Pussy Talk

Amen

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 12:04:45 GMT

"It never ceases to puzzle me that, while men's and women's bodies fit jigsaw-tight in an altogether miraculous way, their minds remain wretchedly unaligned.”

---Taff Evans reflecting on his last night home before sailing into history on the Terra Nova.

After

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 21:27:42 GMT

M asked for doggie and I complied, bracing myself both literally and figuratively, letting him pound away and pretending to clutch at the sheets in order to egg him on, to speed it up, to make it stop.

It was ordered, mechanical, just so.

Not like you.

With you, it was organic, it was animal, not to say bestial. You'd brook no resistance. You'd be bulling me all the way up the bed and I'd be clawing at the mattress, striving to remain earthbound, trying to hold on and always failing, and you flinging me off into ecstasy in the dark rain of your sweat.

*****************

The suspender belt

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 16:24:02 GMT

A suspender belt, sheer stockings, say 10 denier, and heels were required wear.

He made no bones about this: show up without it and you go home. The colour he left up to me, so of course I chose black: black for playboy-bunny playful, black for provocation. Black for hot , fast, and dirty.

He met me in the hotel lobby and led me by the wrist to the room. After a short but hard spanking for a previous disobedience, he instructed me to make myself presentable.

The bathroom echoed with my every move as I undressed, unzipped my bag, fished the silky black nothings from their cellophane packaging, and coaxed them on, at one point bumping my head resoundingly on the towel rail. The stilettos, black peep-toes with an ankle strap, clattered on the tiles as I shoved my feet into them. One of the fasteners on the belt had been sewn on backwards, so I had to twist it to make it work. I prayed he wouldn’t notice.

There’s this thing about suspender belts: you always see them advertised with panties---they have to be, I suppose---but surely the whole point of them is to get fucked in them. The black strips of suspender and the lacy black tops of the stockings suggest, as bondage gear does, flesh contained, flesh outlined, flesh presented for enjoyment, for use even to the point of dissipation. A thong or panties gets in the way: you have to undo the belt to get them off or else fuck around them. I left them off.

One last check: I stuck out my tits, sucked in my tummy, and dared to look in the mirror. You must understand that I am no longer either young or slim, and I had feared that I would look, well, silly in raunch. I didn't. I looked like a fucking babe.

As my lover said a little later, The belt frames the cunt so beautifully.

Not to mention the upraised arse.

*********************

November rain

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 11:13:34 GMT

A day like this is fit only for sleeping too late, rising slowly, making a perfunctory stab at washing and dressing, eating without paying attention and with not a little irritation---say, a peanut butter sandwich while stood up in the middle of the kitchen---, curling up all afternoon in a daddy chair reading Leonard Cohen and chain-drinking strong tea with mug after mug going cold, until shadows loom up in the corners like the monsters of childhood and threaten to swamp the room---the hour when people like my husband who hate this time of day rush around tutting and turning on lights (sitting here in the dark, for godssake!), but when people like you would finally arrive after a long journey through the deepening dusk, take me to bed, and fuck me and fuck me and fuck me all through the moonlit darkness until we make the sun rise.

*************

Art project

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 13:12:43 GMT

Thumbing through my sketchbook, he stopped at a drawing of my bare feet propped on the coffee table and crossed at the ankle.

The line was minimalist with a splash of crimson watercolour on the nails, and both the pose and the colour no doubt recalled one of his favourite photos, the one he took of my feet in peep-toe heels hoisted against the door of the hotel room.

He said, I like this. Then he turned to me and said, Would you do me a drawing like this, of you?

A naked self-portrait, in other words.

Et voici my current project. It's so simple: you just strip off, grab your materials---I'm using a charcoal pencil and in lieu of a big sketchbook, a clipboard stocked with chopped-up newsprint---and strike a pose in front of the mirror. In fact, you don't even need a mirror: you can simply disport yourself on the bed and scribble away, knowing that you are gaining valuable practice in foreshortening while making some very lively drawings indeed, especially if you keep your non-drawing hand busy.

