Hi Darling Ones,

Last night I had a sex dream for the first time since I had the stroke in March. It was weird. The sex in the dream wasn’t weird. It was frustrating and with a man I dated about 1000 years ago, and the only way I could come is after he claimed he could fix Jane, which was apparently what I had named either my dishwasher or my air conditioner.

Sure, it was an unfulfilling sex dream, but a sex dream nonetheless, which is reassuring. Maybe. I’m not entirely sure.

I’ve been struggling with the idea of having a post stroke sex life, with sexual desire, with feeling desirable, with all of it.

At this point, nearly nine months in, it feels frivolous. I feel as though me and my body should have better, bigger concerns, more noble concerns, perhaps than orgasms and sex. Maybe you know, I should concentrate on being able to walk without a walker, or strengthening my knees, or balance. You know, something important like being able to carry something and walk at the same time

Yet, much likes the Lydia Loveless song, all I ever think about is sex and money. And not just because I’ve been listening repeatedly to “Nothing’s Gonna Stand in My Way Again” in its entirety every single day.

For real, all I ever do is think about sex and money, which is not entirely unusual. Pre-stroke I thought, read, and wrote about sex a lot. The money part is new and sucks. And some days I worry I’ll never have either of them again.

Not being able to work very much for eight months and surviving on the kindness of strangers and my nearly depleted savings has not been fun. However, once I get my vision back, I’m confident I can make money again.

But sex? I wonder how I will navigate sex with another person in my new body. I wonder if I will be able to put away the constant thrum of my brain that’s always shouting Oh my God, it’s so weird in here. We had a stroke and now everything is not right. This is not right. Our body is not right.

Will I be able to put that away long enough to have sex with someone else? Will I be able to feel desire for another person when I’m in their presence or will I spend the whole time worrying if my Floppy Scoop will be a boner killer?

It’s a lot to contemplate and it’s not anything I’ve written about because it feels embarrassing. Like I should be above this.

Whenever I start to feel guilty for thinking about sex, for wanting sex, for wanting to be desired again I remind myself of Gina Frangello’s excellent memoir Burn Your House Down. In it, she writes about having breast cancer and one of the medicines she has to take robs her of her orgasm. Her doctor chastises for wanting to stop the med because her orgasm is important to her and you know sex is important to her and the doctors like Really? and she’s like YUP!

I want to be like that.

I’ve thought about my body, being in my body, what my body can and cannot do more in the last eight months than I did in the previous 50 years in which I’ve lived in this body, which is saying a lot. As someone who is extremely tall and fat and deemed other because of this unusual body, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it.

And yet there’s more to think about, and different ways of thinking about this faulty, ramshackle body.

Love,
Jodi

P.S. For the record, I have not named my air conditioner or my dishwasher. But I do say, “thank you, refrigerator raider,” every time the fridge makes ice.

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This is the more I had to say about Sexy Baby. Apparently Friday is the new tomorrow.

P.Holt was a project manager when I was a copywriter at Jasc, a little software company in Eden Prairie. I spent an inordinate amount of time torturing him. In my defense, we all kind of tortured P.Holt with our sarcasm and insouciance. Also, we always called him P.Holt.

I have come to learn that P.Holt was one of the best project managers I ever worked with and the importance of a good project manager cannot be overstated. Too bad for ol’ P.Holt I didn’t learn this lesson until long after we parted ways. He was lost in the great purge after Hell, Inc. acquired Jasc.

P.Holt was really easy to torture, a caring dad-guy who was organized and just wanted things to run smoothly. We were a rowdy band of mouthy, opinionated, argumentative web workers. When not being an asshole about schedules and deadlines, I adored P.Holt. He was a reader, a passionate liberal, had two teenaged daughters he adored, and he had decent taste in music. I adored him so much I badgered him into taking a class at The Loft with me. It was my first Vodo class way, way back in 2003. But the best thing about P.Holt is that he was very kind, which is different than nice. Nice is bland, thoughtless, and easy. Kindness is about real, actual caring and thought. P.Holt was totally kind.

Now, as you may remember I am a freakishly tall fat woman. Have been my entire life. According to my baby book I was put on my first diet at the age of four. Growing up in the 1980s in America, fat was the worst thing you could be. At least it was the worst thing you could be if you were a white, lower-middle-class girl in the suburbs.

When my gaggle of girl friends started noticing boys there was a lot of worries about our bodies. We were of varying shapes and sizes and with them I would often bemoan my own fatness.

“You’re not fat!” My friends would say, while complaining about how fat they were. I would kind of shrug noncommittally and be quiet, secretly thankful for their lie. And this is the kind of conversation I had with friends, both male and female, for most of my life when it came to my size and anyone I was romantically interested in. My extraordinary size has always been an issue when it comes to romantic or physical relationships. It will always be an issue. However, since knowing P.Holt the belief in my own desirability has become less of an issue.

