Let me break one factor of this change down. Hopefully with some delicacy. I want to talk about money.

Even though I should know it by now, it consistently shocks me how expensive it is to be kinky. Money is one way in which much of the public scene is privileged; there is literally a bar to entry open to a selected few. (Not to mention all the other ways in which much of the scene caters to a particular privilege: age, time, location, race, gender, orientation, able-bodied, to name a few. With a nexus of overlying, unspoken requirements, it’s no wonder the public scene is comparatively tiny.)

Now, I’ve come to realize that the Australian relationship with money as I currently see it is a little different than I’m used to. Namely, they spend more on their pleasures. It’s not just that Sydney is an expensive city, especially with food prices skyrocketed. NYC is also an expensive city; I’m used to this.

Rather, it seems a regular occurrence for the people I hang out with to drop $100 on alcohol in a single night. A weeknight. On a weekend? An American girl I met the other day told me, in hushed tones, that an Australian guy she knows spent $600 last Saturday, between clubs, cabs, and drinks. We stared at each other with our mouths open. $600 is my rent for a month.

So it doesn’t seem like a good enough reason, in this culture, for me to say that something is simply too expensive.

I have spent a lot of money on the weapons and gear of my sexuality of choice. I have spent a lot of money on events like Floating World and Black Rose. Thousands of dollars. Thousands of dollars that I, and others in my economic situation, cannot technically count as disposable income. And as half of a couple who travel together and split our expenses, for every dollar I spend, Maymay spends one too.

If we shall speak very technically, it is not too expensive for me to spend $40 to go to a play party. I do have $40 in my bank account, and it could potentially go toward such a thing. So let me be a little more honest.

Unfortunately for the good people I’ve met here in the scene, some of whom host simply gorgeous parties, I have a hard time getting myself out and putting down cash at the door. This, I should clarify, is not through the fault of their parties. This is because, as I mentioned, the things I want from the scene have changed:

Where I used to consider the possibility of pick-up play, I now play only with established partners and long-term friends.

Where I used to feed from the energy in kinky spaces, I now feel awkward and exposed.

Where I used to be willing to manage the social minefield of not knowing anyone on the room, I now feel more comfortable around at least a few people I’m close to.

And where I used to be able to make friends with people solely upon the common ground of shared sexualities, I now find myself unable to do so. This has unfortunately knocked munches off my list, as well as parties.

So the events are not at fault. But the events are no longer right for me. And the Sydney scene appears to be structured in such a way that these kinds of events are the first point of entry.

So when I say that something is too expensive, I am being a little unfair. What I should say is that I’m not, at this point in my life, willing to pay an entry fee in order to be exposed to a number of kinky people with whom I have a slight chance of becoming friends. Because that’s what these parties have become for me; the vapor of a possibility that one of the other attendees might be someone I want to make friends with.

In the end, having complementary sexualities has almost no value for me in forging new friendships. It comes below a laundry list of other factors that must first align: our humor, our interests, our intellectual inquiries, our attitudes toward society and life and ourselves.

Complementary sexualities become a real factor in maintaining a relationship once sex itself becomes a factor of that relationship. To say that I am more likely to find friends among the kinky is similar to saying that if I were hetero, I would be more likely to find friends among men. Largely illogical, consistently untrue.

I have been reassessing the return on my investments, so to speak. Unfortunately, if I go to a play party that does not yield me any kind of good feeling, friendship, or conversation, I don’t just shrug it off. I get upset at myself, a little depressed. And where I get a little upset, Maymay becomes angrily vicious and bitter. It is not uncommon for us to leave play parties that are unsuccessful (by our standards), go home, fight, and end up miserable and crying. So in many ways, an entry fee is not just an entry fee; it’s a gamble.

And as what I’m looking for diverges further and further from what play parties are designed to deliver, the gamble becomes increasingly bad.

He comes to the bedroom naked and curls up on the matress like a June bug. He starts banging his forehead into my thigh.

“Yes, may I help you?” I say, petting his hair.

“Can we have sex?” he says, all hopeful.

I pet his hair. “No thank you, dear.”

