Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Face Soup

The first inquiry is usually: "Who's face was it?"
"I don't... sometimes I don't ask questions."
Followed by: "Well... was it good?"
"It was better than the stomach stew."

Istanbul: I'm in the modest living room of my handsome musician friend who happens to be Kurdish-Turkish-Armenian -- a politically volatile pedigree in Turkey. Turks and Balkaners say Kurds are "voodoo people," liable to be liars, gangsters, and thieves.
"Yes, but being Armenian is even worse..." he chuckles, deciding between his Persian tar and his Greek lute.
I don't have the experience or the blood memory to fully understand these kinds of aggressive racial-cultural accusations or to have their meaning resonate in my bones. I do know, however, that my friend is a sweetie -- he's good natured, good humored, talented, and clean of heart. As he plucked out haunting micro-tuned melodies on his lute in 11, 15 and 7 time signatures ("the ladies must love this guy," I thought), I tried catching on to the beat as best I could.
"Us Westerners are used to 4 or 3," I said.
"Ok, so we play something in 9."
3 times 3 is close enough, I suppose.
[As a passionate side note, I love beats divisible by three -- I've always been naturally drawn to waltzes and vals. There's a symmetry in trinity that I'm attracted to, though I didn't even notice it until I started drumming.]

After we played our fill of exotic odd meter, the subject of food came up.
"So... it is soup, made of face (tongue, cheeks, eyes, you know), and you put much vinegar in, and much boiled garlic, chili flakes... and all this helps the smells."
"What smell?"
"The smells of... face."
SOLD.  Garlic and offal? Perfectly monstrous date-food. I couldn't possibly imagine something further from my hungry imagination, so of course I had to try it.
"This is normally food Turks only drink when very drunk, so if you are to have to soup you must have some of this first," a swig of ouzo.
This guy is into Greece. Charming.

Now I'm not saying it was the face soup, nor am I positing that the rambling Benigni film that followed was the most erotic thing ever, and for the record, though strong, a single swig of ouzo isn't obliterating. Perhaps it was some gypsy voodoo from this guy's bloodline, but some kind of aphrodisiac ("padişa macunu" in Turkish) magic happened that resulted in the two of us making love like it was our call to prayer - roughly four times in 12 hours. And roughly. This guy is so sweet, with an extreme gentleness towards cats and a kind of soft fairy voice that at first had me question his orientation, that the impressive cock that hung below his skinny-man six pack and the perverse energy with which he wielded it took me by surprise, which was more intoxicating than the ouzo. I wasn't expecting anything from our date except for some music, but Sweetie gave it to me like man for hours and hours, somehow tapping into fetishes I wouldn't speak aloud and executing them with an unforgiving panache. All of this perverted exuberance was punctuated by peacefully entwined hugging naps, endless marathons of tender kisses, and quiet exclamations such as "My beauty! My beauty... you make me so happy."

What the fuck? What kind of sorcery is this? Where the fuck did this guy come from? He doesn't wear leather gear or bondage raver pants, or for that matter have anything about his demeanor, outward appearance, or media taste that would suggest that he is anything other than a sensitive, sweet, well-traveled musician. In fact, his Nepalese sweaters would make me think otherwise, but the fact is that not only is he one filthy-sick lover, he is also the king of aftercare! This guy should teach workshops, god damn it, and he doesn't even know what the subject's called.

It occurred to me at some point in the seduction process that perhaps this guy's voodoo power was from sheer slutty experience. The persistent thought arose, that sex as an end-game shouldn't be rewarded -- that's how girls are taught to protect themselves, that their sex should only be doled out to those worthy by seemingly arbitrary factors. But who am I to guess what Sweetie's end game is? Even after his second orgasm, even after MY second orgasm, even into the present, he's made me feel cherished and loved, and I love sharing pleasure with him. Whether his endgame is the love or the sex, and the other is simply a part of his emotional/sexual "slut-style," I'm into it!

What's the punch line here: Don't judge a Kurd by his soup? Offal the name of love? Hey baby, I want your face-soup? Now accepting entry related pun submissions in the comments...

