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Lusty Lady

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Friday, August 31, 2007

Where's my Tony Ortega rejection letter?

Thanks to Gawker, I get to keep reading about how everyone hears back from Village Voice Tony Ortega. I guess two-plus years of writing a column without ever taking a vacation means...nothing, but I already knew that, right? Glad to know that everyone else in the world gets a response. Whatever. I emailed him soon after he became editor with the note below, then, not hearing back, snail mailed two sample columns, one of which is below. The other was called "Bare Hipster Breasts" and had interviews with Bronques of Lastnightsparty.com and Richard Blakeley of Fleshbot as well as Lux Nightmare and others. That one I will try to pitch around. I guess the topic of "No Regrets" is applicable here too. Someday I still hope to publish a book of my Voice columns, but for now, the world is clearly telling me that fiction is where I need to focus.

Dear Mr. Ortega:

I'm writing to introduce myself. My name is Rachel Kramer Bussel and I wrote the Lusty Lady sex column for the Voice
(http://www.villagevoice.com/home/index.php?page=columnpage&column=Lusty%20Lady) from October 2004 through January 2007, when David Blum replaced my column with the Married, Not Dead column. You probably already have
plans for the sex column position, but I wanted to see if it would be possible to schedule a meeting to discuss the possibility of either writing that column or another kind of sex column for the Voice again, as it was a position I greatly enjoyed and believe I had a large audience of steady readers.

Thank you very much.

Sincerely,

Rachel Kramer Bussel


Hed: No Regrets

Dek: Even bad sex can be a good learning experience

“Abstinence is my choice . . . because I don’t want to have any regrets,” reads a poster on Ichoosemyfuture.com, a site sponsored by the New Mexico Department of Health to promote teen abstinence. Other reasons for making this choice (and do note the cooptation of the word “choice” from a site geared toward pushing not independent thinking, but one true way) include “Because I don’t want warts” (like I do?) and “Because my little sister looks up to me.”

The first answer brought up issues for me far beyond the ins and outs of modern sex education. None of us set out to have regrets, sexual or otherwise, but if we were to truly live a life of no regrets, not only would our daily existence be incredibly boring, it would mean we’d have no room to grow into our true sexual selves. In every other area of our lives we’re encouraged to find things out by trial and error, but sex, above even drugs, is supposed to be so sacred that we should strive never to make a mistake. That’s ridiculous. How else would I know how I feel about ice cubes up my ass (yea) or having my feet tickled while in bondage (nay)?

I would love to be able to tell you that I have no sexual regrets, that in my many years of fucking around, everything’s been fun and hot and enjoyable, but if I did, I’d be lying. I’ve had weird sex, awkward sex, uncomfortable sex and confusing sex. I’ve had sex to feel less lonely, to make a person like me, and because I felt I owed it to someone after they’d bought me dinner. I’ve slept with people only to discover how incompatible we really were: the guy who refused to go down on me after I’d done the same, the one who wouldn’t shut up about baseball only moments after he came, the girl who made me feel so nervous and inexperienced I couldn’t even tell her what I wanted, the guy who banished all talking⎯even saying his name⎯in bed. I brought a guy back to my dorm room once who desperately wanted his nipples clamped. I’d bought tweezer clamps, thinking they’d be used on me, but was intrigued enough to slide the silver tongs over his erect buds, only to find myself too squeamish to continue. Back then, I wasn’t quite the sadistic chick I am today. I felt stupid, though, like I’d lured him home under false pretenses, but I also learned that being a mean girl, at least at that point in my life, was a no-no.

It’s easy to look back on bad relationships and say, “Well, life would’ve been so much easier if I hadn’t slept with them.” Sure, but how are we to know this in advance? I’ve beaten myself up countless times over a guy I dated last year who I envisioned myself having babies with. As it turned out, he was more interested in hiring hookers off Craigslist than having a relationship with me. “I should’ve seen the signs, I shouldn’t have fallen so hard, why am I such an idiot?” are just the mildest versions of my self-flagellation. Those are probably natural thoughts to have in my situation, but can I truly say I regret starting up with him? No, because while we were together, I was blissfully happy. It’s tempting to forget about the hot sex, but we had that too before things went sour.