This getting back in touch with myself quite literally was part of the fun of naked self-portraiture: full-time work and a retired husband leave me with almost no time for self-pleasuring these days. Drawing my own breasts, belly, and cunt, I had to look and touch carefully, and dare I say extensively, in order to get the curves and contours the right shapes and in the right places.

All very stimulating and satisfying, of course, but most fun of all was the thought of my lover's face, and yes, I'll be honest, of his cock and how it will stir and stiffen when he opens this little portfolio of drawings and sees how shamelessly and how joyfully I have displayed myself yet again for his pleasure.

***************

Somewhere beyond the sea

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:51:43 GMT

An anniversary of sorts: four years ago today, on a stretch of beach none too deserted and in full view of assorted beachcombers, tourists, and dog-walkers, my lover swept me into his arms for the first time and kissed me like I'd never been kissed before. He took my breath away then, and he does so still, every single time.

***************

Reverie

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 07:58:45 GMT

Last night you had me restrained at wrist and ankle with my legs spread to each side, on some kind of upholstered bench that was just the right height for you. A fucking bench, I suppose.

I was immobile, exposed and helpless.

You were wearing your suit, the dark one, the one that makes you look dangerous, with the jacket unbuttoned.

You had my nipples clamped.

I thought you would drive me mad: you fingered and tongued me at your leisure, repeatedly bringing me to the brink of orgasm but never letting me come.

Not until you unzipped and fucked me so hard I exploded with you.

******************

Right of spring

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 20:45:54 GMT

It's been a long time since he touched me---with a real touch, I mean, not a furtive brush of fingers across a table like prisoners at visiting time, but the naked bulk of his flesh moving onto mine, his palms on my breasts, his belly to my arse, his cock to my cunt.

It's been a long time, far too long. Life has intervened in all its irritating pettiness, and for now we are constrained to meet for the occasional coffee, or quick kiss if we're lucky, and always for the banter that sustains us, that makes the broken whole and the blind see. Perhaps we take it for granted, he and I, but together we have a sort of genius: from the raw grey stuff of twenty minutes on a park bench, we can conjure up a secret fastness against the hustle-and-bustle of shoppers and traffic, a private oasis shimmering and tense with passion.

And sometimes there’s more, something closer to what we crave: pain, and an echo of ecstasy.

Last time, without warning, he gave my nipple a savage tweak. I gasped. “You hurt me!“

“Yes,“ he said. “I love you so much I want to hurt you.”

Every time he tells me that, I remember the first time: how the fear swelled and rose to a crest where it hung trembling for a split-second before it broke over itself in a huge joyful and cascading wave of relief. Yes!! Yes. At last. Yes, I love you so much I want you to hurt me too.

He ordered me into the bushes then, spanked me hard, let me touch his cock that was reared up hard and thick in his pants. He left me with my head spinning, my arse burning, my mouth dry and my cunt wet, I was that hungry to straddle him right there in that public garden, and all around the cock songbirds squaring off and the frog ponds bubbling and roiling with spring.

It’s been way too long.

********************

Welcome home, big boy

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 20:51:41 GMT

I was ready even before he returned from his trip: scrubbed, trimmed, and polished, tarted up in sheer scanties with proper stockings and stilettos, ready for his enjoyment. I was there, waiting, when he came through the door. His breath was smoking in the cold. He stopped and looked me up and down. Shut the door behind him, put down his case, unfurled his scarf, hung his coat on the hook, all without taking his eyes off me. He didn’t smile.

“Bitch,” he growled. “Come here.”

One step and I was within arm’s-length: he lurched out, twisted his fingers in my hair, yanking me to him like a falling man clutches a life-line, kissed me hard, gulping at my mouth like a drowning man gulps at water. He smelled of frost, sweat, jet fumes, stale coffee. The wool of his suit was damp and scratchy to my belly. His fingers found me just the way he likes me, slick and hot.

He clawed what there was of the bra up, mouthed my nipples, and fumbled at what there was of the panties until with a curse he ripped them and flung them aside, in shreds. He didn’t touch the suspender belt and the stockings. He likes those.