He goes and gets his iPod from the table and wedges his ass tight against my knee as he checks his Twitter feeds. A minute passes.

“Now can we have sex?” he says, in his best little-boy voice, like I have cinnamon rolls hiding under the blankets. Pretty pretty please with a cherry on top?

I finish my email, put my computer on the floor and roll him over, rubbing my face and hair into his. I pitch my voice high and smile while I make fun of him. “ Can we now, can we now, huh? No? Hoooow ‘bout now? No? Now? Now?” And he laughs and hides his face in the pillow. I throw the sheets on the floor, lace my hand through his hair and drag him downward with one hand. With the other hand I awkwardly pull down on the elastic of my cotton boy-cut briefs. They are one of my oddest pairs of underwear; they have bananas printed on them.

He goes in soft with his long tongue, and has just made contact when I start screeching. The long wiry hairs of his beard are brushing in little circles over the sweet-spot skin of my ass. “Augh! It tickles, stop, it tickles!” I writhe back and forth and try not to laugh so hard. “Get off!” I plant a hand on his forehead and he goes back in a jumble on the edge of the bed while I try to start breathing again. When I stop laughing I crook my finger at him.

He comes back firm this time, and that goes well until his beard starts to brush my bum again and I squeeze my eyes shut trying not to laugh. For a little while it works, but soon I can feel the tiny bits of laughing tears start to gather. I’m trying frantically to swat them down with the incoming buzz of juices.

I give up. I pull him up, reach over to the desk drawer, and toss a condom in his face. It hits him on the nose, and that’s too much. I laugh hysterically while he rolls it on. He drizzles lube over his penis with a wrist flick like a dessert chef, and once he’s inside me I stop laughing.

It’s sweet, slow. I have a hand on the small of his back and I can feel the sharp line where his skinny hipbones dig into my inner thighs. My feet flop a little in the air, and then I pull them up to my chest. I push him out so that he has to hold himself up with his arms like a seal, and as I look at the gap between our bodies inspiration strikes.

I scoop the Hitachi from the side of the bed and wriggle it down into that little rounded space. He grins at me. I flip the switch.

Nothing happens. “Shit,” I say. I realize I unplugged the damn thing the night before to charge my cell phone. I pull it out of the way. “Plug that back in?”

He reaches over me, his penis still inside me at an awkward angle that makes me want to giggle again, and feels along the crack of the bed.

“What am I doing?” he says, bewildered.

I try to explain. I paint little pictures with my hands. “Take the thing that is plugged in, unplug it, then take the other thing that is unplugged and plug it in.” It’s perfectly clear in my mind.

He tries again. “Yeeeeaaa,” he says eventually, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

I push him off and weave my hand through the bed frame to the plug, make all the right connections and pull him back inside me as I’m turning. I slap his ass and smirk as I flip the switch again. “Let’s get up to speed here, boything!”

The wand comes on. In a few minutes, while he watches and thrusts and sighs, I start screaming low in my throat, because my clit feels like it is under attack from an invading army and has chosen to run in six different directions. I grab the sheet and twist with my free hand, and come in waves that, amazingly, don’t stop. Between our legs things get wetter, and warmer.

The final spasms push his penis backward, and as I lay and quiver-twitch he runs a finger up my side. “Can I go back in?” he says. That same voice from before, a boy begging for sweets.

I put my fist in his hair and tuck him tight into the bend of my shoulder. When he comes he tries to get away, for air. I press his face further into my skin.

Afterward we lay gasping together for a little while. I sit up before I fall asleep, feeling the heat seep out of my body and into the room that is getting colder every second. I poke him; he’s dozing with his mouth open in a little half-moon smile.

“I like having sex with you,” he says.

“I like having sex with you too,” I answer.

“Damn,” he says as he sits up. “I’m starving. How long did that sex take us?” I pull my cell phone from the dresser and flash him the screen. Two hours. “Damn,” he says again.

He goes to the kitchen and makes a plate of nachos. When he comes back I’m writing.

“What’re you writing about?” he says with his mouth full.

“Sex,” I say. I steal one of his nachos.

“Are you writing about the sex we just had?”

“Yes. Damn.” The residual nacho grease makes my fingers slip on the keyboard.