Sex can be a learning experience, and to expect every time to be perfect is to give sex too much power over us. Sex is messy, both physically and emotionally. It changes us, for better or worse, just as changes in our circumstances affect what we want out of sex. What turned us on when we were 20 may be very different from what us you on at 40, or 60. Does this mean we must regret what went before? It'd be easy to disavow our past sexual lives, but the same could be said for anything we did in the past. I no more want to fuck like I did at 18 than dress like I did at 18.

Abstinence is a valid choice for many, but it shouldn't be treated as the one and only answer. There’s value, too, in fumbling, stumbling, doing something that might embarrass you later, or might rock your world. Chances are, good sex and feeling comfortable being naked with another person will take time. Knowing what your kinks (and your turn-offs) are is an important part of your sexual self-awareness, but hard to assess in advance. That image of you getting tied up and fucked by some anonymous stud may not be so hot in real life⎯or maybe it’ll be more explosive than you could’ve imagined. I’m not suggesting you run out and act on every sexual whim you’ve ever had, but I’d rather live with a few regrets than think wistfully about who I might have fucked, if only I’d been bold enough.

I’ve made tactical errors when it comes to sex, misjudging lovers⎯and myself. I’ve been lax about using condoms simply because my boyfriend was so persistent in his disdain for them and I wanted to trust and please him. I’ve ditched late-night deadlines in favor of booty calls only to be dropped like a hot potato when the situation was reversed. I’ve assumed a level of commitment that simply wasn’t there, only to find myself miserable when the object of my affection suddenly stopped calling. I’ve read and reread ex’s emails searching for clues about what I could’ve done better. I’ve felt self-conscious when my orgasms took too long⎯or didn’t come at all. But for every erotic moment I feel regret or embarrassment or anger or sadness over, at the end of the day, they make me who I am. Unlike some of my sex column writing peers, I’m not an expert in anything but sluttiness (and I say that with infinite fondness for that particular epithet). More often than not, I don’t know what I’m doing and feel completely uncertain about what my lovers are thinking about me⎯and that’s okay.

Women and girls, especially, are taught that sex is of such paramount importance that one misstep can send us down a path of doom, forever marked as bad girls and sluts. This either/or thinking only serves to shame those who wind up going all the way, when they’d planned on remaining “pure,” making them think that any instance of sexual impropriety dooms them completely. The big myth we hype with the allure of abstinence is that when we finally find “the one,” sex will be so perfect it’ll make us forget about the frustration of holding out. There are plenty of good reasons to put off sex, and for some people, that might work, but promising that waiting until marriage will mean no regrets is foolish. Imagine if we applied this policy to other areas of our lives: Would we ever get in planes, bungee jump, or take any kind of life-changing risks? You can play it safe, sure, but then you’re also missing out on the sexual shock and awe you might unlock inside yourself.

Along with my sexual regrets are many more sexual memories I treasure dearly. The threesome in San Francisco where a woman fucked me in the ass with a dildo while I had sex with her husband. Beating my girlfriend’s ass with a belt at a sex party, knowing she’d proudly show off the marks I’d left. Letting someone I barely knew slap me across the face⎯and liking it. Realizing the depths of my own kinkiness and rock bottom sexual needs feels like part of growing up to me, like learning to balance my checkbook (still working on that one) and cook a decent dinner (that too). I hope sex is always a learning process for me; I never want to feel like I’m so “been there, done that” about it that there’s nothing new to discover or enjoy. By that I don’t mean new lovers per se, but new feelings, new perspectives. In so many ways, sex is a high risk, high reward activity. I have some regrets, but I wouldn’t trade them in even if I could.

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