Living In Sin

Living In Sin: From Orgasm to Over It

Dear Jen,
I'm a 20 year-old, bisexual-leaning lesbian who has not done anything sexual with either gender. I get turned on easily and love to masturbate all the time. My problem is something that I can't seem to admit freely and you seem like the person who will (finally) understand.

I can't keep going after I come, even though I'd love to. During the build-up I'm thinking "I could do this for hours" but as soon as I come I can almost feel the whoosh of my hormones receding and I feel exhausted, disgusted and uninterested - almost to the point where if I were to keep going for another one, I'd vomit. I've had this problem since I started masturbating when I was 14 and I just can't seem to force myself to shake it.

I'm afraid this is going to translate into my sex life when I finally have one, and I don't know how to improve the situation! Do you have any tips?
- One Hit Wonder

Dear One,
Every year I go backpacking in the wilderness areas of southeast Utah with two friends of mine. We stumble around an endless landscape of giant blobular crazy swirling taffy-colored rock that I can’t really describe, but suffice it to say that anyone who’s ever smoked crazy glue has been there. There are no other people and there are no trails, so if you’re anything like me, you either go with friends who have super-human navigational skills or you spend the end of your trip being eaten by birds.

One year a very rare thing occurred and we actually saw another human being out there. We were perched on top of this purple cone-shaped rock overlooking a little valley, and off in the distance was this guy skittling around like a little cartoon character. We couldn’t figure out what he was doing, darting around like he had ants in his pants, deedly deedly dee, but it was incredibly entertaining. Until we saw him bend down to fill his water bottle in a tiny, fully-foul desert puddle. We realized he must be delirious and lost and started yelling and waving at him. In mere moments he was at our feet, bug-eyed with terror and nearly weeping with relief. We gave him some water, fed him an apple and pointed to his tent, which was about 500 feet away. That was when he really started crying.

You remind me of this guy because you’re also blindly stumbling around while the answer is just around the corner. If you weren’t so ashamed of your “problem” and felt like you had someone, male or female, that you could talk to about it, you would understand that you are perfectly normal.

I don’t know if you’ve been too busy masturbating to notice or what, but one of the oldest jokes in the book is about the guy who gives you his two minutes of thunder and then rolls over and goes to sleep. Here’s my favorite one of late:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=WGOohBytKTU

Women can usually re-charge faster than men, but the clit has 8,000 nerve endings, all of which get flushed with blood when you come, which means it can actually hurt if you try to play with her right after an orgasm. So even though men are more famous for it, lots of women join the snooze crew once they come, too.

Anyway, the real issue here isn’t your lack of ability to rev up again, but rather the gag reflex you have towards your own sexual pleasure. I’m thrilled to hear that you masturbate like the dickens, but I don’t like the way you feel all pukey afterwards. This may have something to do with why you haven’t slept with anyone else, btw. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a virgin, but I’d hate to think that you’ve remained one because you’re disgusted and nauseated by sex somehow, not because you don’t feel ready. If you get mighty real with yourself and decide that this is indeed what’s going on, it might behoove you to talk to a therapist who can help you navigate your way into someone else’s pants.

Living In Sin: Holes Vs. Poles

Dear Jen,
I have a question that's been driving me NUTS. I can't decide between boys and girls. It's killing me. Have you ever felt this way? At first I thought it was cool to be bisexual, like there were so many more possibilities for love, but now I feel like I just need to make a decision between the two genders. Why? Because I am 26, in NYC and want to one day get married and have a family.

I spend a lot of my time in lesbian bars and I love my lessie friends, but sometimes I feel like it's all a big waste of time if I will one day end up with a guy. If I want to marry a man I should be on fucking J-date dating dudes. I've loved both men and women. My male gay hairstylist told me, "if you don't have to be gay...don't be,” and that's really stuck in my mind, as I feel like I have a choice in the matter. I don't want my life to be harder than it has to be and I want to be happy. How can I find out which sex I will be happiest with? I don't want to waste anymore time. I want to make a commitment to dating, and then marry either a man or a woman.
- Biconfused

Dear Biconfused,
I know several people who went through law school, who put their brains in a vice grip for three fun-free years, ruined their eyesight, went into debt as deep as the deep blue sea and stumbled out with a fancy law degree only to discover that they’d really much rather make muffins for a living or something. I think it’s safe to say that these are the people who went to law school because they thought they should, not because practicing law made their hearts happy.