“That’s very meta of you,” he smiles. We are very meta people. He gets out his iPod again and rechecks his Twitter feeds. After a little while he turns back to me.

“I like having sex with you.”

I smile. “You mentioned that, my love.”

He pokes at my arm with his finger. “Also,” he says, and his voice goes round and little again. “Also, I like the cryptography script I made today.” He looks at me like a puppy, so I reach over and pet him. His eyes sink gently closed and his eyelashes flutter as he smiles. I lean toward him.

“Silly sexy boything,” I say softly, just before we kiss.

“When are you going to fuck me?” he said in a tiny, tiny voice.

Now, I thought. I didn’t say it out loud. Instead I hooked a finger behind the steel ring around his neck and dragged him to his feet and through the bedroom door. I stripped his clothes off and left them in a trail of little satin puddles. I pulled tan leather straps and silicone from our new teak toy chest. When I bought the chest it came with a little card, detailing the history of the ships the teak was salvaged from.

I pressed him into the bed with one hand on the dip of his spine. He arched his back in the air with his ass pointing straight up, and I laughed and had to push him back down to get him in a position I could actually penetrate from.

He made the most amazing noises. He started by moaning vowels out low in his throat, like music. When I thrust faster he gave low boar-grunts that ended in little mouse-squeaks, and when I finally stopped and lay across his back he sighed so deep I could feel it curl his toes.

Here’s what I wanted to say, the thing I probably wouldn’t say without that sweet white wine:

I also have an oral fixation.

May is siting across from me right now in a leather armchair, with his leg stretched out along the beige carpet, and when I look at him I think, “Fuck dominance, fuck dignity, all I want to do is lick my way up the skin of his legs, his hips, his stomach and neck, and sate myself in the texture of his hair. All I want to do is lay him down on our bed and let my mouth go roaming.” My mouth tingles with the thought, his soft, butter-smooth skin catching on my lips, opening to me, offering to me.

His skin is like vanilla ice cream. I look at him and want to eat him up with relish, like a delicacy. Earlier he brought me my wine in a tall water glass, and I pulled him up against the rough fabric of the couch, scraped my teeth over the fleshy head of his cock and tried like hell to ignore how much I wanted to just bite down.

There is a weird fucked up paradox that places want and need in submissive spaces. The part of me that is a drunken, dominant, desperate connoisseur is here to tell you: that is bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. I want May so badly it hurts to look at him. My mouth aches for him. My fingers tingle when I think of touching his velvety, amazing skin. 

I want him. Fuck all the shit that says I shouldn’t want, that says I have distance and control. I have no distance. I barely have control. My lips pulse at him, the urgent need to just push him to the floor and devour, to pick him up and curl him in my arms and eat him whole.

Having my sexuality censored didn’t throw me into an enormous depressive spiral of self-doubt. It didn’t cause me to take any dramatic steps back or change any of my beliefs. It has not been so climactic.

But I’d lie if I said it wasn’t affecting my relationship with kink, with sex, and with other people.

Two weeks ago, that Saturday night, I fell asleep with sex banished from my mind. The yawning gap where my sex drive had gone missing was hidden, all mixed up with the rest of my misery.

I keep using the word “shredded.” What it means is I walked around for days with my nerve endings dead, my brain feeling sluggish, my nose stuffed and my spirit exhausted. I still feel it; the numbed feeling, the exhaustion. I am still so, so tired. I can’t remember the last time I was this tired.

One by one, parts of me are beginning to heal. I emailed my family member back. What started as a fight has become a halting, slowly paced discussion; still painful, much more rational. A few days ago they emailed me a stupid joke:

Q: What did Buddha say to the hot dog vendor?
A: Make me one with everything.

I laughed and cried at the same time.

In an example of incredibly ironic timing, the weekend of the fight was directly followed by the weekend of Black Rose, a kink event in Washington DC. Months ago, May and I had planned to go. We had tickets, a hotel room, people expecting us.

That week, as each day dragged by, I kept thinking Oh god oh god, I do not want to go to Black Rose. I cannot deal with scene space. I cannot handle playing.