“On your knees,” he ordered. “Take out my cock.”

He loves how I choke and struggle when he fucks my mouth.

But he’d been away a week. We had the whole night ahead of us, and he was too hungry to wait right now, so that was enough of that. He dragged me to my feet, whacked me back against the wall, and with his hands under my thighs, shoved me upwards, the better to pull me down onto him, to sink himself up into me.

I clung to him for dear life. Screaming.

And that, girls, is how to welcome a man home.

******************

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 06:55:13 GMT

What Emily said

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 21:29:27 GMT

Wild Nights – Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile – the winds –
To a heart in port –
Done with the compass –
Done with the chart!

Rowing in Eden –
Ah, the sea!
Might I moor – Tonight –
In thee!

****************

Where the bee sucks....

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 20:19:57 GMT

Here’s a big burly bee, up to his eyeballs in the petals, his great dark hairy body shouldering into the core of the flower, his tongue unfurling to penetrate the honey-cup that drives him mad. Gorging himself!

My lover’s appetite for cunnilingus has me thinking about the bee from the flower’s point of view. Like me, she unfolds her petals---pink, delicate, frilled, scented---to entice and delight him, spreading and displaying herself by tilting towards the light to look her brightest, her freshest.

Slow, slowly. This way, now that way. Come, my king bee.

He hangs in the air above her, aligning himself for the best approach.

Held captive by her root---as I am by cling-film or rope---, she is capable of only the slightest quiver, imperceptible to all except perhaps the bee who tussles with her. As he settles into the embrace of her petals and probes their satiny depths, his greed for her inflames her desire for him and they sway together on her slim stem in a delirium of colour and fragrance, gold-spattered, dripping with nectar, royally jellied, rocking back and forth as one creature, one bumbling and beautiful animal-vegetable-divine flesh.

It’s not the wind that makes them shudder so.

So what is a flower but a visual archetype of orgasm?

***************

NB. Yes, I know, I know. Worker bees are female, so properly conceived, this would be an allegory of lesbian love. Allow me my poetic licence.

And on a lighter note, let's not forget the inadvertent humour of early typesetting: “Where the bee fucks, there fuck I….”

***************

Lucid

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 15:45:32 GMT

Nested, stacked like spoons, we drowse on our left sides, his fore to my aft, my head tucked under his chin and his fingers making a lazy fumble between my legs.

I tilt my haunches back, like a bitch in heat. I can feel his cock jutting into my flesh, insistent and growing ever more urgent.

He pinches my nipples. With his other hand he angles me forward, gropes at my arse, finds the place, shoves himself home.

I’m wide awake, so why does this still feel like dreaming?

**************************

He's my brother

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:28:36 GMT

So Charlize has ditched her long-term partner because they'd become more like brother and sister than lovers. Clearly, and wisely, Charlize has ignored the trendy advice of Lori Gottlieb, who is suddenly famous for counselling post-feminist women to---wait for it, grrls--- settle for the man who's more like your brother than your Prince Charming. Grab your Mr Good Enough, aka Mr Right Now, and run for it, on the grounds that someone, anyone, is better than no-one.

Yep. Settle.

It's a code word for compromise.

Not the good kind of compromise, which you do with someone else in order to reach an agreement, but the bad kind, the kind of compromise you do with yourself in order to convince yourself that black is white, or that what matters to you doesn't really matter at all.

What Ms Gottlieb doesn't know---and how could she? She's still single at 42, a fact which apparently makes her some kind of expert on marriage---is that if you settle for Mr Good Enough, you spend the rest of your life compromising yourself beyond recognition.

You spend years, decades, trying to pretend that your realio trulio sow's ear is the silk purse of your dreams. You spend decades fucking a man you don't want to fuck because he's more like your brother, you know? Your life fades away into pretence, into mirage. Especially the part of your life you spend in bed with him.