Your letter reeks of a similar, deadly “shouldness” that is going to land you in unhappyville too if you’re not careful. You say you could just as easily be with he or she, but from the sound of your letter, she is way more interesting to you at this point in your life. Finding a dude because it’s easier/because you live in NYC/because your hairdresser told you to are not exactly the kinds of reasons to do anything, let alone find someone to settle down with. As you half-heartedly mentioned in your very last sentence, you can also marry a woman. And have a family. And a really great life. If that’s what you really want. So what if it’s harder – if that’s what you decide you want, wouldn’t you rather work at being happy than take the easy road to misery?

The whole deciding which gender to be with can be confusing, but why do you have to decide? Why not just do what the rest of us do – date people who make you feel funny down there and when you find a really super good one, stick a ring on their finger? For you, it’s about the person, not what’s in their pants, so keep your eye on the prize.

The whole missing out on the other gender once you commit to one is a bummer, but that’s what commitment is all about: missing out on stuff and other giant bummers. That’s why so many of us run screaming from it like we’re on fire. Nobody, be they straight, gay, bi, whatever, is ever thrilled about the sudden lopping off of other options once they commit to another person, but we do it because the benefits far outweigh the fact that we may never go to another lesbian orgy again (depending on who we wind up with, of course).

So please, stop worrying about it, stop trying to force yourself to do what you “should” and just enjoy your life. If you really wanted to be on fucking J-date, you would be, but you’re having fun at the lesbian bars at the moment so have fun at the lesbian bars. Who knows, you may bump into the man of your dreams on your way there? You have no control over who you’re going to fall in love with so stay open, keep putting yourself out there and listen to your heart, not your hairdresser.

Living In Sin: Dr. Strangelove

Dear Jen,
Recently it was revealed that the Pentagon, under Bill Clinton, was working on a secret Gay Bomb.

It apparently involved a strong-enough hormonal attractant to turn entire opposing ranks homosexual and hopelessly in lust with each other. They (we) spent a few million, but now it's supposedly a shelved project.

I must admit, I'm hopelessly heterosexual and can't imagine a chemical that would change that. But I’ve always been interested in the role of smells, and presumably that's how the secret Gay Bomb would have worked. Opinions?
- I Smell a Homo

Dear Smell,
Well, now there’s an idea. I smell a great movie, no, wait, a great musical. A bunch of queens sneak into the Pentagon, steal the bomb and suddenly life is a cabaret! Figure skating is declared the national sport, overpopulation, unwanted teen pregnancy and abortion become non-issues and Cher finally takes her rightful place as president.

Yes, it is sad, and staggeringly insulting to the gay population, but true: the macho pinheads who run our country did pull such a stunt, wasting millions of our hard-earned dollars (7.5 to be exact) appealing to their own homosexual neurosis. Why on earth would turning the opposing team gay make them any easier to fight? Do they think they’d just be like, “ow, quit it!” when they got shot? That they’d be too busy carving their initials inside little hearts on the barrack walls, and grinding to the latest Kylie single, to go out and fight? That straight women are tougher than lesbians?

If anything, it would work against them. The gays I know work much harder at staying in shape than the straight boys do. And, as a seasoned fag hag who’s said the wrong thing to the wrong queen on several occasions, I’ve found that they’re a hell of a lot more creative at retaliating when you piss them off. And who wants to fight against people who are intimately involved? Defending someone you’re in love with is a much stronger, and immediate, impulse than defending your country. And if we’re just talking about lust – if I found something I liked, I know I’d do whatever it took to keep that fine piece of ass in one piece.

If you could change someone’s sexuality by smell, I think Dick Cheney would have made sure we’d figured that out by now. And that the powers that be, especially Bill Clinton, would have figured out how to put it in pill form to facilitate more hot girl on girl action.

The research into what causes homosexuality has been going on for decades, and it’s still murky as to whether it’s biological or learned. And apparently, since there is no Gay Bomb, the government didn’t have much luck figuring it out either. They should have used the resources that were right in front of their faces, and our 7.5 million dollars, and made a Dumb Bomb instead.