What it's like to be married and having an affair with an ex

That's the subject of one of my recent Elle.com Love, Actually interviews.



I'm sharing this because I'm looking for more women to interview anonymously about your sex and dating lives. If that's you or someone you know, please get in touch or pass along the above link or this post. I would especially like to talk to a woman who's dating someone at least 15 years younger or older than her, but as you can see from the topics below, I'm looking for all sorts of women to profile for this series, and I will repeat again that you can be completely anonymous. I've changed everyone's name except one who allowed me to keep her first name. Who am I looking to talk to? You can be a virgin or a woman who has sex with someone different every night, as long as you're willing to let me ask you some very personal questions about what that experience is like; I'm looking to interview women from age 18 into their eighties and nineties of all sexual orientations, those in relationships and those who aren't. Email me at ellesexstories at gmail.com and tell me a little about yourself and what you'd want to discuss. Here are the interviews I've done so far:

How sexual assault affected a married woman's sex life

A wife having an affair with her more well-endowed ex

Three weeks after giving birth, she's ready for sex

Life as a disabled single woman who's actively dating

A wife confesses to her husband that she's a BDSM submissive and wants him to dominate her

What it's like to have a spouse who's transitioning

Sex in an open marriage

My story "I Spy" in German is "Ich sehe was"

Last year I made my Black Lace debut, something I'd been working toward my entire 10-year erotica career. This week I got in the mail the German translation of their anthology The Affair. Turns out the German translation of my title "I Spy" is "Ich sehe was." Now please put out good energy/thoughts for me to get one of my anthologies translated! There are 30-something out there now and I think this latest crop of female erotica should have wide appeal. By my count, the book that just arrived (in stores any second), Fast Girls: Erotica for Women, is my 32nd print anthology. Woo-hoo! My fingers are officially crossed.

Affair sex vs. married sex from "Anatomy of an Affair" by Kerry Cohen

Hear Kerry Cohen (writing as Michelle Perrot) read from this piece and talk about the aftermath tonight, tomorrow and Tuesday in Eugene, Portland and Seattle. I'll post my Q&A with her ASAP because it's fascinating and I'm SO proud to have published this original, not-seen-anywhere-else piece in Best Sex Writing 2010. I hope we get a big showing from poly people because I think outspoken, proud people who are willing to grapple publicly with what it means to reject our fucked up culture of compulsory monogamy are truly sexual outlaws, which is the theme of the anthology. Actually, scratch that - it's the general public who needs to hear voices like Kerry's, to understand that you can be married, be a good mom, be a smart, savvy person and still opt out of monogamy and (OMG!) be happy.





From "Anatomy of an Affair" by Kerry Cohen:

I don’t want 1950s-style advice about “date nights” and lingerie and role-playing. I don’t want to “spice up my marriage.” I want rough sex. Dirty, spit in his mouth sex. Wet, disgusting, nasty talk about pussies and cum and fuck-me sex. The kind of hate fucking where afterward you can’t move. And the bottom line is that I don’t want that kind of sex with my husband, this man I love.

For a number of years, of course, I assumed I would forgo this sort of sex. It was worth it to keep my marriage intact. Marriage is about compromise. It’s about some degree of sacrifice. Honestly, if what I would have to sacrifice were something other than the sort of sex that most fills me, I’d be happy to oblige. But sexual desire is so intensely personal, so completely something you don’t control. I can’t just decide that I will no longer crave that sort of sex, and our desires don’t always fit well with the monogamy our culture demands.

The running psychological theory is that we eroticize what has shamed, hurt, or frightened us, that our “lovemap cartographic systems,” as described by John Money, the famous John Hopkins psychologist, are learned. If that’s true, it could be argued that I spent my childhood feeling helpless, unable to control the ways in which my parents emotionally wounded me. As the years went by I tried to control the world where it felt out of control. I pursued men vigorously. I yelled at them when they hurt me, tried to force them into being who I wanted them to be. These were the men I had the best sex with, the ones who wanted to make clear who was really in charge once we got in the bedroom, the kind who made me go blind mid-orgasm, who told me my pussy was so wet and their cocks were aching with need for me, who smacked my ass while we did it from behind. These were the kind of men I never would have married. I wanted to get married, to share my life with someone.

I chose my husband because he was not one of these men.

Read the entire essay in Best Sex Writing 2010, which is for sale from publisher Cleis Press and:




Indiebound



Amazon.com



Bn.com



Powells

Portland, I heart you

Portland has been nonstop - stayed at Hyatt Place, because I was antsy about coming to a residential neighborhood at 1 am sans phone, and had a lovely time. For $85 I got a giant room with couch and bed and there was a pool - obviously if I forgot my phone I didn't think to bring a bathing suit, but anyway, then I took the light rail to the Apple Store, got a new phone that is so fancy I barely know what to do with it, went to Saint Cupcake for a meetup, hung out with my friend Douglas who showed me some of the many food carts in Portland and we caught up.


Hello Kitty greeted me in the mall (I am a Jersey Girl at heart so of course my first stop was in a mall to get a new phone)

Then my friend Irena picked me up - I spent almost all of the summer of 1999 hanging out with her and her then-girlfriend having the time of our lives. Now she lives in a house that reminds me of a friend's in Silverlake, completely with cute little dog and guest room and we go to catch up and hang out with her wife and talk baby names, good (and bad) tattoos, cupcakes and life. And eat at Mio Sushi, where I was introduced to sushi pizza! Yum.



