Living In Sin

Living In Sin: A Vagina by any Other Name

Dear Jen,
My daughter is two years old and occasionally, when I change her diaper, she touches her genital region.  When she does this I talk to her about it using real words, like “vagina.”  A friend recently overheard me and said that I’m doing long-term damage.  She thinks that if my little girl goes to school and falls and says that she hurt her vagina, all the other kids will ridicule her.  My friend insists that calling it her “pee-pee” or her “cha-cha” would be a better alternative.  What do you think?
- Midwest Momma

Dear Momma,
Just yesterday I hit the road for my beloved New Mexico where I lived for many years before moving to L.A.  I was telling a friend about all the excellent people I was going to get to see when I got there – Flowers, Burgy, Gautch, Kimo - while my friend, Goldie, looked after my place.  I also told her that she should go see my friend Gecko’s art show while I was gone.  All she said was, “Are all of your friends stuffed animals?”   

Lots of my friends have weird names.  That’s because lots of my friends are weird and made them up themselves.  I also know people named Starskee, Storm, Bedouin, Mojo, and Dagmar and used to get followed around by a strange lady in a filthy skirt who called herself Bumble Bee.  I think it’s because my friends are creative and unconventional, not because they abhor their parents (the majority of my friends, anyway).  It’s like naming the person the grown-up you relates to, rather than the one that was beholden to your parents.  You get to define yourself.  It’s like giving yourself a Mohawk.  Or a pet name. 
What people call themselves, and parts of themselves, ain’t nobody’s business but theirs.  Especially if it comes from a healthy place which, if I can get mighty real here for a moment, all this vagoglossing does not.  For the most part, it’s about shame, denial and embarrassment.  I mean, a knee is a knee, an ear is an ear – why does a butt need to be a po-po?  It’s these seemingly innocent and playful little suggestions that drill some hugely negative crap into our psyches.  So if you want your daughter to be loud and proud about her vagina, good for you.  You’re sending her a much more positive message than suggesting that any part of her beautiful body is a dirty thing that is called a dirty word.  Tell your friend to put that in her long-term damage pipe and smoke it.

Besides, your daughter is going to get ridiculed anyway.  They could just as easily crawl all over her for calling it her halla lalla instead of her poonana.  Kids are ruthless, and no matter how much you try and watch her back, she’s gonna get it from somewhere for something.  Instead of fearing what might or might not happen to her, your time would be much better spent teaching her that she’s hot shit, to stick up for herself and that she should tell anyone who makes fun of her for not using the term “cha-cha” that it’s a vagina, not a Mexican restaurant.

Living In Sin: Newlywed and Underlaid

Dear Jen,
I am a 21 year-old male who lost his virginity to the girl who is now my wife at 19. I want sex 24/7 just like when we first met, but now everything seems to have switched. We only have sex like once a week and it's always the same thing where she gets her way, always missionary and no position change. We used to be so open sexually - we experimented with anything and everything. I have only slept with her and still feel I have so much experimenting to do, meanwhile I’m the 8th person she’s been with so I feel like she is finishing her sexual career and I'm barely starting.

What can I do to jumpstart things? How can I help her open back up? Is it something I'm just completely missing? Anything that can help me reclaim my sex life would be a great help because now I find myself masturbating 3 or 4 times daily and it sometimes affects my work. Thank you for any help. – Cut Off at the Starting Line

Dear Cut,
When you get to be a certain age, a terrible, terrible thing is going to happen to you. You are going to wake up one day to discover that all your friends, all those fun, spontaneous people who were always game for hikes, concerts, dinner parties, trips to India, hours of pant-wetting laughter, deep discussions, creative projects and brilliant brainstorming sessions have disappeared. They have wandered off into the abyss of new parenthood.

They have traded in precious time with dear sweet you for those things with giant wobbly heads. They’re now focused on those projectile vomiters who roll their freaky, unfocussed eyes at you and envelop you in vague gazes that speak of their fresh arrival from (and, no doubt, partial residence still on) “the other side.” For me, it’s not terribly appealing. Babies are extremely wiggly. Some are born with lips that have enough sucking power to deflate even the oldest and strongest of friendships. And all of them have soft spots on their heads where their fragile baby brains lay unprotected. Squich squich. If that’s not fully creepy, I don’t know what is. I don’t care how cute their feet are.

Yet whenever my married tell me about their big news, I'm genuinely excited. Because what more could you ask for than to see the people you love get what they want? But my excitement is the same excitment I feel when I hear someone excellent and nearby is moving to another country, or has fallen madly, obsessively in love or has started going to AA – it’s fabulous for them, it’s back to the drawingboard for me.