I feel incomplete. I feel as though parts of me have died and fallen off.

But I had laid my money down, and as it became clear that sometimes the solution to pain is not to wall oneself off to the world, I sucked it up and went.

And it was lovely. Lovely, and hard, and complicated. It was what I needed it to be.

The entire weekend I felt strangely as though I’d been granted a brief reprieve from my pain. Like the world was on hold, and my sexuality was working, albeit quietly and with far more reservations than usual.

It was as though the range of interests I’m used to enjoying had been culled ruthlessly, walling off sadomasochism, walling off D/s, building big heavy brick walls around anything I would consider heavy play. At the time I hardly noticed; I was so fried, so happy to be playing again, to be reconfirmed.

But as I’ve come out of that space and back to the world over the past week and a half, those walls have remained. It took me days to find a way to recognize arousal again. My fantasies feel scattered. The first orgasm I had after the weekend was hard. I had to wait for it, because I couldn’t fight for it.

It would be easy to say this is frustrating me, but that’s not quite right. It’s making me less confident, it’s pushing me into issues with my body and my personality that I had under control three weeks ago.

It makes me want to wear baggy clothes and put my hair in my eyes. I watch myself flirting and have to consciously tell the part of my character that worries about social faux pas to shut the hell up.

We think about being attacked and group our possible responses into fight or flight categories. I know it looks, on that side of the computer screen, like I’m fighting. On this side, nothing is simple. I’m consciously trying to figure out ways to defend myself and cataloging ways to fight, and at the same time I catch myself stumbling over words, pulling gestures back in half-fulfilled motions, hiding my face and shutting my doors.

It’d be easy to pass this off as a minor depressive spiral. Maybe that’s all it is; I don’t really have a pinpoint on the nuances of my mind.

I know I’m second guessing my desires. I can feel myself doing it, like there are decisions being made in my body that my mind is continually one step behind. I don’t like it; it’s unconscious. This little thread of pain and uncertainty isn’t based in rational thought. Rather, it’s an earmark of my self confidence, reduced to tatters and shreds.

I feel as though there’s a plate glass window between myself and my sexuality. As though I have neural gaps and lack the ability to bridge them.

I know I will bridge these gaps and tear down all the temporary walls I threw up in my hasty defense of my psyche. I realize that this is largely a matter of time.

I can be patient. I will wait for my kinks and I to find our way back to each other.

What I remember from that night, the strongest image beside all the others of blond hair and bruised skin, is that he came up for air from kissing my neck, he ran my hands down my stomach, and he ripped my underwear off. He shredded them like so much green lace paper, threw them to the floor and plunged his head between my legs with the motions of a desperate man. I remember that was the sexiest anyone had ever made me feel, the first time someone had wanted me with such searing completeness.

Last week May was lounging on our bed as only he can lounge, all sprawled out with awkward grace like an overgrown albino kitten. I itched for him in a way that was oddly unfamiliar, a sexual need not quite asking for sex, a dominant need not quite reaching to sadism. I turned this itch over in my head, thinking What is this want that I have, and where do I know it from? Then he turned over on his side and raised his hips in the air at me, playfully. Then I got it. Oh, right. That’s the strap-on itch.

I pulled our tan leather harness on, I fitted the dildo in the ring curve pointing downward, and I grabbed May by the ass to drag him to the corner of the bed. I had him kneel away from me, I spread the dildo with sticky jelly and wiped my fingers on his skin. Then I fucked him.

I fucked him long enough and hard enough that the bones in his legs wobbled and melted out from under him, sinking him first to his chest and then to his stomach, pinned down by my hand on the bed. He keened, screamed, pounded his fists into the pillows and his hips into the mattress. I fucked him until his ankles hung in the air behind me and he stayed on the bed only because of my weight supporting him, and then I fucked him right down to the floor.

I too the harness off and left him there, with his head pressed against the foot of the bed frame. He was moaning with every breath, softly. I climbed onto the bed, spread my legs apart on either side of his face, and began to masturbate, running my finger in hard circles around my clit, scooping up moisture from my lips and spreading it around my skin. From the floor, he watched. His eyes just peeped over the edge of the bed, achingly huge. When aroused so severely May’s eyes grow to anime-worthy proportions.

