Pregnant? No Thanks.

Last night, I took a really amazing yoga class that focused on appreciating the body during menstruation. The teacher talked about menstruation as a great opportunity our bodies give us to let go of whatever we're holding onto that we no longer actually need, whether it's physical, mental or emotional. I ended the class feeling a newfound sense of appreciation and love for my body.

Which is why I was so incredibly annoyed that I had yet another pregnancy dream last night! For those of you who are not cursed blessed with these dreams, or for those who may not be familiar with the concept, a pregnancy dream is your body's not so subtle way of nudging you and saying "Hey lady person, remember what you're evolutionarily supposed to be doing during this phase of your life?" Through conversations with other women around my age, I've found that this is actually a really common phenomenon.

My first pregnancy dream happened when I was in college, working hard while overloading on classes and not even a little bit wanting to be pregnant. I dreamed one night that I was pregnant and due pretty soon, but the weirdest part of the dream was that I was SO HAPPY that I was pregnant. In the dream, my pregnancy was all I could think about, and I was absolutely thrilled about it. When I woke up, I was actually a little bloated that morning, so I reached down in horror to feel a slightly rounded belly. I proceeded to have a minor freakout until my half-asleep mind could process the information that I hadn't even had sex with anyone in the last six months or so, so there was literally zero chance that I was actually pregnant.

Ever since that first time, these dreams have felt like a struggle between me and my body. Sometimes I already have a child and another is on the way, sometimes I've just found out I'm pregnant, sometimes I'm having twins! While I am not at all at a place in my life where I want to have children, my body is 26 years old and healthy, and it clearly feels like it should be making babies.

Here's the thing: I don't want to fight my body. I want my body, mind and soul to live in perfect harmony and always be in complete agreement with each other! I want them to dance and frolic together in a field of flowers while unicorns jump over rainbows. However, life seems to have other plans for me.

Just like every other relationship in my life, the relationship between my mind, body and soul is one of compromise. If I can't give my body babies right now, I will make it happy in other ways, with yoga classes and yummy food and plenty of sunshine and healthy amounts of sleep (when possible). And just like with every other relationship in my life, when there is compromise and healthy communication, it will ultimately lead to a deep and fulfilling relationship. And if any relationship in my life is going to be deeply fulfilling, it had better be my relationship with myself.

Celebrating Life Choices While 20-Something

Has anyone noticed that everyone in the world is getting engaged? It's like in the last six months, the rest of the 20-somethings got a memo that I somehow totally missed. I think it's so wonderful that people are choosing to celebrate their love and share their lives together, and also every time I see a new engagement on Facebook (thanks for those adorable popup notifications, Zuck), I want to pull my hair out and scream. Just a little bit.

So why does it stress me out when other people get engaged? Is it because I feel like I'm losing the rat race? Is it because I'm frustrated with the current state of my life? It's certainly not that I want to be engaged - I'm actually very happily single at the moment. When people get engaged, it seems like they have their lives together and are focused and successful. However, I've learned from talking with these crazy engaged folk that, generally speaking, they feel just as lost as I do being 20-somethings and trying to figure out this crazy little thing called life. So if we're all really lost little lambs in the woods together, why the unease on my part?

I was thinking about my strangely unreasonable engagement woes, and suddenly my mind started wandering and thinking about the things that I've committed myself to over the last few years. No commitments to people, pets, apartments, etc., but commitments to ideas. Like sex-positivity. And body-positivity. And feminism.

Which is when I came up with the radical notion of...(drum roll please)...LIFE POSITIVITY! Okay, I looked it up and it's definitely a term that's been used by all sorts of holistic living organizations, and I think that's awesome. But that's not quite how I'm using it.

Sex-positivity, to me, means keeping an open mind about sexuality and celebrating every person's choices (as long as they're consensual), even if they're not necessarily what I would choose. Body-positivity is about keeping an open mind about the diversity of the human body - celebrating people's choices to love their bodies at any size. So life-positivity would mean keeping an open mind about life decisions.

