On the one hand, I love jewelry. If I wore a single different piece of jewelry each day, I’ve estimated that it would take me a little more than a year to go through my entire collection. And I make jewelry. I’ve made about half of my collection. I love the colors. I love the spark. I am, as previously harped upon, obsessive compulsive creative.

On the other hand, I’m currently exploring the much more butch side of performativity. And I love it too, right down to my toes, to the tips of my cuffs, I love it. But there is almost no intersection between that kind of performative dress, and my brightly colored mounds of jewels. So I’ve been making new things, and running up against new questions. How is men’s jewelry different from femme jewelry different from butch jewelry? Is it different at all? Google is no help, of course. Someone must have asked this question before me.

I’ve been doing new work in wood, and in hemp and in leather. I’m still trying to figure out if I can make pearls butch. Believe it or not, I think I can.

I have images in my head of what femme is starting to mean to me, what butch is starting to mean. More and more I find that it’s the mix I like more than the far reaches of either image. All juxtapositions and inherent contradictions, as broad as my legs sprawled out in a skirt, as small as a beaded tie.

I feel like I’ve tossed a coin in the air, and I don’t know which side it’s going to come down on. In the end, I suspect, it won’t come down at all.

Meanwhile, I have just come off the rag, so to speak. I think that since I’ve made a habit of writing about anything that comes my way that’s related to my body, this is a fine topic for today.

I find the way that women’s periods are talked about a bit strange. There’s the usual influx of euphemisms, but I’d like to set those aside for the moment. What I find strange about mentioning that I’m on/near/capable of having my period is the look of bemused bewilderment that such a comment will usually pull out of my male friends.

I realize that it’s entirely fair for these friends of mine to feel bewildered when confronted with the mention of an experience which half the population finds alien. But then, I’m still surprised every time; menstruation is such a routine, usual part of my life.

And yet, this routine is rife with physical and mental issues. Issues I rarely talk about, or even think about, even when I’m on my period. That’s weird. I love thinking about things.

So, I think I’ll explore a little, maybe shed some insight on this bodily function that takes up one of every four weeks of my life.

Here is a breakdown of what happens to my body every month.

My period usually begins in the first week of the month, and when I was on the pill (which I was for four years) its regularity was so mind-numbingly predictable that I also knew it would come, each month, on a Wednesday afternoon. Now that I’m almost two years off the pill it is only slightly less regular. I’ve never experienced the change in cycle that can come when women who live together sync their periods up. If this happened with my mother and I, I never found out. When I lived with two of my best girlfriends, senior year, I was still on the pill. They synced to me. I was like a drumbeat.

I recently started taking more drastic steps toward getting rid of the acne that lives (lived, I hope) on my chin. I find it unfair that I have acne at the age of 24; I realize that many of us continue to have acne our entire lives, but this does not prevent me from feeling as though I’m still in middle school every time a new whitehead comes swimming up to the surface.

This acne has always behaved in predictable cycles. A week before my period it threatens, and then will usually flare up two days before I start bleeding. Since I came off birth control I’ve learned that I can predict the arrival of my period through watching my skin. Now, however, I’m two days past my period, and I have just gotten my first pimple in two weeks. This is mildly confusing to me, and I’m sure my skin is confused as well.

My period begins with a bit of dark red-brown spotting, nothing too alarming. Within four hours it increases to a steady flow, and by the middle of the next day is usually heavy enough that I’ll bleed through a heavy-duty tampon in about an hour. (That’s very quickly, by the way.) This tapers off steadily over the next three days; by the third night I will be able to sleep eight hours without having to get up to insert a new tampon. Usually my body gets a bit coy at this point and stops bleeding for about 12 hours, or just long enough for me to start thinking it might be over. Then, once I’ve let my guard down, it comes rushing back in for a day in a final hurrah.

I started using tampons when I was a freshman in high school, and they practically changed my life. I hated pads so, so much. They never worked, I would always bleed through them, and sometimes I’d end up with horrible patches of blood on the insides (or outsides) of my clothes. I avoided tampons for a while because the mechanics of them spooked me, but after borrowing one from a friend’s mother in a desperate last-ditch effort one summer day, I learned by necessity and never looked back.