Because I don’t want children, and because the haves and the have nots tend to live lives that only cross paths at the occasional farmers market, I have tried to talk some of my most treasured friends out of reproducing. And I have yet to succeed. I have also failed at talking my neighbor into trading in his surfboard for paddle tennis with me and was ignored by my mother year after year when I suggested that she get us a horse instead of a dog.

Here’s the annoying thing about other people: You are not in control of deciding what they want. You are not the boss of them. You are only the boss of yourself.

That’s why when it comes to getting your wife to have wild and crazy sex 24/7, if she doesn’t want to, there’s not a whole lot you can do about it other than let her know how it makes you feel. If she’s willing to work with you on it, great, if not, you have to decide if you’re willing to stick around.

As far as your constant fiddling goes, keep in mind that nothing obsesses us like that which we cannot have. While I think that being young and horny is normal, it sounds to me like you’re obsessing over it because you can’t have it. Sex, like smoking pot or over eating or compulsive traveling, is an excellent distraction from dealing with other parts of your life. And I don’t blame you for not wanting to deal, because it sounds to me like you could be in a doomed marriage. To still be in the honeymoon phase and begging for sex is not a good sign. Her lack of enthusiasm could just be a phase, but it could also be about something much deeper. I strongly suggest you guys get some counseling and figure it out because if it continues on like this, you’re in for a lifetime of resentment, frustration and some serious carpal tunnel.

Living In Sin: Fan of the Fur

Dear Jen,
I was at a dinner party the other night and the topic turned to sex. I’m a fairly conservative guy and have never really done anything that would be considered kinky (unless you count 69ing as kinky) but was intrigued by some of the things people were talking about.

I was fairly educated on the majority of topics, but had never heard about this business of dressing up like stuffed animals and having sex. I was at once horrified and intrigued and you are the only person I’m telling this to (and even this is difficult). Apparently people dress up in full animal costume, cut holes in the appropriate places and go at it.

Where would I find such a costume? And how on earth do I bring this up to the person I’m dating? I’m single at the moment, but am really hoping to try this out at some point and am sure I’ll scare a prospective partner away. Thanks for your help Jen!
- Feeling Goofy

Dear Goofy,
I was walking on the beach the other day, getting lost in the meditative sound of the waves like the good hippie I am, until all of a sudden I was gripped by panic – what if a sneaker wave comes up and drags me out into the middle of the ocean to my watery death? This happened to a friend of mine, or rather to her little boy, or rather it almost happened…they were walking down the beach, he closer to the water than she, and this massive, solitary wave came out of nowhere and pulled him out to sea. He was miraculously able to latch his skinny little boy arms around a rock and hang on until the waves returned to normal, but it was a mighty close call. And as someone who doesn’t live on the Oregon coast (where there are rocks aplenty to cling to) and who could easily get her ass kicked in an arm wrestle with a six year-old boy, I was suddenly terrified.

Meanwhile, if I’d never heard of sneaker waves, I wouldn’t have known to be frightened. And that’s the way it is with about 90% of our fears – we learn about them and then either choose to take them on or choose to focus on something else. We could all walk around freaking out that the earth will get slammed by something large and hot flying around in space or that our appendixes might burst at any second. There’s enough material out there to spend a lifetime doing nothing else. Meanwhile, it’s only the quality fears we need to pay attention to, which are the ones our instincts, not our minds, flare up about. That’s what instincts are for. It’s their job. But the mind is a meddling, insecure, over-achiever that demands we pay attention to it and all it’s whoop de doo ideas.

If you were just going along, doing what felt right, natural and made you happy, and didn’t know that dressing up like Scooby Doo and doing the wild thing was something to worry about, you’d just do it because it felt good. And none of your instinct alarms would go off. But you were raised in a society that for some reason has decided that all sorts of things that make people happy are bad and should be hidden, ridiculed or not allowed to marry.

As I was poking around the internet looking for some sites to send you to to educate you on your new-found fetish (you are a furrie, btw.) I found a great quote from dear old Dan Savage that made me laugh out loud (as usual):

“As far as we're concerned, there's nothing wrong with getting off on fursuit sex or fucking stuffed animals or anything else that doesn't involve grave bodily harm, real animals, children or Ann Coulter.”

There are entire websites, chat rooms, conventions, videos and costumists dedicated to perpetuating a furrie lifestyle, and lots of prospective partners out there who would love you to poke around beneath their furry flaps. Here are a couple I found:
http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,11000-2007140884,00.html
http://furries.meetup.com/
Life is short. Find your people. Get your gorilla on.