Fifty Shades of Sexy

I often make a lot of observations on this blog about my single life and the unconventional choices I’ve made, such as my choices to eschew diets, reject high heels, ignore pressure to conform to certain fashion norms, and so forth. I often talk about how my sexuality expresses itself in untraditional ways that have nothing to do with these accepted conventions. I wanted to take a little bit to talk some more about my notions of sexuality.

Traditional expressions of sexuality can be great. They’re there for a reason. Many women in our culture have felt the power of putting on a miniskirt, a bustier, a lacy bra-and-panty set, or a smoky-eye-and-red-lip combination, and it’s a great feeling. Since I was very young, I have embraced these very classic avenues of sexual expression, and I still think they’re a great way to experience sexuality. They allow us to tap into primal veins of gender expression and our own fantasies about what we find attractive. From women dressing up as Playboy Bunnies for Halloween to newlyweds strip-teasing for their new husbands to the sounds of the Pussycat Dolls in their bedrooms, we should never underestimate the power of a new blowout or garter belt.

However, I don’t think we should be limited to these norms of sexual expression when thinking about or expressing our sexuality. So often, women feel pressured to live up to a beauty ideal that most of us just won't ever achieve. The pressure to be beautiful is harsh, and it affects our ability to enjoy gender norms. To add insult to injury, these gender norms often interfere with our ability to experience sexuality authentically. Every time I put on a miniskirt or a sexy smoky eye, I felt the rush that I associated with sex and sexiness. It was a heady and intoxicating feeling, and, for a long time, one that I couldn’t match.

There was one problem, though. My fantasies weren’t satisfying me. No matter how much attention I got, it wasn’t enough, and even considering that I wasn’t receiving the amount of suitors that I would have liked, my experiences with the ones I was meeting weren’t turning me on. It was amazing to me. To me, sex was a toy, and I enjoyed playing with makeup, clothing props, seduction modalities and the like. But, at the end of the day, when it came to actual relations with actual men, fantasy fell short of the reality of sexual expression. It was quite a disappointment.

It was at this point that I began to realize that my stereotypes and preconceptions of sexuality and sexual expression were primitive and inadequate. While miniskirts and smoky eyes still turned me on, and, judiciously used, were devastatingly effective sex props, I discovered that there was so much more to good sexuality and – yes – good sex. Today, I realize that sexuality is so complex and rich that it holds almost endless possibilities for arousal, and very few of them have to do with red lipstick or spike heels. For an example, please read Hanne Blank’s seminal essay “Confessions of an Unrepentant Cocktease,” from a compilation of essays called “Sex and Single Girls” published in the 1990’s, and then Google her picture. It is quite possibly the most subversive sexual essay I have ever read, and in a single blow decimates our culture’s stereotypes of what good sex looks like. If you would like a copy of it, write me at thesatisfiedsingle@yahoo.com and I will send (or give) you a photocopy of it.

Intelligence, sensitivity, articulateness, thoughtfulness, honesty, sophistication, kindness, and compassion are aspects of sexual arousal that I never heard discussed on MTV. I have come to realize that, for me, the process of sexual arousal involves many different layers of sexual expression, only a few of which have to do with pectoral muscles or a slim frame. In my experience, when I meet a man, the encounter marks a process of exploration which has very little to do with the metrics of predatory sexuality I described earlier, the aggressive and domineering seductiveness which our media teaches women to wear like a proud badge on our lapels. Instead, my experience of men, and particularly of men I am intrigued by, is a process of exploring them, their intelligence, sensitivity, articulateness, et al, and allowing the peculiar buzz of sexual energy, if it is there, to grow and grow until it engulfs the both of us like an aura of grace. It has very little to do with the shallow ego gratification of landing a “hot guy.”

Which is definite progress. :) 

Culture Vulture? Who, Me?...

