me time

One of my absolute favorite things about spending time alone where I live is the freedom not to wear any more clothing than I want to or is necessary due to temperature.

I just took a shower after trying to plant some things. I may have put the sprouted avocado upside down, and that potted basil may have been too late in meeting the garden. That's entirely beside the point. The point is, that I am sitting here bare-ass naked, save for my glasses. I do not even have my nose-ring in and am not wearing the lucky Japanese coin which seldom leaves my neck.

There is a delightful breeze coming through the window, my bedroom door is open, and as I am not expecting anyone else to be here for another 24 hours and the downstairs door is locked, that is all just dandy.

I think I came late to appreciating nudity, relatively speaking. Little kids seem to love to be naked, and having worked with youth a lot, I can tell you some take a lot longer to pick up the social conventions of when/where and how much clothing they are expected to wear in various circumstances. From what I remember and have been told, I was not one of those kids. I was on board with being fully clothed just about as soon as I could get clothes on with minimal assistance. I didn't want to change without a lot of privacy, which was difficult given how many sports I played. When I got involved with theatre I started to loose some of those boundaries. When you've got to do a quick-change, you've got to do a quick-change, but that was only ever down to my skivvies, which were pretty modest and uninteresting at that point - I once had to do a quick change in an alley for a show that I did when I was 14. The same truck drove by 3 times in the minute it took me to change from a full male military costume into a tea dress, matching hat and shoes.

When I became sexually active nudity in that context never seemed like a big deal to me. Of COURSE I have the hang-ups about my body that people have but I guess I always figured that if someone thought I was sexy enough to get to that point with me, what they found underneath my clothes wasn't going to send them running for the hills. I embraced well (not harshly) lit sex almost right away. Otherwise, I stayed pretty clothed. My beloved Alma Mater was, to put it mildly, a pretty naked place. I would take off my shirt and leave on my bra at parties, or go to underwear themed parties, in boxers and tshirt, not lingerie, and not just barely lingerie like some of my dear, darling classmates.

A few years ago I read from some very authoritative source, as in, some womens' magazine or other, that part of the reason that women tend to like their faces more than they like their bodies is because they SEE their faces all the time, and do not often really see/look at their bodies. I immediately took up the practice of looking at all me naked in the mirror at least once a day, and HEY! It's true. Having a better idea of what my body actually looks like made me like it more, and feel more comfortable being naked - alone, around other people, just for the heck of it. I don't feel as though my body needs to covered when it does not actually need to for the sake of social comfort or warmth. It's great. I am not suggesting even a little bit that I no longer have my hang-ups or any such thing, I just like chilling out naked now. That's all.

Naked Kinsey Out

You want me to kiss you after that!?

I have a hypothetical vampire-sex question. (Shut up, I'm watching 'True Blood')
So, there are those people who, for reasons I completely fail to understand, are unwilling to kiss their partner after said partner has performed oral sex on them, at least not before they gargle or brush their teeth or whatever. In the case of vampire-human sex in particular, because I assume this would be kind of a non-issue with vampire-on-vampire action, would there be those who after being bitten (presumably during sex) would refuse to kiss their blood-sucking lover prior to that lover cleaning their -the human's blood out of their mouth/off their face?
OR, is it possible actually that there would even be those vampires who would be unwilling to be kissed with their own blood on their partner's mouth?
OR, is it completely ridiculous that I'm making blood and sexual fluids analogous in this situation?

like a sex machine

I subscribe to fitness magazines. I found SELF immensely helpful after I graduated from college and was trying to make-over my life and body from the excesses and abuses to which I had been subjecting myself. I got a free subscription to Women's Health thanks to a fabulous eyeslipsface (e.l.f) offer - a free magazine subscription with orders over $20.00.
I'm generally pretty pleased with the attitudes that these publications take towards sex - its positive, and relatively open-minded, if a little heterosexist and not super inclusive. They promote healthy sexuality as part of over-all well being: sex is good for your health, and good health = good sex. I could have told you that, but its nice to see science backing it up.

There seems to be an assumption that sex is always available to women, and by implication that men are always up for (forgive the pun) and available for sex. There's this implicit idea that men's sex drives are always roaring full-blast, and that they'll be happy to service the needs of a woman whenever she feels like, as though they don't have bad days, headaches, deadlines, and are always in the mood. That's not fair to men or to women. It suggests that there's something wrong with a man who doesn't want to, or can't have sex all the time, and/or that there's something wrong with a woman if a man does not, or she can not make him want to have sex with her whenever she feels like it - that something is medically or emotionally the matter in either case.
Not being at the ready all the time is not the same as E.D.
Encouraging women to be open and unashamed of their sexuality is great, making them feel as though they're undesirable by this kind of thinking about sex is not. Maybe there ought to be more consideration in these articles of ways that women can take care of their own sexual needs and how to navigate that within their relationships, how to read their partner's sexual cues, or how to facilitate communication between partners about what makes them feel like its a good time or not.

Just my $.02

Dude-ness

Sex really turns me into a guy - my stereotypical male qualities and behaviors.
It's funny.
Visual:
wearing boxers and a white undershirt, drinking a beer which rests between my legs when I'm not drinking it.
Yeah.
Then I burped while making nachos, and Mon Amore informed me that,
"I was just about to say, as long as you don't burp right now, you wouldn't totally be a guy."

It also seems as though my voice gets lower after sex. This may be from moaning, this may be some kind of wash of hormones and endorphins. Who knows? But it's funny and I enjoy it.

discomfort

Apologies for the hiatus. Life happened, I allowed it to prevent me from writing.
The truth is that I find it difficult honestly to talk about myself. No, really.
The feedback which I have consistently been getting for the past two years at Naropa is that I am 'too academic' and do not speak enough from my own experience. I find it uncomfortable.
On that subject, Mon Amore had the following to say,
"That's kind of what you (all) do there (Naropa). You drink chai and feel uncomfortable. "

I have spent so much of my life cultivating a certain kind of persona - one that is glib and detached, and that laughs away its discomfort and unhappiness. I am afraid of making myself vulnerable by really exposing myself. I am afraid of being disliked, or unlovable for having feelings that I think of as negative, undesirable, or unpleasant. Blame it on being a WASP, blame it on being a woman trying to succeed in male-dominated academics, (not to mention, um, society), blame it on the person who told me that people didn't like me because I was gloomy when I was a child, blame it on the Bossanova, but there it is.
I've spent most of the life that I can remember being entirely too busy to let my feelings in, or out, and made myself focus on what needed to be done. This obviously isn't healthy. I've been working on it in a number of ways, and now am coping to the fact in a public forum. *Whew*

Why is this relevant/Why am I telling you this?
Because it greatly affects the way that I talk and write about sex and sexuality. I've been a lot more comfortable being a bit detached on the issue, and very rarely writing about my own feelings, experiences, etc. Consider this my pledge to you and to me to try to be more honest and direct and to tell it like it is, and hopefully, therefore, to post a little more regularly.

Posts to follow:
issues in masturbation
when sex is too intense

Love,
Kinsey