My periods mean a few things to me, in both physical and mental aspects. These are the issues that continually crop up.

The first day of my period means I may be in for a very bad couple of days.

Usually my cramps are mild to moderate. They are deep belly pains, not quite like muscle pains, and they make me feel shitty. Sometimes this is literal. I described this feeling, once, as “being two steps away from having my stomach fall out of my butt.” But this cramping, although annoying, is manageable. It is uncomfortable rather than truly painful.

About once every four months, however, I have what I call a bad period. These are the periods that kick off with a little trickle of cramping pain and culminate, a day later, in sweat-soaked twisting misery. My entire lower half ties in knots, cramps that start at the middle of my spine and end in my knees. There is nausea, and a lot of blood. Since I never know just when one of my bad periods will be, when the first spotting comes I start mentally steeling myself for this possibility. Sometimes I take Advil. Usually it’s too late.

The first time this happened I was in high school. I curled up on the bed in our guest room and moaned, my arms wrapped around my waist. It was the first time I’d ever been in serious pain that wouldn’t stop or fade away. It lasted about three hours. My dad brought me saltines and told me it probably wasn’t as bad as I thought it was.

When I was on the pill these bad periods were very rare. Since I came off they’re more frequent, and much worse. The worst one was about a year ago. I called out sick that day. I remember I was curled up on my bathroom floor in an over-sized bath towel because the texture of cloth of the sheets on the bed made me feel sicker when it touched my skin. I rocked back and forth slowly and cried. In the worst of it I held my head over the toilet and vomited violently. Vomiting made the cramps fade, and I fell asleep on the floor, still wrapped in my towel.

That’s what it means to me when my period comes.

What else?

The first day of my period means I’m not pregnant.

That seems like something that I, as a woman who knows safe sex and doesn’t even have that much sex, should not have to worry about. And yet, I lived in fear of an unwanted pregnancy for a very long time. An irrational fear, but a real one. Thankfully, this has eased, because I’m better now at analyzing irrational fears.

Where I grew up, pregnancy at a young age was like a brand on your skin. It meant you had to leave school, you had smashed up your future and ruined your life. And to my family (and by extension me), “at a young age” didn’t just mean the middle school and high school years. It meant during college, after college, any time in my life before I was at least 27, and married. I got it drilled into me that anything resembling a commitment as large as a child before I had had a career and made a great deal of money would be seen as a betrayal of my genes and potential.

The very first time my first boyfriend and I slept together, the second man I’d had sex with and the seventh time I’d had sex, the condom broke. I remember his face when he pulled the little ring of latex from his penis where it had rolled itself up tight. We had been dating for six days. I was on the pill. I had missed one of my doses, the week before.

Needless to say I did not get pregnant. I simply lived in abject terror for about a week and a half, until my period came and I blessed that oozing blood flow like a fucking ceremonial cleansing rain.

I don’t think that the fear of pregnancy that I nursed for so long had much to do with the development of my kink in orgasm control, but I know that it helped me to kink on not giving out sex when I still lived with that baby stab of terror in my belly.

What else?

My period means that I’m not sexy.

Now, I don’t tend to get extremely bitchy or significantly bloated during my period, two side effects I’ve been happy to miss out on. However, my sex drive plunges. It practically free-falls. I don’t feel turned on, I usually think I look horrid, I lose interest in sex, pornography and eroticism, and I simply wait. I know that I could probably find plenty of people willing to nose-dive or cock-dive into me while bloody, but I don’t usually see the point. I find my blood interesting, especially when it’s gobby and thick, but I don’t find it sexy. That, and the nerves of my clitoris essentially shut down for a week.

But then, after my period has had its last hurrah and is permanently removed from my life for a good three weeks, my sex drive rockets upward. I become demandingly, unquenchably horny. I get in the habit of multiple orgasms, I walk around with my nipples hard, I go looking for new dirty stories to read and write. I sometimes growl during sex. It’s quite fun.

And then, after a week or so I settle back down, I get back into a groove, I don’t need sex every minute, and life goes on, until the next month comes.