I have an addiction to a publication put out by The Economist. Many of you are probably familiar with The Economist, an economic-political rag put out weekly. It covers the very latest public news in economics, business, and politics, and talks about everything from globalization to political instability to cultural shifts. It’s kind of like a more intense version of the New York Times. It’s really expensive, but it’s a wealth of information for everybody, from entrepreneurs trying to keep abreast of business trends to retirees wanting to know where to invest their retirement funds to mothers trying to learn about the Drought of 2012 so they can plan how to feed their families when the price of food goes through the roof (a soon-to-be-occurring phenomenon; search Drought of 2012 on the Economist website and be appalled).

However, The Economist also puts out a very little-known publication that is so obscure that I didn’t learn about it until several months after subscribing. Most people don’t know about it, perhaps because it’s not sold in the United States, only abroad. You can’t get it online either, like you can The Economist. The only way to get complete access to it is to buy a subscription, and it’s INSANELY expensive - $275 for a 2-year subscription, 8 issues. (!)  It’s so, so worth it though. The publication is called Intelligent Life, and it’s one of the only arts and culture magazines I know that is supremely, exquisitely worth its price.

The magazine profiles museum and gallery shows, works of literature, musicians, artists, dancers, even theories and ideas which titillate the mind and the senses. You would think that since the magazine is affiliated with The Economist, it would be dry and lifeless. But even for myself, an admitted lover of underground art and culture, it was stimulating and inspiring (granted, I have no animosity towards fine art or ballet; someone who does would most likely have a very different experience). As an example, in the last issue the magazine interviewed Sergei Polunin, formerly of the Royal Ballet. Widely accepted as the heir apparent of both Baryshnikov AND Nureyev and the most promising young star of the past seventy years, the magazine chronicled his struggle to accept his role in the ballet world and his battle with his turbulent past. Captivating reading. It’s available on the website if you’re interested, under Culture/More Intelligent Life.

The magazine also regularly publishes the seven favorite wonders of the world of various public figures. I recently read of physiologist and author of "The Spark of Life" Frances Ashcroft’s seven favorite places. One of them was “Any Ryokan in Japan.” I’ll let her describe why: 

To be honest, I much prefer my own bed! But if I have to choose a hotel my favourite would be a Japanese ryokan. Staying in one is such a different experience. It starts with a Japanese bath, which is small, deep and very hot—sitting in it, you feel your cares melt away. Then an exquisite lady in a beautiful dress comes and serves you delicious sushi and morsels of vegetarian food in your room. By the time you go to bed, you are feeling perfectly relaxed. I was once taken to stay in an old Japanese home in Shirakawa-go by a Japanese colleague. It’s like a Japanese version of Switzerland with Toblerone houses—triangular, brown and thatched. It was deep snow outside and there was no heating. We slept under mounds of quilts warmed by a hollow brick filled with hot coals. 

Mmm… the entire article was much more sensual. You’ll have to read it for yourself. ;-)

Leaving Manolo Behind

Today I was pondering something that I think about from time to time, something that nobody I know seems to have registered. I was contemplating what I believe to be the most socially significant fashion movement in the last 40 years of women's history, one that seems to have gone uniquely unnoticed by our media and by academia. To what do I refer? Yes, that's right. I am referring to the rise of - wait for it - GALOSHES.

I'm actually not sure what came first. If I recall correctly, around 2005 or 2006, high-heeled knee boots were in style - what we in the 'hood used to call "hooker boots." And then something changed, somehow - somebody got a flash of inspiration, a Vogue editor got a bunion, whatever. And some of the designers went from putting hooker boots on the catwalk to putting riding boots on the catwalk. I don't remember where galoshes fit in this picture, but I do know that by 2009, everybody in New York City was wearing flat-heeled shoes.

This is a revolution, not just for women's health, but, especially in the case of galoshes, also for women's souls. I used to wear high heels religiously. They made me feel like a real woman. I used to accept the fallen-off toenails and blisters as par for the course, the cost of modern femininity. The pain was something so seamlessly accepted that I hardly felt it, prancing around like a model down the streets of New York, my heels clicking authoritatively against the sidewalk. I recently tried on a pair of heels again. I couldn't walk more than a few steps without my knees buckling in pain. How did I ever accept such oppression?, I asked myself.