So one day I was chatting with P.Holt about a pretty serious crush I had developed on a man we knew. It was bad. I was like a schoolgirl all breathless descriptions of my crush’s beauty. His hands. His hair. The funny/smart/profound things he said. I could cringe a little, because I was in my thirties when this happened.

At one point P.Holt and I were chatting, online. Not like with our mouths but our fingers. He was in his cube and I was in mine. And the chat went something like this:

“Do you think he could ever like me?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.

And I stopped typing for a minute, because I wasn’t sure what to say next.

“Some men like typical women,” he said. “Some men are connoisseurs. I don’t know if he’s a connoisseur.”

It was something about the way he put it that clicked in my brain. He didn’t talk about my size explicitly nor did he point out my good physical traits (“you have such a pretty face” or “beautiful eyes”), nor did he tell me I would need to change to attract a man like my crush.

The fact that some men would like me just the way I am seemed like a revelation. I’m not sure why exactly, because I had experienced men who desired and liked me before. There was just something about the way P.Holt put it that crystalized the thought for me.

And while it didn’t happen magically overnight, after that conversation I stopped having sex with men just because they wanted to have sex with me regardless of my actual interest in them. I started putting more thought into what I wanted. And one thing that did happen overnight is that I totally stopped having sex with anyone who made me feel bad about myself.

The guy who complained about how long my back was? Never fucked him again.
The guy who said “uh, I’ve never, uh, been with a woman so big?” Never even fucked him.

And, this is why the labiaplasty in Sexy Baby, upset me so much. It reminded me of every single time some guy said something to make me feel bad about myself in bed & I was super mad at them retroactively. And kind of mad at myself too

But then it also reminded me of that conversation with P.Holt and that’s probably the best thing about the movie.

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Saturday I watched Sexy Baby which labels itself, “a documentary about sexiness & the cyber age.” The movie’s been knocking around in my brain since I watched most of it that afternoon. I say most because I went off the rails a little bit and stopped paying attention.

Basically the movie follows two women and one young woman as they traverse the minefield that is sexiness and the internet. The most interesting is Winni, a twelve-year-old when the doc opens, who has to deal with parents, Facebook, and the urge to look more grownup than she is, which translate to sexiness or slutiness depending on who the judgement-maker is. She says some wonderful smart things and is by far the best thing in the movie.

Nichole is a thirty-year-old adult film actress, stripper, and recently married woman wanting to have kids. Her story is sad because she’s struggling with trying to get pregnant and her husband comes off as not at all comforting or empathetic. The Nichole parts kind of bored me.

Then there was Laura, a twenty-two-year-old kindergarten teacher in North Carolina who was going to get labiaplasty because her first serious boyfriend made fun of her labia and told her she wasn’t like most porn stars and it would be a bigger turn on if she was.

If I could have one wish I would wish for three more wishes, and then I would use one of those to wish that any guy who says something like this to a woman would never ever get to have sex again. Not ever, with anyone, maybe not even themselves.

The comment this fucker said to her made her so self-conscious that this poor woman get a second job to pay for labiaplasty. And the doctor who performs it feeds right into her insecurity and I tried to firebomb him with my thoughts.

AND AND AND the worst part? Warning this is really bad. If you have a weak stomach skip the rest of this paragraph. They show the extraneous labia she has clipped off after it has been removed from her body. The doctor tosses it onto a medical tray. It’s gross. Feel free to vomit for ten hours. My stomach hurts recalling it.

Besides making me sick to my stomach the whole thing broke me right in two. She was so young and her mom went with her for the procedure, weeping the entire time. Her mom kept saying “I just want you to be happy.”

Ugh and thinking about it makes my entire body sag as though my bones were made of sadness. I wanted to reach through the screen so I could hug her and tell her there was nothing wrong with her body that it was lovely and perfect and anyone who would make her feel bad about her labia is not worth one millisecond of her time.

Incidentally, this was when I went off the rails, live-tweeting my horror & outrage.

The documentary is okay, more anecdotal than anything concrete. They only speak to the experience of three middle to upper class white women, so that’s a problem. Plus, all three are conventionally attractive as far as current western white beauty standards go. But it’s worth your time just for young Winni’s story. You can stream it on Netflix.

I have more to say about this, but it’s going to have to wait until tomorrow. Try to contain your excitement.

The post Sexy Baby & The Labiaplasty That Haunts Me appeared first on I Will Dare.

I am at the point in revising The Beast where I have to write song lyrics. As you could probably guess I know doodley squat about writing a song. Like nothing at all. Not even close. However, I didn’t know how to write a book either and I fucking figured out how to do that, right?

This impending lyric writing has me paying extra-close special attention to lyrics, which is saying a lot because I’m kind of a lyrics girl. I notice the words oftentimes before I notice the music.

Like right now as I sit in the dark and type, I’m listening to The Decemberists Greatest Hits and hearing all the great, great words Colin Meloy uses. Specifically I’m listening to “Los Angeles, I’m Yours” which has so many great words: orphans & oligarchs, truncated symphony, undies, dolor & decay, cranky, calamity. It’s bursting with great words.

