Mind the gap

It’s interesting that you talk about this imaginary divide. I personally have tried to remove the lines from my mind between straight/gay and kink/normal. Currently I am in a monogamous relationship with a woman who is my wife and Mistress when we decide to play. I have often wondered what it would be like to be with a man under the right circumstances. It’s not a gay act that interests me it’s the experience of being with another man; to me the fact that society labels it “gay” has no bearing on my interest. To me people are people and I would find it just as interesting being with a man as I would some new fetish experience. I hope eventually society will evolve to the point where sex and love are allowed to be shared between people without societal biases influencing people’s expression of their intimate feelings. The expression of your rage at the situation with your “bits” is a perfect example. You were mad and felt like sharing it with people whom, lets face it, you already have a somewhat intimate relationship with even if it isn’t sexual with all of us. From the sound of your post there were those of us who didn’t like it, then there were people like me who respected it for the expression it was. I do look forward to your posts involving erotic encounters but what I really come for is posts like this one.

… I can’t help but notice the abject straightness of my life these days and wonder if I’m contributing to the divide…

Hmm, I don’t know about that. Your sexuality is what it is. If it happens to fit some societal “norm”, then so be it. If not, so be it as well.

I’ve had people pass judgement on me for being “too straight”, whatever the hell that means - but I cannot force my sexuality to be something it’s not. I’m straight and that’s the way it is. It doesn’t mean I’m going to limit anyone else in their sexuality. But just as I would not try to force mine on anyone else, nor should they try to get me to “accept my bisexuality” when I really don’t have any.

I have to agree with you that there is no going back. I too have started to realize that I know far too much about a lot of people who I never would have even met if not for my job. I was actually talking with a customer yesterday and he was telling me things about himself and his relationship with his wife, and afterwards he said, “I don’t know why I feel so comfortable telling you these things. You probably know far more about me than you should.” It is amazing what barriers come down in a buyer/seller relationship when sexuality is involved…at least for me, people tend to feel very at ease sharing a LOT about themselves, things they probably would not tell someone who was selling them books, or food, for instance. This has always fascinated me.

this reminds me of people accusing us of contributing to the happy hooker myth. our experiences are our experiences. recording them contributes to the spectrum. you can’t help that you’re a straight girl (hah-ha). unless you feel you’re not being true to yourself. in which case, that’s different. denying your self is the only way in which you would falsely contribute to the divide. i love you sweetie. even though you’re a lousy gay girl, you’re queer as all get out. money for fucking guys up the ass is about as far outside the hetero-norm as you can get.

My present primary relationship is with a bisexual woman. One of her “friends” giving her shit about being with a guy, and has even gone out and bought a domain and put up a crappy website (here)to question her bisexual street cred…

In response, I finally came out of the closet as a Lesbian…

In the end I had to come out of the closet yet again, as a sapiosexual.

In the end I come back to the reality that labels all suck. (but in a bad way) They tend to make sexuality just a disconnected part - somehow separate from the whole, and entirely codifiable as a known quantity, much as you would go into a store and say “I would like to buy 1 lb of coffee beans”

…the deal is that even when dealing with something as mundane as coffee beans, there is an infinite variety from which to choose… so all labels will eventually fail us.

…just be you… and let the labels slip off of you: encounter the world naked - free from the labels and entirely and uniquely yourself.

this is the woman we know and love… and the one we don’t get to know is even better still I’m sure…

No apologies necessary - unless you stop being you.

I think that, while the wacky-queer/genderqueer-kinksters do buy porn, we’re probably not numerous enough to support many porn careers, let alone sex-work.

As for you being ‘lousy’, sheesh, lighten up on yourself. If you’re a lousy queer, I’m sure many of us don’t measure up ourselves. If Picket fence, Log Cabin, Bush Voting, Republicans can be queer, you certainly can.

Having read the last few entries, it sounds like you’re undergoing a lot of self-discovery, which is good. Of course, I dont know you outside of the blog, and lots of other people do.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, I hope you can be happy with who you are, who you’ll become, and acepting of who you’ve been. It’s great fun reading what you have to say. Thanks for writing it.

What I’ve always found fascinating, and this goes for race as well as sex, is that when we try to “look beyond” or to “blur the line/erase the divide” between cultures, what really happens is we accentuate them. Now I’ve never been one to say, “let’s look at the world without color, or without sex (as a preference).” But then I’m not on the distinct other side either, calling out to embrace what you are and let it shine. I’ve never been overly certain where to classify myself in these ranks. I’m straight, no doubt about that. However I can have some feminine tendencies and have always preferred the friendship of a woman (yes, gasp, friendship without sex, even - for the When Harry Met Sally set) or with gay men (I’ve found many who have been very good friends and prefer most gay men to most “traditional” straight men). But that’s all to say that I’m not your “man’s man”. Clearly I’m not propagating the pink/blue dichotomy, but have I instead fallen into a new little nitch of the mainstream?

On the one hand we want a world of understanding and acceptance where labels don’t exist and we can all live in harmony, right? But on the other hand, who we each are, is what makes us… us. It’s why we’re individuals and if you homogenize our culture we each loose a sense of our identity. The contemporary gender gap has gone from a divide between two distinct sets to a series of crags running amok through society separating not only the large groups, but the husband from the wife, lover from the friend. The interesting thing I’ve found is you no longer have to take a giant leap to cross the one gap. Many of them can be stepped over; still others will make you trip and fall on your ass.

I don’t know a lot about sex work, Dacia, but I do know something about work and workplace psychology. Doctors, bartenders, carnies, car salespeople, cops, therapists, telemarketers, realtors, park rangers, and 10,000 other specialists who’s full-time work involves episodic contact with generally inexperienced customers have very similar things to say about their clientele. Compared to the “vendor” the consumer is typically very predictable, vulnerable in the sense that they’re often very easily manipulated, and strikingly unimaginative.

To a certain extent they’re all correct, but almost always the extent reaches only to the vendor’s domain of expertise. Be cautious about generalizing beyond that and you’ll do fine.

Reading this post again a day later I wonder if I didn’t miss your point. When I was coming into my sexuality the big benefit of bisexuality was supposed to be the freedom and flexibility it gave you to move from one interest to another as you saw fit. It obviously doesn’t work that way (see Jane’s acquaintance building a site to out someone else for being “insufficiently” bisexual) but I don’t really see how spending most of your time on one side or the other can invalidate one’s bisexuality. It’s like the flip side of the homophobic conceit that a single encounter with the same sex is all it takes to make you queer for life.

What you really need to do is perfect selling sex as hot dogs.

Yeah. Me too.

The other day I was telling my girlfreind how I’ve been feeling guilty, like I’m neglecting my duty as a force of social construction. She looked at me and she said, “Honey, you are a force of Nature!” which is nice and funny and true and great, but doesn’t change the guilt thing.