For the first time in 40+ years of women's history, and maybe longer, there has been a revolution. Women's comfort comes first. For all the bravado of 1970's feminism, burning bras and jettisoning makeup was mostly a political statement. This is not. This is a simple act of self-love. This is more about women than men. As we all know, it wasn't men putting the pressure on women this time; it was us. It's not men, for the most part, pinching hip flesh and complaining that we "need to lose 10 pounds" for the millionth time, or obsessing about whether we got highlights this month or not or got the right brand of expensive cosmetics. Men don't buy magazines that talk about Speidi and the Real Housewives. Men don't care if we wear flats.

We cared. And letting ourselves "exhale" is a huge landmark. The galoshes thing steps it up a notch. Not only can women be comfortable, they can actually dress utilitarianly, which implies that they can concentrate on things other than fashion. And, presumably, beauty. That's a trend I'll lift a martini glass to.

Dinner for One

Being single has allowed me to discover the joys of food in a way that I don’t think I would have had time to were I in a relationship. When I was with my former boyfriend, we ate out a lot. He was constantly taking me to nice restaurants – I remember going to an exclusive Italian restaurant where he knew the owner, an exclusive French bistro… oh yeah, the eatin’ was good with him. It’s pretty much been a constant that when I’m dating someone, I can expect some nice meals.

But one of the things I love about being single is the delicious privilege of being able to treat myself to anything, anytime, wherever and whenever I want to. My priority is me, and I'm the one buying me roses. Or chicken parmigiana, as the case may be. One of the greatest things about my life right now is that I get to come home every night and cook for myself. And I don’t have to worry about whether my boyfriend likes it or not, or whether he is hogging the kitchen. Let’s get one thing clear: I love to cook. There’s something visceral and inspiring about creating an artistic work whose purpose is to titillate the senses and nourish the body. Both the process of creating it and the act of consuming it are sensual.

I’ve been researching and exploring recipes with gusto. I am both a chef and a baker, so I have been taking advantage of my lust for both dinner and dessert. A sample menu. Recently I prepared a delectable dinner of vegan chicken marsala with spicy sautéed spinach and a special brand of rice pilaf that beats all the others with a stick. I finished it off with a slice of this low-calorie, low-fat carrot cake that I swear tastes better than the real thing. The secret is applesauce instead of butter or oil and soy cream cheese icing. There’s this recipe book – Low-Calorie Desserts for Dummies, I think it’s called, or something like that. I got it a long time ago. It rocks. You can’t tell the difference for most of the desserts.

The vegan chicken marsala was made with vegan chicken cutlets that I got from Whole Foods, drenched in just a touch of flour and pan-fried in canola oil spray. After frying, I added white wine to the pan, then light butter, lemon juice, and salt. Finished it off with some parsley, made the rice pilaf, and BAM! Amazing. The sautéed spinach is always the real star, though, and made from a secret recipe passed down by my Nigerian roommate. She knows so many flavors and spices that we just don’t know here in our country, and her culinary skills should be canonized. She sexes up fresh spinach in a way that I, whom spinach normally makes vomit, eat whole bags of. She sautés it in some vegetable broth until it wilts, then adds Goya Sazon con Culantro y Achiote, half a cube of chicken bouillon, a couple of cubes of pureed garlic, onion powder, and a bit of salt. After sautéing it a bit, she adds a teaspoon or two of extra virgin olive oil, sautés it a bit more, and it is SO. GOOD.

I have been trying my hand at shrimp scampi, stir-fried Asian noodle dishes, penne in cream sauce with portobello mushrooms and peas, beefy Angus burgers dripping with melted cheese, high-quality lettuce and tomato and onion, and accompanied with a side of spicy fries, moist banana-walnut pancakes with sliced strawberries and real maple syrup… :-) And it’s not just home cookin’. I’ve been taking the liberty of treating myself to a flaky croissant or pastry when I pass a particularly exceptional-looking bakery wafting confectionary smells out towards helpless pedestrians, a salted caramel mocha every once in a while from the barista at my favorite Starbucks who does them EXCEPTIONALLY, a delectable grilled-to-perfection hot dog with onions, sauerkraut and mustard from Gray’s Papaya on 72^nd and Broadway, famous for their crisp-and-salty dogs.