And half a lifetime later, when the kids are gone and you're left staring at Mr Not Quite Right across the living room during the supper news and wondering where this unreality came from, and how it could have happened, you end up hating both him and yourself. Especially yourself, for not being stronger or braver, for not holding out, for not knowing enough to hold out, in the name of your own integrity.

Consider Joan Sewell on this. In case you've forgotten, she wrote I'd Rather Eat Chocolate, a kind of manifesto for women of low libido, of which unhappy band I am not one, alas for me.

In an old interview in The Atlantic, Sara Lipka posed this question to Joan:

Straight married women keep having sex out of generosity, you say, and that is submissive in the most personal way possible. What do you mean by that?

Joan replies:

Compromise is something all counselors and sexperts and most people say is part and parcel of a marriage. But there’s something about compromising your body—it’s a different category. If you have sex when you don’t desire it, physically desire it, you are going to feel used. Now, you can trick yourself for a while into thinking, “Well, I’m giving this to him as a gift from me. This is my loving gift to him.” But it’s like my friend Holly says, do it enough times, just do it enough times, and you’re going to build a resentment that’s slowly going to take over the relationship, no matter how much you smile during it.

********************

Dream

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:55:30 GMT

This is the dream: he doesn't have to hold back for fear of marking me. He can do it the way he's always wanted.

It begins when he puts me across his knee and uses his hand, for the heat, for the warm-up, as sportsmen say.

Erotic spanking is an art mastered by few men, specifically by those who understand that pressure is the key element, not speed or force. In spanking, as in any other kind of loving touch, the pressure of the hand against the flesh both expresses and generates desire, which manifests first and most obviously in the form of body heat. The object of erotic spanking is to raise body heat, and to this end, the touch is deliberate and measured, for nothing is to be gained by rushing: the hand must linger on the flesh with the fingers curved in close contact and the palm both absorbing and amplifying the heat of the blow. The pace of the blows must be calculated appropriately, according to the rate at which desire grows: too slow, and you leave her struggling to build momentum; too fast and you smother the flame with distress and fear, shutting her down and leaving her behind.

My lover understands all this implicitly. His pressure and pace are perfect, and perfectly judged to have me whimpering and squirming in no time.

The fine wool of his suit is slightly abrasive against my belly. He is, of course, still fully and impeccably dressed, because as Angela Carter notes, this is the most pornographic of meetings, the woman stark naked and the gentleman in his London tailoring.

At some point, it becomes necessary to push the woman to the next level, where desire mushrooms and overwhelms her. My lover identifies this moment exactly: I'm not sure how, and no doubt every woman gives her own signal. Is it the note in my voice, the catch in my breath? The look in my eye, the way my head sags and tosses? The way my hips rock expectantly, the slight sheen of sweat on my back? Whatever it is, when I display the sign he's looking for, he orders me onto the bed, to kneel with my face in a pillow. Sometimes he gags me, but this time, in the dream, no, because it doesn't matter how much noise I make. We are blissfully isolated and no staff will come running in alarm.

The belt clatters through the belt-loops. Remember, this is the dream, this is the ideal: he will mark my flesh with his belt, and every red stripe will be a sign of his need and his lust and his love. He will never draw blood and he will stop the instant I ask him to, with no recrimination and no game-playing. The belt doesn't work, even in the dream, without the kind of mutual trust that lets you put your life in each other's hands.

The pain is indescribable, but again, the timing is perfect: this is no mindless hail of blows. In my mind's eye, this is a dance: I see him advancing and retreating, sometimes turning or pirouetting: his pace is unhurried, even sedate. He gives me just enough time between, time to breathe, to gather strength, to brace myself. Time to let the blazing heat cool slightly and percolate through my hips and thighs. Time to anticipate what comes next, as he makes himself more obtrusive, more invasive, as if testing me for doneness: his fingers up my cunt and arse, his palms groping my breasts.

I see nothing, through tears, hair in my eyes, wet pillow in my mouth. At some point, there is rustling, shedding clothes. The bed dips: he is naked, behind me, over me, mounting me, his teeth on my neck, his breath in my ear, his hands everywhere. His cock just. Right. Up. There. And he's fucking me, shoving me ahead of him, juddering me to the top of the mountain only he can see, where he roars into flight and we are both hanging on to each other for dear life, falling, flying, drifting back to earth.