Tonight our pro-affair, pro-cunt sexual outlaw Best Sex Writing 2010 mini book tour with me, Kerry Cohen (Loose Girl) and Janet Hardy (The Ethical Slut) hits Tsunami Books in Eugene from 7-8, Monday night we're at Powell's on Burnside at 7:30 in Portland and Elliott Bay in Seattle at 7 on Tuesday (the latter 2 with free cupcakes). You don't want to miss it, I promise. I'll be talking about the book and what I think it means to be a "sexual outlaw."


Loose Girl author Kerry Cohen ("Anatomy of an Affair")


The Ethical Slut co-author Janet Hardy ("The Portal")

My sexting advice for Tiger Woods

I wrote a piece about dos and don'ts of sexting for Tiger Woods (and you!) at The Daily Beast.

Here's a snippet:

Don’t:

1. Ask who else she’s seeing

“Do you have a boyfriend” and “who is your new boy toy,” Woods asked Grubbs. Not only is it not his business, it sours the mood he’s trying to create. Keep your texts about the relationship at hand, not possible outside entanglements.

Dos

1. Start slow

This doubles as good advice when it comes to putting the first move on someone. Don’t leap straight into explicit language until you know that’s what the other person’s into. Woods and Grubbs were already seeing each other once their risqué texts started flying. David Borgenicht, co-author of The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, Dating and Sex, agrees. “Know your audience” is his first rule (this, I’d say, also applies to dirty talk). “Don't be overly blunt or crude if your sexting target is shy. When it comes to intimacy use double entendres and suggestive language rather than blunt statements of desire or graphic descriptions of actions you'd like to take.”

Read the rest at The Daily Beast (and be sure to check out the lively comments section).

There was a piece in The New York Times last week, "Text Messages: Digital Lipstick on The Collar," by Laura M. Holson and I really liked this part:

Sherry Turkle, a professor and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has studied interaction with technology for more than two decades. Unlike with computers, Professor Turkle said, consumers have a deeply personal connection to their cellphones, where they keep contact lists and family photos. “They carry them in their pockets,” she said, “next to their skin.”

One woman Professor Turkle spoke to for a study was so grief-stricken after she had misplaced her cellphone that she described the loss as a death. “People feel it is an extension of their body and mind,” the professor said, but, she added: “Like Peter Pan, we do not see our electronic shadow until it is pointed out to us. We assume it is not there.”

I really liked this image, and it made me think about how and why texts are more personal then emails, and how it's easier to overlook emails. Sure, maybe you're getting hundreds of texts a day, but probably not, and certainly on an iPhone, they show up differently than email does. Plus your phone is the only device that's going to receive that text message, whereas an email can be retrieved from multiple sources.

An affair that doesn't involve Tiger Woods

As you may or may not know, the theme of Best Sex Writing 2010 is "Sexual Outlaws," taken from Betty Dodson's essay of the same name (click above to read the introduction) that's in the book. In a week when affairs, Tiger Woods' in this case, are omnipresent in the news, let's have a look at a wanted affair, one that nobody is going to have to usher a major public apology for because its author is claiming it happily, lustily, and intelligently before it happens.



Here's an excerpt from "Anatomy of an Affair" by Michelle Perrot - I will have more information from the author about this very hot topic. Media: Best Sex Writing 2010 review copies are available now. Email rachelkb at gmail.com or Brenda Knight at Cleis Press at bknight at cleispress.com with your publication and mailing address.

I don’t want 1950s-style advice about “date nights” and lingerie and role-playing. I don’t want to “spice up my marriage.” I want rough sex. Dirty, spit in his mouth sex. Wet, disgusting, nasty talk about pussies and cum and fuck-me sex. The kind of hate fucking where afterward you can’t move. And the bottom line is that I don’t want that kind of sex with my husband, this man I love.

For a number of years, of course, I assumed I would forgo this sort of sex. It was worth it to keep my marriage intact. Marriage is about compromise. It’s about some degree of sacrifice. Honestly, if what I would have to sacrifice were something other than the sort of sex that most fills me, I’d be happy to oblige. But sexual desire is so intensely personal, so completely something you don’t control. I can’t just decide that I will no longer crave that sort of sex, and our desires don’t always fit well with the monogamy our culture demands.

The running psychological theory is that we eroticize what has shamed, hurt, or frightened us, that our “lovemap cartographic systems,” as described by John Money, the famous John Hopkins psychologist, are learned. If that’s true, it could be argued that I spent my childhood feeling helpless, unable to control the ways in which my parents emotionally wounded me. As the years went by I tried to control the world where it felt out of control. I pursued men vigorously. I yelled at them when they hurt me, tried to force them into being who I wanted them to be. These were the men I had the best sex with, the ones who wanted to make clear who was really in charge once we got in the bedroom, the kind who made me go blind mid-orgasm, who told me my pussy was so wet and their cocks were aching with need for me, who smacked my ass while we did it from behind. These were the kind of men I never would have married. I wanted to get married, to share my life with someone.

I chose my husband because he was not one of these men.

Best Sex Writing 2010 will be in stores in about two weeks and we are finalizing the 6-city book tour now (New York, San Francisco, Eugene, Portland, Minneapolis and Salt Lake City, with other cities pending).

You can also read more at the Best Sex Writing 2010 blog.

Available from your local independent bookstore via IndieBound or:

Amazon

Bn.com

Powells