card while the rest of the group stayed in the back and processed the applications. In the beginning, we were too busy smiling, pivoting, soliciting and processing credit card offers to have much of a chance to talk to one another. Sometimes though, especially as the weeks wore on and it became obvious who was better at what job, Mr. Up and I would get to sit next to each other and flirt shamelessly as we worked diligently to approve all the credit applications. It was somewhere amidst the piles of paperwork that I became aware of my attraction to him.
I don’t know what the clues were, maybe it was my embarrassing inability to put together coherent sentences when talking to him. Maybe it was my aching clitoris or the panties which constantly felt like they needed to be changed when he was around. Maybe it was the fantasies I had about being back in Ireland that made me attracted to him. I don’t know and I don’t really care. I just knew that I wanted to fuck him.
That was it really.
In the time we spent getting to know each other, both at work and hanging out with co-workers outside of work, I had gleaned enough information about him to know that dating him was a terrible idea. It would have been catapulting myself down the same dangerous road of all those other disastrous relationships…the ones that I tried to heal, to patch back up, to love ‘em ‘til they’re perfect, all the while forgetting about my own needs. Although I was lusting heartily for him (a lust which was made far stronger by the knowledge that I should not, could not, date him) I was also terrified that I would not be able to simply fuck him and walk away, even though I had more or less done this routine before. Mr. Up, I still believe, has a really big heart and he seemed like he was looking for more of a relationship than I was.
Nevertheless, the day came when I finally told him how I felt about him and it went something like this:
Me: “I think you’re kinda hot.”
Him: “Uh, thanks.”
Me: “I’d like to have sex with you.”
Him: “Uh, what?”
Me: “I would like to have sex with you and that’s it. I like you but I don’t want a relationship. I just want to fuck you and see what it is like.”
Him: (Long, very long period of silence. I begin to regret what I have just said) “Uh, isn’t that what the guy is supposed to say?”
Me: (Very long period of silence. Wondering why I thought I should share this with him.) “Well, that’s how I feel.”
Him: “Huh.”
End of conversation.
That may or may not be verbatim, but it sure is how the conversation felt! I was sitting there, all lusty in my loins and telling him that I wanted to have sex with him, which, by this point, I thought was obvious. No matter what I did though, I was feeling like I was about to get shot down. It was humiliating!
Turns out it really bothered him that all I wanted was sex, not a meaningful relationship.
Christ!
I thought I was supposed to be the one who, stereotypically, gets upset that someone just wants to fuck me. And here he is all questioning himself and me and my motives! It would have been a better idea to go home and masturbate for all the work this was becoming!
Mr. Can’t Get It Up remains one of my biggest regrets, and not, by the way, because of his unfortunate nickname.
I met Mr. Up when I was working at Kohl’s Department store in a town not too far from where I grew up. I had just moved back, temporarily, into my mom’s house and I was trying to get a job, a real job, doing something using my degree that I spend so much money for, as my mom liked to frequently remind me.
Since I wanted to use my degree and I was tired of waitressing, I naturally decided I would apply for a job at Kohl’s (or just about anywhere that would allow me to keep my clothes on and not have to serve food to people). Although I really couldn’t justify how a job there was using my degree, it was a paycheck while I was waiting to land the job of my dreams helping those less fortunate than me. (Really, I’m not that altruistic, but I really did want to find a job where I needed to have a bachelor’s degree, since it was long past time to start paying the loans back!) I was hired to convince people to sign up for credit cards and to run credit application checks on those people who were silly enough to actually sign up for them. It wasn’t a bad job. Interminably boring towards the end but I worked with some cool people and our supervisor was laid back.
I don’t recall meeting Mr. Can’t Get it Up at the new employee orientation meeting, where we were herded like sheep into a tiny room to learn about the benefits we would never be getting and watching movies about the proper way to lift boxes we would never move. If I had seen him there, that probably would have made the event far more memorable.
Mr. Up was unlike any guy I had ever been attracted to in so many ways. First of all, he was much shorter than me and while I’ve never been a stickler for a guy’s height, I still cringe when I think about my sisters dancing around with the family dog on it's hind legs, mocking the fact that my prom date was almost a foot shorter than me…before I put on shoes! In addition to being shorter than me, Mr. Up had (probably still has) the brightest red hair I’ve ever seen on someone and an explosion of freckles everywhere, or at least everywhere that I could see, and believe me, I wanted to see much, much more! In short, he looked like a little leprechaun and reminded me, with great longing, of the time I spent living in Ireland, and by default I guess, of a man I loved very deeply when I lived on the Emerald Isle and hadn’t heard from in ages. He (Mr. Up) even had an authentic Irish name to boot! I was smitten. Not instantly, of course, because I had been working really hard to ensure that kind of crap never happened again, but I was smitten nevertheless.
Mr. Up and I did not spend a lot of time working together at first. It was the store’s policy (or someone’s policy) that there had to be two greeters at each entrance trying to get people to apply for a credit card while the rest of the group stayed in the back and processed the applications. In the beginning, we were too busy smiling, pivoting, soliciting and processing credit card offers to have much of a chance to talk to one another. Sometimes though, especially as the weeks wore on and it became obvious who was better at what job, Mr. Up and I would get to sit next to each other and flirt shamelessly as we worked diligently to approve all the credit applications. It was somewhere amidst the piles of paperwork that I became aware of my attraction to him.
I don’t know what the clues were, maybe it was my embarrassing inability to put together coherent sentences when talking to him. Maybe it was my aching clitoris or the panties which constantly felt like they needed to be changed when he was around. Maybe it was the fantasies I had about being back in Ireland that made me attracted to him. I don’t know and I don’t really care. I just knew that I wanted to fuck him.
That was it really.
In the time we spent getting to know each other, both at work and hanging out with co-workers outside of work, I had gleaned enough information about him to know that dating him was a terrible idea. It would have been catapulting myself down the same dangerous road of all those other disastrous relationships…the ones that I tried to heal, to patch back up, to love ‘em ‘til they’re perfect, all the while forgetting about my own needs. Although I was lusting heartily for him (a lust which was made far stronger by the knowledge that I should not, could not, date him) I was also terrified that I would not be able to simply fuck him and walk away, even though I had more or less done this routine before. Mr. Up, I still believe, has a really big heart and he seemed like he was looking for more of a relationship than I was.
Nevertheless, the day came when I finally told him how I felt about him and it went something like this:
Me: “I think you’re kinda hot.”
Him: “Uh, thanks.”
Me: “I’d like to have sex with you.”
Him: “Uh, what?”
Me: “I would like to have sex with you and that’s it. I like you but I don’t want a relationship. I just want to fuck you and see what it is like.”
Him: (Long, very long period of silence. I begin to regret what I have just said) “Uh, isn’t that what the guy is supposed to say?”
Me: (Very long period of silence. Wondering why I thought I should share this with him.) “Well, that’s how I feel.”
Him: “Huh.”
End of conversation.
That may or may not be verbatim, but it sure is how the conversation felt! I was sitting there, all lusty in my loins and telling him that I wanted to have sex with him, which, by this point, I thought was obvious. No matter what I did though, I was feeling like I was about to get shot down. It was humiliating!
Turns out it really bothered him that all I wanted was sex, not a meaningful relationship.
Christ!
I thought I was supposed to be the one who, stereotypically, gets upset that someone just wants to fuck me. And here he is all questioning himself and me and my motives! It would have been a better idea to go home and masturbate for all the work this was becoming!
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