I watched him watch me, I saw him lick his lips, and just as I had time to wonder if he would stay there, on the floor, he jumped on me. He pounced, he practically clawed his way up across the bedspread in his rush to my cunt, his mouth suddenly everywhere, his moans muffled in my flesh. I gasped, I watched him bury himself in deeper, I threw back my head and laughed.

Eventually I drew him up into the air and pressed his head into my shoulder. I held him tightly, letting the tremors of his lust drive me farther into orgasm. Afterwards he still moaned quietly, his cock painfully hard against my thigh, and I folded his limbs into a tight ball and pressed him to me. My boy, I feel sexier every day that I’m with you.

I will never be a good erotica writer. I get annoyed with the euphemisms, I’m sick of the crashing oceans. I’m fed up with the metaphor, the impossible dance to balance the delicate with the raw. I’ve had terms churning up in my mind for weeks now, full of frustration.

I simply do not like any of the words we have in this language to refer to our genitalia. And you must admit, erotica does generally contain genitalia. It’s the nature of the two-backed beast.

This is what I do with my time. I sit around and try to figure out why I don’t like words.

I’ll start with the obvious. The technical terms, if you will.

Vagina & Penis

The Vagina Monologues really nailed the word “vagina” right on the nose:

“It sounds like an infection at best, maybe a medical instrument: ‘Hurry nurse, bring me the vagina!’”

Seriously, that is one awkward conflux of sounds. The “v” comes humming off the tongue nicely only to be brought up squeaking short by the high-pitched vowels. It’s not a word I’d like to run my tongue over; it actually sounds distasteful. Clinical.

“Penis” isn’t really doing much better. Pee-niss. The onomatopoeia of the word “penis” is not sex; it’s urine. I realize that’s right on the nose for some, but I am not quite happy that one of the most inevitable words in sexual language is screaming piss play in my face. A sterile, yellow fluid for a sterile, yellow word.

Insert and remove the penis from the vagina, ensuring a sufficient amount of lubrication has saturated the area to allow for fluid motion. Repeat until climax.

Yes, that’s definitely how I want to spend my nights.

Our vaginas and penises are pretty much the only body parts we still consistently use euphemisms for. We’ve grown past the tightly buttoned morality of the Victorian era that danced around chicken breasts and table legs, but we’re still in a culture where it’s just not okay to admit to sex out loud. Our sexual organs are swearwords.

And the euphemisms are even worse, which goes against the very definition of what a euphemism is supposed to be.

There are, of course, the obvious choices.

Cock & Pussy

What am I, keeping a farm now?

I really don’t get the word “pussy.” It’s a bit squelchy, in the end. I feel as though this word got picked up to mean “vagina” because no one could think of a better option. I have no ownership of the word. The area between my legs, although hairy and soft, does not seem adequately represented by the word “pussy.” This edges into the nonsensical for me, a combination of baby talk and misplaced modesty.

The word is far more illuminating in its derogatory use: don’t be a pussy. Don’t be a wimp. Don’t be passive. Pussy is a swearword of weakness and impotence. Isn’t that just fantastic; we’ve managed to make the word we use for a women’s genitals simultaneously dirty and weak. I can’t really avoid that when I say the word pussy. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

“Cock” is a word that I’m warily all right with. It sounds arrogant and hard and clever. But it is undeniably a bit blunt for some situations. The language forces my hand, the very rhythm of the word like a loud misplaced drumbeat in a quieter symphony. I ran my fingertips gently along his cock.

It’s like a linguistic game: one of these words is not like the others, one of these words is not like its brothers.

Cunt.

Here’s the thing about the word cunt. I actually like it; that’s right, I like it. Its vulgarity and abruptness make it a natural complement for the word “cock.” They sound nice together, an aggressive shoulder-to-shoulder brawling clash of sounds. Cock. Cunt. They are hard, fast sounds, and they work for hard, fast sex.

Cunt. Cock. Fuck. Cunt. Cock. Fuck. Them’s fighting words. Thrusting words.