Am I a shameless glutton? Not technically. I have restraint, of course. I am a mature and responsible adult, and I mind my health and my weight. But that’s no reason not to indulge whenever humanly possible. When I am faced with an exceptional culinary opportunity, I have no shame in wholeheartedly partaking in the festivities. I balance indulgence with regular healthy meals (which I make sure are culinary pleasures in and of themselves), and enjoy my life. You only go around once. And I can’t afford to wait for another boyfriend to take me out for lobster risotto.

Not when I have the pleasure of cooking it, and eating it by candlelight to the sounds of NPR, myself. :-)

Learning to Love Yourself

Being in a relationship takes up a lot of psychic energy. When I have been in relationships, I have often seen my boyfriend two or three nights in a week, with a couple of calls in between. Your body almost hums with the memory and presence of your partner, even when he isn't there. It's a great feeling, one of the best. But it saps your energy for other things.

For almost a decade, I felt deprived because I was missing that primal hum. Part of it was the simple fact of twentysomething hormones coursing through my body. When you're that age, you're ripe for partnership and love. Often, the presence or absence of it is a constant presence in your life. But then again, now that I'm almost 32, I should be hearing the ticking of my biological clock, which should be making me even more hormonal. There's no doubt that I long for companionship. But something's changed.

Living your best life gives your soul a spark that animates every aspect of your life. I think one of the biggest things that was holding me back as a twentysomething was that I simply wasn't following my bliss. God wants us to partake of the very best things in life, and when you are living a dream, not having a partner is not so much of a burden. At this point in my life, I follow my bliss in everything, from pursuing my dreams professionally to having a pistachio almond ice cream cone whenever I feel like it. I no longer diet to please men, no longer torture myself with the heels, no longer waste my money on the expensive makeup or the time shopping for clothing that will hide my "size."

Instead, I eat chicken parmigiana, shrimp pad thai, steak frites whenever I feel like it (and do Weight Watchers several times a year to take off the weight I put on). I allow myself to relax in my clothes, to just be a normal girl in jeans and a t-shirt like everyone else, chillin' and comfortable in my skin. I indulge myself by doing the things that inspire and refresh me, going to see live dance, visiting museums, volunteering. If I want to, I buy an extra pillow for my bed, just because.

Not being in a relationship still hurts. But, in some ways, I am the person I am in a relationship with now. I am making love to myself in so many ways, nurturing and caressing every aspect of my soul, from my passions to my dreams to my purpose. It's a great way to live.

Sex: Proceed With Caution

Today I wanted to talk a little bit about sex. I think modern women have been fed such a bum line about sex. We grow up watching shows and movies where women and men play each other like violins, listen to music by pop stars who strut around like strumpets, live in a world surrounded by advertisements filled with painted half-naked supermodels hanging open like barn doors.

Naturally, most of us grew up believing that we would not wait until marriage to have sex. We were all – I know I was – probably “sex-positive,” meaning that we thought that sex was a good thing... unlike our ancestors, who believed it was a sin. Being sex-positive, at least for me, meant viewing sex as a toy, one of my most cherished ones. It was a tool, a plaything, something for me to exercise at will, to use at my discretion.

There was only one problem with this. Sex is not a toy. It is not a tool. It is a powerful, mercurial force. Sex is not a toy that we control, or a tool that we manipulate. It comes into our lives on its terms, and leaves its presence as it pleases. I grew up believing that my sexuality would be at my beck and call, that I would engage man after man, flirting with some, establishing relationships with others, wielding my sexuality like a bludgeon. I believed that I had the power to exercise my sexuality at will.

