The Cunt: The Mission, Should You Wish To Accept

Hi, there. I’m Steff, and I’ll be your pilot.

I seem to be getting new readers every day, and I wonder what their reactions are when they get here. I’d like to say a little about myself and what my little mission is. So. Without ado.

Who am I? Well, I ain’t your standard-issue sex goddess. I’m cute, but I’m more comfortable in jeans and a funky shirt than anything else. I ride a scooter. I listen to indie rock and know what the inside of a mosh pit looks like. I work with kids sometimes. I’m smart, I’m independent, I live alone, and I’d rather be single than in a less-than-filling relationship. I went to Catholic school as a kid, was elected to the student body in college, always had good grades, used to volunteer a lot, always have done well professionally, can work a room and schmooze with the best of ‘em, have never worked in a sex trade, haven’t had a lot of partners due to old-school ethics… Et cetera.

In short, I really am the good girl next door who likes to play a little bad from time to time. Any parent in the world would be thrilled to have me in the family, but god forbid they ever find the home videos.

As a result, being a do-gooder goodie-two-shoes for most of my life, coming to terms with my sexuality has been a long and hard path. I went through hellacious battles with self-esteem, with judgment, and with self-scrutiny. I wondered if giving head meant I was a whore. I was scared that being a hard-core lover girl in the bedroom would mean I’d find a $100 bill by the bed when I was through. I didn’t want to be this thing I had inside of me, this chick who wanted to tear into a guy’s flesh and devour him whole. It was dirty, wrong, and in God’s eyes, not something I should do. Sex was for procreation, not for entertainment, was the memo I’d gotten.

I was passionately religious in my youth, and it’s the case with anything I ever come to believe: I get behind it with a vengeance. Catholicism was no different. The Sound of Music was my favourite film (and I have the special edition on DVD now, heh -- "the hills are alive with the sound..."). I wanted to be a nun. (It’s why there’s a really sexy nun in the banner of this site. Hell, she gets me hot. I like to imagine sometimes that I really did it, I became a nun, and some man some where gets me so goddamned riled that I throw down my Bible and my rosary and take ‘im down then and there. Well, there’s always role-playing.)

I kid you not, man, but every time they spoke of Jesus getting spikes driven through his wrists, I had to sit on my hand ‘cos I could imagine the pain of stigmata. I remember the funny look my mother gave me when I told her that at the age of eight. She said, slowly, "Well, that's very... pious of you."

It was fucked. I was intense. I drank the Kool-aid, and then I learned about the world at large in my teens. I began reading about cults, about the myth of religion, about the world religions, and I learned all the similarities and all the fear tools. I began asking why a god who was supposed to be love personnified would make us bodies that could know such incredible pleasure, and then sit back and laughingly tell us it was a sin to know it. Not the god I had in mind, I thought. I started walking away from organized faith while swearing to keep the ethic (and I have). Then began the slow process of learning to get past guilt.

Then that was followed by this process of really owning my self and my body on my own terms, learning about sexuality. I began seeing what the lack of sexual expression seemed to do to all the old housewives and husbands I knew. I knew I never wanted to get old that way. And I wanted to be alive now.

I then explored my sexuality in the confines of my relationships, and was doing really well at learning about my more confident self inside.

But then, life. Life threw me a curveball, tossed me some death and depression, heartache and loss, and I gained weight, lost my sex drive, and with it, a lot of my will to live life as it deserves to be lived. Whew, I fell apart for about three or four years, into this horrible cavernous place of blackness, despair, and shame.

Then, whammo. Got into an accident, should’ve died, didn’t, realized I was the luckiest bitch ever, and a stupid one for wasting my life, got my shit in gear, began losing weight, got back into writing, and started having some serious experiences in the circle of life once again.

Rediscovering my sexuality* for a second time, after literally learning that whatever didn’t kill me made me better, stronger, faster, has been a fucking miraculous experience. Every week I’m a better, cooler, sexier chick who’s more in touch with who she was than seven days previous.

So this place is as much a record of my journey – but with certain details kept for my enjoyment only – as it is a reflection of my anger for having to have fought this hard this long to get where I am now. Women, when it comes to sexuality, are the victims of a system that has idealized the notion of sex without ever really talking about what the real components of it should be. Men, therefore, are victimized by a system of their own making. Funny how that works. We live in a society that fucking worships sex and hasn’t got a goddamned clue how to have it. This, my friends, is the Age of Irony.

And some of us out here on our sexual soapboxes hope to turn the attention where it needs to be – on the fact that this is an act shared between consenting adults using only what “God” gave them, their bodies. How sex ever became perceived as being so amoral is beyond me. It can be wildly fun, tragically passionate, incredibly tender… sex can be anything you want it to be.

If you only know what you want.

And I guess that’s what my goal is. To play a small part in helping people learn what they want. By writing positively in an everyday gal kind of way about sexuality and about sex acts that are normally written by people who are, well, a little more enthusiastic and lifestyle-ish about it, I try to take what some might consider exceptional sex back into the realm of the ordinary.

I’m just an ordinary gal with an extraordinary appreciation of sex. And I like to share. So, welcome to my world. I hope you stick around awhile.

*The interesting thing is, the more I learn about my own sexuality, the more I realize I need to know about others'. Every human body is unique, but there are commonalities of experience, and the more we learn about others' loves and needs, the more we're able to adapt to our own. It's when I stopped looking at just me for my growth that I finally began to grow. We need others. And sexuality, well, it's about others.