Friday, January 20, 2012

Context for Clitori

We sit on the floor of an apartment in Brooklyn while I drink tea and watch my friend get more and more stoned. She takes out yet another match from the box, handling them preciously.
"These are from Egypt, you know."
She's dressed in the same clothes as last night at the bar. They flatter her curves but somehow seem wrong in the daylight. She is voluptuous, with a spark in her that makes her even more attractive, magnetic even. Every match she lights seems to borrow a bit of her fire. The light in her eyes has been dulled from her habit and from a hard few years in New York.


We met on a plane to Cairo, where we spent the first six months of 2007. That was before the magazine features, before the people were applauded for their nationality, before the political situation was a dinner table conversation topic in America, before the majority of the western world cared. It was during a time of restlessness and buzzing discontent that would eventually lead to revolution. An instance of mob violence had just occurred where men were raping women in the streets, provoked by a celebrity seen belly dancing at a movie premier. The women begged shop owners to let them in and lock the doors behind -- some of them were protected, some of them were left to be ravaged by the dogs of men who couldn't seem to help themselves and assumed blamelessness for their hate crimes.

She holds the smoke in her lungs for a moment, then croaks:
"Don't you think there is anything positive about the gender dynamic there?"
"No, not really."
Her brow furrows as she concentrates on blowing rings.
"But in their homes, the women run the show - they're matriarchs."
"I'd rather have a clitoris."

Female genital mutilation is one of the unspoken horror stories of our time, categorically akin to acid-throwing or foot-binding. It's brutality and prevalence seem impossible to me, impossible that even one person would do that to another, but the fact is that such an atrocity is widely permitted and occurs to millions to this day.
"Over 95% of women in Egypt."
"Yeah, I've heard that stat before," she says.
"Maybe because it's true."
"I dunno man, I had a great time."

I did too. Her and I ran around the feral terrain of Egypt -- from Cairo to Aswan and from Sinai to Siwa -- with the brand of carelessness particular to students abroad, as if it were our playground. For six months we studied music and languages, slept on buses, and haggled for cheap pashminas. We rode camels and horses, went scuba diving in the Red Sea, obsessed over Nubian trance, had boyfriends and girlfriends. We got in fights, went to clubs, smoked hashish, and galavanted in the Sahara until the sun rose from behind the pyramids. We climbed Mt. Sinai, learned folk dances, wrote papers, set things on fire, spent and made money. It was an intense half-year, from which she hasn't quite recovered.

"It was great... but I went off the deep end, man. I stretched myself to every corner of the extreme... and I wish I could have that back. New York's kicking my ass." She coughs smoke, drinks water. "It's too hard to swim here, and too easy to sink."

I can appreciate my home in the west coast with a fuller gratitude in this moment, it's healing and permissive environment that helped me transform my experience of that time, with all it's triumphs and terror, into a context from which I can lead the rest of my life. The contrast between my current experience, vibrantly colored as it is by exercised sexual freedom, and the experience of that 95% of women in Egypt seems too great to exist side by side, but they do.

It's from this awareness that I conduct myself. I drink every droplet of freedom with thirst, and though I'm not particularly religious, I thank God and the universe every day for my clitoris.

For aggregate posts on reproductive and women's rights, check out the posts Slut Shaming and Fascinating Reads: Sexuality in the World.
Read about my misadventures in Istanbul, Turkey in Gypsy Love Curse.
For the latest from Seduce and Confuse, check the homepage and if you like what you read: subscribe and share! 

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

No Excuses

Despite how much I seem to congratulate myself for living openly about my lifestyle and conducting relationships with honesty, I also have something to admit: I fuck up. Sometimes a lot. Having more than one lover isn't all affirmations, orgies, and vegan pot lucks -- sometimes it's hard. When I have four people in my life to whom I'm emotionally accountable, it seems to follow that I quadruple my opportunities for fucking up. It happens.