But “cunt” is also a political word. It holds multiple spaces in my consciousness; a word of female power, a word of reclamation, the word so dirty I didn’t even know it existed because no one dared to use it. A violent word, a feminist word. It is politically charged in ways that my sex is not.

Also, my sex is not always the thrusting rhythm of cunt-cock-fuck sex. This is the battle between technical and vulgar; no matter what words I choose I cannot escape being one or the other, unless I just want to be funny.

So those are my choices: technical, vulgar, or funny. That’s what sex comes down to.

Really, it’s all downhill from here.

Dick.

Horrible sound. “Dick” has all of the shortness of “cock” but none of the flavor. Also, similar to “johnson,” I really cannot get past the fact that this is a name. I don’t name my vagina. I don’t want to name your penis. It’s not a pet, for fuck’s sake.

Organ. (See also: manhood, member.)

What organ? His liver? Am I having a tender tryst with the man’s kidneys?

These words are like having sex through a hole in a bed sheet; distant and full of deniability. Words of coming of age stories and exclusive clubs that I clearly cannot join. In my head these words ring of the historical distaste that made women out as incomplete men. I have organs aplenty, but not the one that counts. My womanhood is innocuous and outdated, and as for membership, well, you get the picture.

Cooch.

No. Just . . . no. I give up on this one. I have no idea how people can stand to even say this out loud. It feels like sandpaper on my tongue.

From here we devolve into the obscure and the outrageous. I cannot create my own euphemisms to use in my erotic writing, precisely because they would be meaningless. Meaningless words are the least sexy of all; they are simply baby talk. Often reading erotica with made-up words makes me feel as though I’ve stumbled into a game of dirty Mad-Libs.

I get that some of us have moved beyond these hang-ups, although clearly I have not. I can talk about almost everything; I spent the beginning of Friday night regaling a complete stranger with my opinions on dildoes. I can talk about sex. And yet I feel hemmed in by these terms: cock, pussy, cunt, penis. I don’t like how they sit on the page. I don’t like that our sexual organs are weighted with such unsexy language.

I mean, coochie snorcher? What the hell?

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I read a post by Calico this morning that is full of righteous anger. If you’re taking recommendations for reading material today, put this one on your list.

I have seen that righteous anger before, wrapped up around a subject so touchy that even skirting its boundaries causes flares in the firestorm. I had thought to not write about my fantasies and rape play scenes, out of what I thought was respect but I realize now is simply my dislike of confrontation. I commented to May recently that I am simply not controversial enough to make for riveting reading material.

So this is not quite the post about having rape fantasies. This is the post about why I’m going to talk about having them.

It is argued that involving rape in our fantasy life or acting out mock parodies of it in our bed trivializes the tragedy. It is said that my fantasy is disrespectful, and I should shut the hell up.

This argument is based on rage and pain, and it is false.

Saying that having or acting out rape fantasies trivializes the crime of rape assumes many wrong things:

It assumes that everyone involved, the fantasizer, the arguer, and the audience, is incapable or unwilling to distinguish fantasy from reality. It furthers the misconception that thought is deed.

Thought is neither intent, nor deed. Think about the myriad logical problems of equating thought and deed; if thought were deed we’d all be dead. Pulverized. Space dust.

This distinction needs to be made. Not just in BDSM; everywhere, to everyone. Teach a child that having a fantasy does not mean they’ve consented to the reality, and maybe that child will grow up able to recognize rape.

It also, in a related point, assumes that the fantasizer doesn’t understand or respect what rape is.

I have never been raped. In a world where the right to speak out is gained through suffering, I have no right to speak. But I understand what rape is.

Rape: a girl sitting in the vinyl booth of a restaurant explained to me with a smile on her face that she’s sexually frigid because she was abused by a family friend when she was a toddler.

Rape: a young woman crying on my shoulder, telling me the story of her date the night before. He fingered her, she said no, but she was too drunk to stop him.

Rape: a lover who wouldn’t let me feel his anus with my fingertip, because he was gang raped as a teenager and the reconstructive surgery left scars he thinks are ugly.

Rape is not what I do in my bedroom on Saturday nights.