Afterwards, there are cool damp cloths, a healing lotion, and hundreds of restorative kisses while he holds me folded in his arms until the darkness engulfs us.

This is the dream.

***************

After the window

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 15:15:41 GMT

That came after the kisses and the spankings (first in, then out of, panties), but before the nipple-clamps, the cling-film bodysuit, and the freshly-peeled finger of ginger.

Just after the window, he pushed me onto the bed and unzipped. He intended to give me a foretaste, a little fuck, he said, just the head, just inside. A tease. He had my nipples so red and ruckled up so hard I didn't recognise them as mine.

Every time I wanted to come, I had to ask in a new way. "Please sir, fuck my ass?" And he would give me permission, because the rule is never to come without permission. When the heat of the ginger became too much to bear without writhing and whimpering, he distracted me with his cock, pressed it into my mouth, urging comfort, giving me suck. Upside down, the geometry works better because the angles become congruent: the upcurve of cock into downcurve of throat.

With time running short we built up to the final frantic fuck over several different positions. Each has its attractions, but bulling is always a favourite of mine, and not only for the busy swing of his balls and the joyful noise of his flesh slapping mine, but for the breath-taking, eye-popping force he can apply when he's on his knees behind me, pounding away at it.

Just before I had to leave, he pointed to his trenchcoat and said, "Put it on." Almost lost in it---have I mentioned that he's what you'd call a Mr Big and Tall?---I straddled him again. In a matter of minutes, he'd given me a lovely sweet, hot mouthful.

I love it when he tastes of me.

**************

One week ago

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:36:14 GMT

Ordered to stand at the window, I knew that drivers approaching the city centre from the south would have a clear view: we were only three stories up and the road descended a hill to the busy intersection where the hotel stood.

They'd see a woman's back, creamy-white and bare but for the black bra band---thank God he let me stand back on to the traffic: he'd fetched my breasts right out of the cups.

Motorists going about their Saturday errands would see me writhe, they'd watch my head sag, then jerk backwards. They'd note the strain across my shoulders as I supported myself on stiffened arms. They'd see the bra strap slip. It would take no effort of imagination to picture the man: he'd be kneeling or perhaps sprawling before her, his face buried in her crotch, stopping only to gasp for breath or to issue commands: Put your arse on the windowsill! Spread your legs! Wider!

The men among those drivers would lean forward and slack off the accelerator, peering upwards and hoping for a red, praying that he'd turn her around right there in the window with the whole line of traffic watching while her breasts swung and jolted up against the cold glass.

And when they saw him clamp his hand over her open mouth and her eyes bulge wide, they'd swear out loud because they'd know he was fucking her hard right up the arse, just like they would if only they had hold of her, the noisy horny brazen shameless little cockslut.

**************

Belle de Jour

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 15:04:34 GMT

So Belle has finally outed herself. Wow. A research scientist, it turns out. Whoda thunkit. We always knew she had a brain, of course, and we imagined she must be drop-dead gorgeous, but apparently, she is not only a superbrain, she possesses a "curvy" UK size 8 figure and a face reminiscent, from some angles, of Catherine Deneuve. Surprise surprise.

Anyway, you go, grrl. May that magic realist novel you've just written win critical and popular acclaim for its own literary merit, and not simply because Belle wrote it. Yes, I can be dizzyingly optimistic.

Seriously now: even though my intellect, appearance, and sex life are rather less stunning than Belle's, I've always felt a bit of kinship with her, if only for reasons of timing. When I started writing PT in January 2004, sexblogs were thin on the interground. In fact, Belle was pretty much it, and she herself had been around for only a couple of months. Since then, multitudes of sexbloggers have writhed their way across countless beds. Most gave up after a few posts, some stuck around for a year or two, and more got bored and started writing about anything but sex. A few of us have stayed the course, with more or less dedication.