Of course I don't want to hurt those I hold closest to me. Maybe it's inevitable that by simply affording yourself the closeness, any movement might jab someone in the ribs. Jab, stab, shank. German choreographer Pina Bausch said something along the lines of (paraphrasing): "We destroy each other, and we want to. When we can't destroy each other, we destroy ourselves." Perhaps it's an inescapable aspect of the human condition, whatever that may be. 

When requited love gets beyond a pair or a triangle and grows into a web-like matrix, well, things are of course complicated. Lines get blurred in a vast tundra of grey area, but some things remain simple. Here's one: don't tout your radical honesty and then lie. Of course any reasonable self respecting adult in meaningful relationships wouldn't lie to their partners... but it's tempting to forget that avoiding being forthcoming with the truth and telling a lie look and feel the same - another territory in the United States of Grey Area. It comes down to this: if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck... it's a fucking duck. 

Yeah, I fuck up. I'm pretty upset about it, human as it may be. 

A friend was encouraging me the other day to be a little less hard on myself: "It's not productive to hate yourself." Tell it to Pina. She never said it was productive, just that we do it. But my friend is right, feeding the fire of self loathing will not alleviate whatever understandable loathing is directed at me by my hurt partners. Choosing to destroy myself because I see destroying them as very clearly not an option isn't helpful. 

The only things left for me to do are to live and learn... and try to do better the next time, if I am lucky enough to be afforded it.

For more relationship fail, stew in the muck of Disorder and the Cure or Distance: Emotional Problems of Nomadism
The latest from Seduce and Confuse is luring you with it's bedroom eyes. 

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Secret Slave

The sound of the fierce slap I had planted on his face silenced the pub. It was the kind of triple exclamation mark that makes stomachs sink, like the sound of glass breaking in an expensive restaurant.
Infuriated, I grabbed my things: a purse, a jacket, and a bag of nasty food and booze splattered work clothes. I delivered my next line from between gritted teeth, just before storming out into the cold:
"You're welcome, asshole."

It felt good. 

After a second or two, the stun wore off. He forgot to keep playing it cool and chased after me. "I'm sorry I'm such an jerk... I don't know any other way to be. I'm trying to stop... I'm sorry," pleaded the thickheaded man as he kissed my furrowed brow. I blinked my tearful eyes hard as I loathed myself for my feelings. A criminal record including two restraining orders for violent destruction of property as well as a DUI, the emotional maturity and communication skills of a child with Asperger's without the elevated IQ, dead beat tendencies, a sty of a room in his parents' house as a grown man, and lastly, painfully, an innocent unwitting monogamously programmed girlfriend? How much more evidence did I need that this guy was nothing but trouble and stupid to boot? And yet... maybe it was an energetic thing resulting from a past life of being torrid lovers... or maybe it was his freakishly mammoth dick... but in any case, the only way I could identify my feelings for this stupid piece of shit was, foolishly, love. 

Ever since I started working there, we'd been aware of each other, though we didn't share a word for months. I started out as front of house and came into the kitchen rarely. When I did, I could count on him gazing at me. Gazing turned into staring, then staring turned into meditative intent. Maybe on occasion I stared back.
We broke the ice awkwardly. A comment or two here and there, and innocuous question. I left for a month to travel - It was during this time he collected a girlfriend.

I came back and was promoted, finding myself flitting between the front and back of house - the difference being that the front of house required a certain finesse of politesse, and the kitchen required a sharp tongue.  In no time, I found myself barking acerbic teasings in a battle of wits. 
All the other guys saw something was there between us, and teased endlessly. Banter was silly, something like:
     me: "I just wanna do good"
     him: "uh, don't you mean do well? I thought you went to an ivy league school"
     me: "I thought you went to beer camp instead of school." 
OR
     me: "He showed me a picture of his girlfriend last night that he really shouldn't show to other people..."
     <moment of uncomfortable silence in the kitchen>
     me: "It was of her face."
     <moment of schadenfreude jubilation in the kitchen>
OR 
     chef: "Hear that, man? She broke up with her boyfriend!"
     him: "You mean there's a slot in her stable? No thank you..."
     me: "That metaphor's relevant because you look like a horse." 
...and so on. 