I have spent hours discussing what consent is. I have an awareness of the concept of consent that is not echoed in the public consciousness. The existence and purpose of safewords, the very first thing any good BDSM educator teaches, crystalizes the concept of consent into a recognizable, vocalized issue.

Why don’t we teach all children and adults what safewords mean? We ignore the issue of consent, assuming that our children will grow up knowing their own rights and the rights of others. We assume that “no” is a safeword, when almost any kinky person will tell you that you cannot assume your safewords.

We ignore or eliminate everything about sex and expect people to just figure it out. Tab A into Slot B, how hard can it be, really?

I am consistently amazed that BDSM organizations do not teach sex education. Perhaps the argument is that we’re not the right place to be teaching about sex, as a specialized culture with specialized skills. There are other venues for sex education. Where? I have to ask. Where are those other venues? How many kinky folks can swing a flogger, but don’t know how to use a dental dam? How many kinky people get regular STD tests?

How do we close that gap, the space between what we can teach about sex and what we can learn about it? There’s knowledge to be had on both sides.

As long as we don’t talk the gap is only going to get bigger.

The reality is that saying we shouldn’t talk about the place rape has in our fantasies and in our lives is a dangerous, damaging fallacy. Calling an issue off limits is ineffective. You cannot stop people from thinking. Saying we shouldn’t talk about rape fantasies is the same as saying we shouldn’t teach teenagers about sex. It’s abstinence only education for the mind, and it does not work.

Saturday afternoon I finally, after six years in this city, made my way to The Museum of Sex.

Currently the Museum of Sex is running an exhibit entitled “Kink.” Supposedly, it is about BDSM. In reality, it is about fetish. I would guess that the curator would not know why I make that distinction. I would in fact guess that the curator is not kinky. But that is all right. It was enjoyable. May and I read about mud and macro fetishes, about how domination and submission are expressed in wolves, and peered curiously into the yiff tubes of plush stuffed animals. I applauded the way the exhibit handled their section on rape play. I was pissed that their leather sample was made from fake leather.

We followed the dark back staircase up and around, and wound our way through the history of pornography in film. I got a crash course in sexploitation films, and kept having to pull May away from screens of cute boys having sex, often pictured with demin around their knees and surrounded by the remnants of tight white tshirts. On the top floor we wandered through a sampling of the permanent collection, stopping on a bench to watch a film on a man who creates brilliant animated robot sex.

“I would have that in my house,” May said, indicating a series of graphic sex acts done in holograms, so that the images appeared only from specific angles. I was amused watching people walk by them and jump in surprise.

“No,” I answered.

“Why not?”

“I hate holographic art,” I answered. Although really, the content would be okay, maybe for a bedroom, I thought.

On the other side of the wall I pushed a red button and grinned in glee when a fucking machine next to me rumbled in to life. “Hee! Awesome.” The security guard chuckled with me.

The museum itself was enjoyable, small, and worth a second visit after new exhibits come through. Far more entertaining were the people, a constantly flowing crowd, mostly my age, maybe a little younger here, a little older there. It seems that in my age group the common reaction to sex is still to point and laugh. I almost don’t know why I was surprised.

I watched the people migrate, yelping and jumping, pointing and calling to their friends. Come look at this, look at that guy, what’s that a picture of, how does this work, are those really robots?” And even That’s disgusting!

And most often of all: Eewwww. Gross.

Oh, right, I thought to myself. Outlaw culture.

As May and I were walking down 6th avenue after we’d been kicked back out into the night, I mused. “Places like that make me remember how strange we really are,” I said to him finally.

“Mmmhmm,” he answered.

The curious thing about being an adult is that I finally understand the subtleties of how the world sees children. I see how we’ve linked maturity and age, though I don’t always see why. And yet, where are the lines being drawn between sexual maturity and emotional maturity? What do we say to the people who’re fully capable of fucking all the live-long day, and probably do, but who still need to snigger and point at genitalia?

The people for whom sex is still a dirty, weird, amazing mystery.

In some ways I grew up so, so fast. Sometimes I don’t know if that’s a good thing.

Standing on the third floor of that museum, Saturday night in New York City, I was unable to shake the idea that I was surrounded by children. I haven’t felt so old in years.