I don't want to be engaged right now. And that's okay. And it's also okay that friends of mine feel differently. And I don't need to feel pressured by that, because I can celebrate their choices WHILE also celebrating my own choices. Unlike in college, where everyone was pretty much at the same stage in their lives, now 20-somethings are all over the place. Some of us are in grad school. Some of us are getting married and having babies. Some of us are traveling the world. Some of us are earning millions. Some of us are living paycheck to paycheck. And that's all okay. I don't think any of these choices are inherently better or worse than any other. Also, each person needs different things in their lives at different times.

So gosh Amy, wouldn't it be way easier for you to be life-positive and celebrate people's choices without getting strange feelings when people who you knew as 5-year-olds are getting married? Yes, yes it would be easier. And I'm working on it one day at a time. I encourage you to do the same and embrace life-positivity in your own life! Let me know how it goes! Any stories about successes/failures/epiphanies?

Kink and Gender

I've been having lots of thoughts about gender lately. A lot of these thoughts came up a few weeks ago, when I had the AMAZING experience of touring Kink.com headquarters at the San Francisco Armory (this was so great - if you're ever in SF, do it!). For such a sex-positive, inclusive, really wonderful space, I was really surprised at the gender-normativity of a lot of their work. Just a few examples:

• They have two separate wrestling themed sites, one with male wrestlers and one with female wrestlers. Occasionally, they'll film with a live audience - the female wrestlers' audience is mixed-gender, but the male wrestlers' audience is exclusively male. The reason? Gay men watching the male wrestling site don't want to see women in their porn.
• The fourth floor of Kink.com is called The Upper Floor, which is a breathtakingly gorgeous, elegant space that is home to play parties open to the San Francisco kink community. There are a special group of slaves (BDSM submissive - it's a totally consensual arrangement that brings pleasure to all parties, so please don't be offended by the term) who are the slaves of The Upper Floor - it's the ultimate goal for slaves at Kink.com, and it's a very special honor to be in that group. Which is all women. Because that's what their online audience responds to.
• I attended a rope bondage class while at Kink.com. It was SO AWESOME and fun and fabulous and totally different from anything I'd ever done before! Also, all of the people who attended the class were in couples that were male-dominant, female-submissive. All of them. One of the women actually got annoyed with me when I suggested that some people might be turned on by switching power roles once in a while.

Okay, so here's my analysis. I totally get that Kink.com is a business, and as a business, they need to cater to their customers' preferences in order to be profitable. So I am completely sympathetic to their situation. I guess I'm just surprised, since a kinky porn site is already so far from mainstream, that their customers would be so very mainstream in their desires. I know that there's a market for gender-bending porn and porn that is inclusive to women and porn that promotes gender equality - I know because I work with that market every day. Unfortunately, it seems that those are not the people (or at least not the majority of the people) who pay for porn site access.

In my ideal world, a porn company would hear from their customers that they prefer seeing only female slaves on The Upper Floor, and they would say, "Too bad for you! We don't want to prevent our male slaves from being able to achieve the highest level of slavedom." Or if online subscribers preferred to only see male audience members at a gay male pornographic wrestling match, they would say, "Sorry! Sometimes women get off by watching men have sex, just like how some men get off by watching women have sex, and all of that is okay!"

The problem is, we are all socialized to see gender constructs as necessary and true. It's so deeply ingrained in us that even those of us who have rejected all sorts of other societal norms still get off on seeing men in dominant roles and women in submissive roles (and for many of us, participating in those roles as well!). It doesn't even mean that's necessarily what we like in life outside the bedroom - it means that these roles are so deeply embedded in our psyches that our minds interpret this kind of power dynamic as pleasurable. I don't even see this as an inherently good or bad thing - I just find it fascinating. The human mind - wow! And its effects on the economics of running a porn company. And how that can unwittingly contribute to reinforcing gender stereotypes in our society. I love how it's all connected. In a way, it's kind of brilliant to see the whole system and how it works through us. Thoughts?

Sex: Funny or Serious?

Which is it?? I don't know, a little bit of both, I suppose. This is a borderline I'm constantly running up against!