I started to get high on cutting him down. This guy took cuts like a champ, but eventually I started to see pain in his sad little face - it was then when I finally realized he had feelings that I resolved to be nice. I asked him if he wanted a beer after work, he accepted, and you know, he wasn't that bad. He even paid for my beer. Pretty soon it got to be a post-shift tradition, and it was alright. I even looked forward to it. 

Things got out of hand when we started talking about kink.

At first it was a casual discussion of sexual preferences and various city kink club scenes worth frequenting and our experiences there, as well as the ones we hoped to have. Soon after I found myself driving 45 minutes out of my way to a shit hole ghetto thinking: "fuck fuck fuck, what am I doing, fuck..."

Next thing I knew he was silently, solemnly, and even gently leading me up the stairs.

Next thing I knew he was carefully peeling my clothes off, with the tenderness and respect one would disrobe an expensive porcelain doll, a collector's item. 

Next thing I knew he was asking me, "What do you want?" My hunger to own him was so great, I allowed a clichéd response to slip from between my lips: "You."

Next thing I knew he was piercing my being. He held that familiar yet disarming gaze with me, a look of such unprecedented sincerity that I feared my heart my stop beating at any moment like a bunny that dies in the arms of the child who squeezes it too tightly.

After our little deaths we lay limp among the twisted sheets with the embarrassment of our sincerity, nakedness, and pressing guilt for our lack of regret seeping in, along with our sweat.
When we were finally able to move and enjoy critical thought again, the issue at hand presented itself: being tender with each other was kind of beside the point.

We went to a bar. He pissed me off. I dragged him back to his room. I tied him up and beat the crap out of him in a manner from which I am sure he still retains scars. Physical or emotional, it doesn't matter to me which. All that mattered was that he was, in that moment, my slave to abuse.

I finally unshackled him and ordered that he fuck me like a man this time. Such an erotic rage was unleashed, I thought he would split me, rip me apart. He violated me with delicious conviction and in doing so exacted retribution for his humiliation. "Is this what you wanted?" he hissed beyond his tensely veined neck, gritted teeth, and focused glare. Between my cries, I could only nod yes as he continued to forcefully ravage. (Heaven.)

Nothing about that experience could change the fact of "the girlfriend" matter. She was as good as he was going to get in terms of serious life partners and I applaud her for swallowing his hot load of royal fuck up with a relatively impressive amount of grace and acceptance. I owned my slave for a hot afternoon, but I knew that in the end I would have to let him go.

The thing that strikes me again and again is that monogamous people (that is: those seeking fidelity in singular partners) don't realize that to satisfy their curiosity with more open "non-monogamous" people (those who seek fidelity whilst enjoying the freedom of multiple partners) is to crucify them. I was hurt that I was good enough for that one misstep, but not enough for more - a waltz of affairs that might have lasted in a lifetime the analogous length of a song in a movie. However transcendent the event felt to me at the time, feelings were trumped by security, something I can never be able to offer as long as security equals static. I have endured a handful of lovers walking out of my life tearfully on this account, and that is something I have come to expect. People say I'm a heartbreaker, but the reality is that openness makes me raw and vulnerable to the core. Because I have multiple lovers, it's hard for people to appreciate the sutures sewn in my own heart, and yet I don't expect them to. It's just the way of the world. 

Also, his dad came home early and saw me fully nude. (That was fun!)

In the end, despite the face-slapping at the bar, the half-assed apologies and platitudes, and finally the lingering question marks, things are still jovial between us. Our secret is now the greatest thing we share. In a moment of confessional disclosure, I did tell the foul-mouthed bartender. His reaction was: "I can actually see you retards being good together."

I'm glad I had that experience, satisfying a number of burning curiosities in doing so. I'm happy to have realized that in discovering my adulthood, I have become a person who is willing to be vulnerable, to risk by saying "yes".

For anecdotes of *functional* and sexy debauchery, go HERE.  
Check out the latest from Seduce and Confuse. I dare you.