So this afternoon I was listening to the new Jenny Lewis record The Voyager. It did not go well because in the second song my ears stumbled on this lyric:

?All the times we were making love, never thought we?d be breaking up.? a

My ears were so offended by that nonsense that they leapt from my head in protest.

“Making love” has got to be the gaggiest, grodiest phrase in all the land. It leaves me wretched, retching on all fours. It’s oogy and smacks of soap opera theatrics.

And, worst of all, it reminds me of this dude I used to canoodle who I really liked. He was super smart and funny and he loved Bob Dylan, like really a lot. This was a check in the pro column.

However, he really liked the phrase “making love.” I get shudders of horror just typing it. And what he really liked was to have me say and I quote “I love you” whenever things were getting really hot and heavy. I would often try to fudge it by saying “I love it” or some variation of that, but he was all “say you love me.” Ouch.

I always felt bad because that’s not a phrase I say lightly and, frankly, I did not love him. I might have grown to love him at some point, but at the time, not even close. I did, however, love it. That was not a lie.

And let me tell you, nothing turns down the heat like having a raging internal debate about the ethics of lying about love in the middle of sex.

That is all.

(P.S. that picture at the top of the post is a strawberry trifle Heather made for Rock & Roll Bookclub last night. I don’t even like whipped cream, but I dove face first into that thing and did not regret a moment of it.)

The post Thoughts Upon Hearing a Shitty Lyric from a Jenny Lewis Song appeared first on I Will Dare.

My mind is full. The messages are contradictory. I need to write today and I haven’t yet. When I get around to it, my main character Cora will buckle under the weight of responsibility.

I tried to avoid falling into the pit of news about the misogynist murder spree in California or spending hours weeping through the #YesAllWomen hashtag. And having failed at that, I started to share my own stories about being called a slut for saying no, being asked if my career was something I was doing until marriage, and how I was told to use my initials as a journalist to appear more credible.

Alongside all that is a recurring daydream about the man I hope to make my lover. It involves the palms of my hands, and his hipbones. Also the front door.

This is what it means to be a woman and a feminist and someone who has a hard time concentrating.

This started out as a post about laundry and in that post you’ll never see I included this: Sometimes I like to hide things behind blog posts with innocuous titles because I’m not as brave as I like to think I am. But I also do want to talk about laundry. That laundry bit is why there’s a picture of my just unearthed Superman pajamas at the top of this post.

I don’t want to talk about laundry anymore.

Instead, I want to talk about how last week over dinner Sister #2 talked about her work-friends bookclub. How in discussing the book the women in the club started sharing how they keep weapons next to their beds. Not guns, but bats and heavy flashlights, one woman keeps a small hatchet under her bed. The two men in the club were stunned by the revelations.

I told her how I don’t have a weapon next to my bed even though I live by myself, how it never occurred to me to have one. It made me feel naive or maybe oblivious. As I drove home that night I thought maybe because I am a woman of extraordinary size, a statistical anomaly a doctor told me once, I didn’t have the same concerns for my physical safety that smaller-than-me women have.

But today when I started tweeting my #YesAllWomen stories all these things started jamming my already full mind.

One time, in college, I got trapped in my dark bedroom with two men I didn’t know very well. They both tried to shove their dicks in my mouth at the same time. They stopped when I started crying. And I don’t think I ever told anyone about that until right now.

That man who called me a slut did so because I wouldn’t let him put his fingers inside of me on the front lawn of one of the houses I lived in during college. He lived next door. Whenever we’d run into each other at a bar or on the street he’d call me a fat, dirty whore. He told me I was lucky he even wanted me and I should have taken the chance when I had it, that now he’d never fuck me because I was so fat and ugly. At that point in my life I’d had sex with one man. Once. Only one time ever. I know I never told anyone that because I was too ashamed.

I hit a man once because he kept trying to wrestle my breast from my bra and shirt. We were in the front seat of his car. Eventually I had sex with him. Not that night, but a different night, because I thought I was lucky he even wanted me. The sex was awful. So awful that I never wanted to do it with him again. He often showed up at my apartment, unannounced, hoping for more. He wasn’t the first man to do that.

For a long time I wouldn’t tell men I was dating where I lived, exactly. It made some of my longer relationships a little tricky. It’s why I’m in the hoping to stage of making that man mentioned above my lover.

It’s why a few weeks ago when my next door neighbor relentlessly ding-donged my doorbell at 1 p.m. on a Thursday I was furious not only at the intrusion in the middle of work day but on his insistence of being answered. I put my statistical anomaly body between him and my home even though his body language said he wanted to come in and see for himself that my water heater wasn’t leaking and causing some sort of mess in his utility closet. Yet I’m the one who said, “I’m sorry. I’m working. I’ll look at it later.”

There is no pithy ending to this one. I’m tired now and hungry because I skipped lunch. I still haven’t written anything yet and I have to catch up on my daydreams.

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