On the one hand, I think sex is one of the silliest things in the world! Strange noises and awkward moments abound, and I am SUCH a fan of awkward moments (I'm actually not kidding)! There's nothing better than super fun silly sex that ends with everyone rolling on the bed laughing (ROTBL?). And a lot of what I do at work is try to lead people to not take sex so seriously, and instead to be able to step outside the situation and laugh about it.

On the other hand, there are lots of people who come into my store and swing dildos around their heads and hit each other with floggers and laugh about sex. And that frankly pisses me off! But why? They're being playful about sex! They're having fun! Yes...and they're also totally disrespecting my work and the store.

So I totally think that sex is fun and funny and that it's awesome to be able to laugh about it. But laughing ABOUT sex and laughing AT sex are two totally different things. And while sex is very funny, it also deserves some respect! After all, it's the reason we all exist.

Frustrations of Teaching

At my lovely place of employment, we have a weekly workshop series. I didn't even realize that I felt like it was in a rut until this last month. In July, we offered a bunch of really exciting new classes about topics I hadn't seen taught before. They were incredibly well received and well attended, and I was fortunate enough to see all of them taught! It felt really fresh and new, and like we were really getting out useful information that we cared about, and I felt that the teachers were personally connected to the classes in ways I hadn't seen before, which was wonderful.

Then August came along, and it's sadly been back to business as usual. The last two weeks of workshops have been the same old topics taught in the same old way. This has been a bit frustrating and disappointing for me to see. I have lots of friends who are teachers (in a more traditional sense), and I have so much respect for them for a million reasons, but one of the big ones is having to start from square one every time, yet still maintaining enthusiasm for the work. I see all the same kinds of people with all the same kinds of issues come to my workshops, and sometimes it really gets me down. How many people in this city have I told now that it's okay to communicate with your partner, or that it's okay to have whatever desires/fantasies you have, or that no one kind of sex is more valid than any other kind of sex? Literally hundreds. Yet with every group, I encounter exactly the same hangups. Teachers, I'm sure you have the same issue with things like reading and math. Every time you teach a topic, it's starting over right from the beginning.

A more positive way of looking at it is that it's like solving a puzzle. You always want to help a person get from point A to point B, but the way you get there is different for every person. I suppose if I were working with people more on an individual level, I would get more of the benefit of that. Occasionally, I'll have a student who has an "Aha!" moment, which is very rewarding. I guess it just doesn't happen as often with adults as with, say, five-year-olds.

A big part of my frustration is that there is very little shared knowledge in the world when it comes to sex. With other topics, people can form unofficial "study groups" and talk about what they've learned. I know lots of people who are in book clubs where they get together and talk about lessons learned from the books they've been reading. This is a great way to collectivize knowledge and take advantage of not only the things you've learned, but also what your friends have learned. It's a rare group of friends, though, that will sit around and talk frankly about sex in a non-shaming way. People often talk about sex in a gossip-y way (who's fucking whom? what does that mean for this person? etc.), but not in a learning kind of way ("well, my partner and I were talking about this aspect of our sex life the other day, and here's the conclusion we came to. what do you think?").

I feel like we could get so much further as a society if we could just talk openly and honestly with one another about sex. It would certainly make my workshops far less frustrating. Of course, I probably also would not need to have a job anymore. So, thanks to all the sexually insecure people in America for...keeping me employed? Yikes.

Nontraditional Relationships

Oh, hey there blogosphere! Sorry I disappeared for awhile. I actually wrote a really great post the other day and didn't save it, and then my computer froze and it got lost forever :-( So that bummed me out for a while. But here's my recreation of that post, which is slightly less brilliant, but hopefully still pretty okay.

Despite what Facebook may say, there are three main relationship statuses that are actually considered "normal" by most people - single, in a committed monogamous relationship, and married. All three of these options are great ways that people can define relationships to themselves and others. However, as with everything else in life, when we try to fit the vast variety of human experience into a severely limited collection of narrow boxes, much of it doesn't fit! Which leaves lots of people feeling dissatisfied.

After three years of working in an incredibly sex-positive, openminded environment, I'm only now beginning to explore how something outside of these three options might work for me. It's amazing that it took me so long to get to this point. But oh my goodness, is it a liberating feeling!