And remarkably, although I’ve been doing this every month of my life for the last eleven years, I have never written any of this down before today.

Also? This is essay length. I was going to split it, but I’ve decided against doing so. Read at your leisure.

Strap-ons.

On one of the first posts I made there was some commentary about gendered play. A nice man commented about the nature of his relationship with his dominant female partner, emphasizing his own masculinity, and writing in parentheses: no strap-on dildos here! I added the exclamation point, but you get my drift.

And at the time, that surprised me, but I hadn’t really registered yet that such a comment is totally in line with much of the blogosphere. Hey, whatever works.

But sorry. I’m not a card-carrying member of the No-Strap Ons Club. In fact, I’m a card-carrying member of the Strap-Ons Rock My Socks Off Club. We’ve got jackets.

I love strap-ons. Love them. Love them like I love singletail. I use a strap-on on a man, and I get to glory in every reaction I elicit from him, moans and little fragile cries and all. I enjoy this the way I enjoy whipping a man until he falls to his knees. I want to see what he does. I will push him just to see how he pushes back, or whether he does at all. If he’s never done it before I want to see what happens to his mind once it’s over. I am a reation top; I get off on the reations I inspire in others. Not all tops are like this; lots of doms get off on having their pleasure sated. I do that too. Reactions are my pleasure.

For female dominants who deal strictly in their own pleasure, strap-ons seriously stink. It’s true; I don’t feel anything. It’s detached, like any other toy is detached. It’s not arousing in any kind of physical way. It does not work for everyone, and I wholeheartedly agree with Bitchy when she says it should not be the cum shot of femdom, and we shouldn’t all have to rush out and buy one. It’s all about getting what you want. To get what you want, first you have to understand what you want. Then you can go finding a set of tools that work for you, be it handcuffs or rubber gloves or strap-ons or paddles. Whatever.

Like, what? I can’t be a powerful woman with a strap-on? I can be whatever I want with a strap-on! Pull out of this the only part of the sentence that is actually worth a damn to me: I can be whatever I want.

A lot of femdom throws out the strap-on emphatically because emphatic gestures, even when overly simplistic, are often the easiest way to deal with complex problems. I don’t believe that femdom needs to eradicate the use of the strap-on in order to stop the perpetuation of equating masculinity with power. I think we actually need to restructure our thoughts on a very different, more fundamental level.

We’ve got these two sets of binary ideas: male & female and power & weakness. We have them all wrapped up with each other, entirely interdependent in so many ways. I want to erase this connection. I want to separate the idea of the male & female from the idea of power & weakness.

I’m amazed you’re still reading, by the way.

Male phallus worship has been around for thousands of years. Female power worship has also been around for thousands of years. And you know, I’d call myself a feminist, but that’s not right. I’m more of an equalist, if such a thing existed. I think many equalists become feminists because it seems to be the best way to approach the current situation. The thing is, the current situation is fucked and will not benefit from tinkering. It should be defenestrated. I wish to throw it out the metaphorical window.

We want to change the kink world for the better, yea? The way to change the world is by thinking differently. Step back, take a breath, and redefine. Reexamine your accepted truths.

Culture tells us that penetration equals power, penetration is masculine and therefore masculinity and power are forever linked. Because we’re dealing with two halves of two binary ideas, culture automatically links the other halves together; femininity is weak.

In order to combat this fuckupery we have decided to embrace being penetrated as strong, in order to cause the inevitable chain reaction which concludes by stating that the female gender is the one with the power.

The problem with deciding to turn the idea on its head is that we’ve already demonstrated that the logic behind the idea is faulty; culture came to the conclusion that women are weak, and we disagree. So we take the exact same logical treatment of ideas and arrive at the conclusion that women are strong, which suits us infinitely better but in no way fixes the problem of the faulty logic. This isn’t trying to fix the culture. This is trying to reaarange it to our convenience.

Rather than rehash an old process with new ideas, it serves us better to examine the process itself to figure out what the hell’s going wrong.