This was unrealistic. I was a woman, a mortal human being. I didn’t have the power to “exercise my sexuality.” As I entered adolescence and then matured, it became patently obvious to me, to my dismay, that my “sexuality” was not following the master plan. Sex was not a toy. I was getting hurt. And so were my girlfriends. In my case, the men simply weren’t coming. My sexuality was there, and I was ready for love, but I just couldn’t find the right guy, and the guys who were coming were there for the wrong reasons. It hurt. I thought I could control who came into my life and when, but I didn't have any power over when or where I would find love, or what type of love it would be.

My girlfriends were faring a bit better, but not much. There were boyfriends who were distant, boyfriends who were indifferent, boyfriends who were downright abusive. Boyfriends who cheated, mooched or stole money, forgot anniversaries and birthdays, ditched date night for Monday Night Football with the boys. Those of us who experimented with one-night-stands discovered that, contrary to Erica Jong’s concept of the liberating “zipless fuck,” promiscuous sex was often an empty and unsatisfying mélange of foreign bodies melding together, hands groping erotic zones clumsily, a perfunctory caricature of foreplay, and a sweaty body thrusting between the thighs, indifferent to our rhythms, pushing robotically until climax.

Some of you have undoubtedly had much better luck than my friends and I have. And yet I think I speak for most of us when I say that many of us have discovered that sex is not a toy. And we can’t control it. We can’t control who comes into our lives, and when. We can’t control what happens when they get here. And throwing sex wantonly into the mix is like mud-wrestling with a barracuda. Reading this has probably made some of you think about the experiences you’ve had. If I would be allowed to offer you any advice at all, it would be to RESPECT SEX. Respect sexuality. Respect romance. Don’t be wanton. Or you’ll get hurt. Like all my friends and I did, and almost all of the women I know.

Why Good Is Good Enough

It’s interesting. I’ve just recently realized something that I think is very important, something that I hadn’t realized was influencing me so much until now. I’m glad it occurred to me, because I think it has changed my life.

Until now, I hadn’t realized that I didn’t believe that being a good person was good enough to be successful in the dating world. This is something that may seem so elemental to some people, but for me, since I had social difficulties as a child, it wasn’t obvious. Looking back, I think that my difficulties led me to believe that some of the other people, who had advantages that I didn’t have at the time, disliked me because of the fact that I didn’t have those advantages. Now, twenty years later, I’m still operating with those handicaps. Tragic.

I realize now that I truly believed, on some level, that a good person is not attractive to a prospective partner unless they are also pretty, or smart, or successful, or any other of the “accepted” shorthands for good-looking in our society. I believed that the dating world operated based on who was more “attractive,” meaning who met more of the qualifications for those shorthands of privilege. As bizarre as it sounds, I believed that a good person who did not meet those qualifications would not be attractive to many people at all.

In point of fact, I believed that good people were not seen as desirable at all – as friends, lovers or even coworkers – unless they had some other “status symbol” trait. I didn’t think that being good counted for much. I now see that this was a direct result of my adolescence, when I was morally more upright than all of the people who surrounded me, yet suffered from the most ostracization, rejection and humiliation.

I now understand that, while status symbols may get you attention, just being yourself will get you all the dates you need and deserve. Being a good person is a great aphrodisiac, both for you and for the prospective partners who are just the right fit. You don’t need all the bells and whistles to be successful in the dating world, so long as you understand that being successful in the dating world doesn’t mean having a date every Friday night, or even every month. All you need to do is shine your own unique starry light out into the world, and be your best you. That will be so attractive to the men you were meant to be with.

In the end, there are only going to be probably three or four guys, maybe six or seven, max (for those of us who get ridiculously lucky), who we really get serious about before we marry, if we do. For some of us, it’s 1 or 2 over the course of our entire lifetimes. For some of us, we’re serial daters until we’re 70. But my point is that for most of us, there will only be a few guys who really touch our hearts. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have time for the trophy boyfriend who is there only to hang out with on Friday and Saturday nights and have perfunctory sex with afterwards. I did at one point. But I got bored. I prefer my own company now. And, frankly, I could REALLY do without the perfunctory sex. I require a little more from my sex life now. ;)

Being a good person is enough. It’s enough to fulfill you as a person and make you very attractive to the people you were meant to be with. That’s enough for me. :)