The key to breaking out of the narrow box system is, of course...communication! (I realize I'm a bit of a one-trick pony with this. But it's SUCH a good trick!) It's easy to say "Okay, we're married now, so we know exactly what the expectations are there." But marriage doesn't have to look the same for everyone. Maybe you prefer a nonmonogamous marriage - that's cool! Maybe you want a marriage that is sexually exclusive, but you can go on dates with other people. Maybe you want a marriage where you can have sex with other people, but only as a couple, not as individuals. All of these are totally legitimate options, no matter what conservatives might say! The thing about personal relationships is that they are PERSONAL, between people, so you and your partner(s) get to decide what each of you wants out of the relationship and come to some consensus about what works best for everyone involved. No social pressures involved, and no worrying about what's "normal." What a great gift! And what a huge responsibility!

The first things to think about are: what do you want to contribute to a relationship, and what can your partner contribute to you? It's pretty unrealistic to expect one person to meet all of your needs - emotional, sexual, physical, mental, etc. That's also a lot of pressure to put on each person involved and on the relationship. Why do you think the divorce rate is so high? Maybe there's someone in your life who you have excellent sex with, but you're not really feeling the emotional connection - do you give up the excellent sex just because of that? Or what about someone you feel a strong emotional connection with, but the sex is just eh? Despite what romantic comedies teach us, it is totally okay to have a conversation with someone where you say, "Hey, I feel really emotionally connected to you, but I'm just not that sexually attracted to you right now. Can we work with that?" Who knows, maybe they're feeling exactly the same way!

You might say, this is risky! People could get hurt! Crazy Amy...

Yes, this is risky. So is life! People can get hurt doing anything - it might as well be while you're being honest with yourself and other people. But here's how to avoid getting hurt, at least a bit. Sit down with yourself and be really honest about what you want from a relationship and what your boundaries are. Do you want a partner to share your life? Do you want a companion to have fun with? Do you want someone really hot who you can bang on a regular basis? Do you want relationships with multiple people, and if so, how do you want that to work? Do you want to be by yourself right now? If you're being honest with yourself and others, and they're being honest with you, it's far less likely that someone will get hurt, and far more likely that you'll be able to figure out what style of relationship works for you. Wow, it's really amazing what a dose of open and honest communication can do for you!!

Celebrating Your Sexual Journey

I've experienced a lot of bachelorette parties this wedding season, and none of them were for me or any of my friends. They were all events I was working at, teaching at, etc. It's such a joy to be able to join in on people's celebrations, and it's fascinating to see how different people send off their friends into the world of marriage! A lot of them do it by getting drunk and acting stupid. Which is great! I totally appreciate the need to blow off steam and have a fun crazy night with the girls! I don't appreciate it quite as much when I'm trying to teach a bunch of people who are drunk and acting stupid, but on some level I totally understand it.

My favorite bachelorette party I've worked, though, was a bit different. There was definitely alcohol involved, and there was plenty of silliness going on, but the vibe was a bit different. A little more...shall we say sex-positive? When I arrived, the party was already in full swing. They were playing a game of documenting the bride's sexual history on a huge piece of paper on the wall. For each encounter (starting from her very first sexual encounter ever), the bride wrote her partner's name, how old she was at the time, drew a picture of the person's penis (hilarious!), and told the story of what had happened, while noting down relevant details like where it took place, specific fun facts about the encounter, etc.

The list was already quite extensive when I got there, and the best part was that no one was being judgmental at all. They were all so excited to re-live the bride's sexual journey along with her in a supportive, encouraging, and really fun way. When you're about to get married, what better way to celebrate than by remembering and sharing all the experiences that led you to this person with whom you plan to share your life?

Even though it's a totally archaic cultural trope, people still think of brides as virginal (note the white dress). Though some brides are virgins and are very happy about that, I think many, if not most, brides in the U.S. have had some previous sexual experience, which is such a great thing! Sexual compatibility is such an important part of marriage, and how are you supposed to know unless you take someone for a test drive? So I think it's so wonderful that this party was focused on celebrating all the experiences the bride has had that have led up to this exciting occasion. I hope she has a very happy marriage, and given some of the stories she was telling, I have a feeling she will!