Point one: Penetration equals power. Not true. Penetration is a tool to be used in the process of power exchange. Being the giver or taker of a penetrative act in no way necessitates a certain kind of power, as all the lovely women who can top while being fucked have proven. Scratch it. It’s a false assumption. We knew that already; that’s the basic premise of the No Strap-Ons Clubs’ argument.

Point two: Penetration is masculine. Well hey, guess what. I don’t think that’s true either. And I fully realize I’m going against literally hundreds of thousands of years of biology here, with men having penises and women not. But doesn’t it seem that the very invention of the strap on has pretty much made this whole argument bullshit? Not only that, it’s not just a penis one can penetrate with. I can penetrate you with a knife, a needle, my fist, my finger, my teeth. I can penetrate your personal space. I can penetrate you emotionally with my mind. I get as much pleasure out of penetrating you with a strap-on as I do from penetrating you with a needle. I’m a woman with full control over the ability to penetrate people. I’m not taking on a masculine trait. This does not need to be gendered. Seriously, stop gendering things. Really.

With point one and point two pretty much gone, the conclusion just doesn’t hold up now, does it? Masculinity does not equal power. It’s not because masculinity equals powers’ opposite, weakness. It’s because, guess what, you don’t actually need to gender your power exchange in any one particular way. You can if you want to. But you don’t have to.

Especially not when stuck within this rigid bullshit idea that gender and power are binary concepts. Gender and power are fluid concepts. The two scales can play off one another with or without being intertwined. You can treat them any way you’d like.

I believe gender is necessarily fluid, because we’ve stuck ourselves into a binary idea and then have to embrace fluidity in order to account for all of the people, ideas and actions that don’t fit the binary model. I include myself in this fluidity. And I believe that power is fluid for exactly the same reason. I wear boys clothes, I kiss girls, and I don’t always think of myself as totally feminine. And I don’t hold every single solitary kind of ultimate power in my relationships, and don’t want to.

We insist on gendering power exchange because we choose the genders of our partners. It makes so much sense if you’re a submissive man to connect women with power. You want a woman with power. It’s not a far jump from there to wanting women to be powerful, even if they don’t want to be. And from there, to deciding that womankind is powerful. We are so insistent on gendering everything! Look how we name our interests: fem dom, male dom, fem sub, male sub.

If you’re not heterosexual this whole insistence on a binary equation of gender and power just up and fades away. Seriously, the heterosexual scene needs some prolonged exposure from the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans) scenes. Most of them figured out what I’m about to say a long time ago.

They’re *people,* people. We’re humans in the end. Embrace the idea that you are powerful because you are you. You demand power, you work for it, you get it. Embrace the idea that you are vulnerable because you choose to be, not because of how your sexual organs happen to be arranged.

It’s not me being a man, or being masculine. It’s me with a strap-on. It’s all about me. My gender identity informs rather than defines my identity as a whole. I claim power, because I am me. It’s so more elemental than gender.

A strap-on is a tool. Penetration is a tool. Power exchange is mental; power exchange is not about the tools you use but how you how you use them. It’s not about what you do; it’s about how you do it.

This is bad news for every annoyingly clueless femdom who’s ever walked into a play party and demanded that strange men bow down to her. It’s bad news for every male dom who argues that women are naturally the weaker sex. It’s bad news for every male sub who insists he’s worthless, and blissfully perpertuates the idea that all women are to be worshipped. It’s bad news for every man who wants to be fucked up the ass to make himself feel like a weak woman.

Nope. Sorry. Here in my corner of the Internet, I’m going to make you work for it. I will not accord you a place on any power scale according to your gender or a gendered idea of how you want to play. It’s going to be much harder than that, and it’s going to involve understanding the exchange of power as something you have to deal with consciously. Something you have to earn because of who you are as a whole person. What you think, and how you play. I have power because I use the tools I have available in order to gain power.

I’m not saying people can’t go out and gender their power exchange if they want to. Gender is fascinating, and an incredible tool to have available. I’m saying do it consciously. Have strap-on sex, or don’t! Whatever! Give and take as whole people, not arrangements of sexual organs.

But don’t come looking to me for femdom. I’m not a femdom. I’m a dom. Straight up. And I penetrate.