Those still banging away and scribbling about it include that darling Rentboy Mon and Phil over at HotAction. Bliatz is gone, Chelsea is writing about other things, and Zoe was outed, and it's never the same after outing, is it? Lost and sadly lamented are John P Smyth at Viewing the Local Antiquities and that sweet devil Badman, who, though I blush to think of it now, was my first sexblogging crush in those heady early days.

To those of you who are still popping in for a look now and then, thanks for keeping my counter ticking over. Feel free to post a comment or email me---it's always lovely to hear from you, and I can promise you two things:
1. Pussy Talk will always be about sex, and
2. I won't be coming out.

Even though, and I add this quite modestly, mine may be one of the most astonishing sexblogging stories of all.

***********

Links:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6917260.ece

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6917495.ece

**********

One more sleep

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:29:15 GMT

Tomorrow we meet. You asked me what I want, and I know it doesn't matter what I want, but these are the things that have kept me up or awakened me from sleep all week:

you kissing me for a long time
kissing you for a long time
you making me strip for you
you ordering me to assume the position
you making me repeat the rule
you touching me and teashing me
you pinching my nipples very hard
you sucking my nipples hard for a long time
you examining and nosing and fingering and kissing my cunt
you making me display myself for you
you licking and sucking my clit while your fingers plunge inside, curling and stroking
you stuffing me with pearls and eating me when you've filled me up, then whipping them out in a great slippery whoosh!
kneeling in front of you and sucking and gagging on your great juicy-purple cock
nosing and licking and kissing your balls
you taking out toys and playing with me and hurting me
you wiping your wet cock on my face
you spanking me until I cry out, with your hand or a belt
you taking off your clothes
you getting ready to fuck me
you making me display my arse and my cunt to you
you calling me filthy little whore
you spreading my thighs and thrusting into me
you tossing my legs over your shoulders or holding them to one side and fucking me
riding you backwards and touching us where we join
putting my fingers up inside you to pleasure you
you bulling me, your balls swinging free and slapping against my cunt
you coming in me, in my cunt, you coming home to me and emptying into me and exhausting yourself upon me

**************

Well-conditioned

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:59:41 GMT

You'd think I'd know by now. After all, it's not exactly new anymore. You'd think that the past three years would have inured me to surprise and that the possibility of genuine shock would have diminished pretty much to zero by this time. You'd think I'd be conditioned.

Not a chance.

He still takes my breath away, every single time. And I'm not talking about lovers' trysts, about our scheduled secret meetings in hotel rooms when we get naked together for serious loveplay. Nor is this about those occasional rendez-vous we hastily carve out of afternoons between work and suppertime, when we grab a coffee or share a park bench for twenty minutes, friends as well as lovers.

No, this is simply about seeing him in a public place, not by chance but by arrangement. On Friday, I knew he would be there. I was expecting to see him there and I kept checking, but the moment I looked up---higher! my lover is delightfully tall---and met his eyes, my mouth went dry. We didn't speak. We couldn't have spoken without betraying ourselves, but we didn't have to speak. The look in his eyes was enough: to see him struggling to master the same impulses that he was igniting in me, to feel my body caving, melting, and opening to him just as his flesh stirred and swelled towards mine, to know that he was as hard as I was wet.

Every time is just like the first time we met, when he swept me into his arms and crushed his mouth on mine.

Come to think of it, I am conditioned. And I'm loving it.

****************

Love tokens

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 21:54:10 GMT

The thing we want most to do is the thing we can never do: for him to imprint himself fully upon my flesh, to mark me openly as his own with stripe and weal and handprint.

It’s not that he’s a sadist, nor am I a masochist, and this is not about inflicting or bearing pain for its own sake in the name of some cruel perversion. No, this is about exclusivity. For him, it‘s about owning and possessing the object of his desire, about claiming my body as his territory and about marking off with his hands and his belt the boundaries of his pleasure on my breast and belly and haunch. For me, it’s about being proud to belong to him, about giving myself up to him and giving him back as pleasure all the pain he is pleased to give me, and that pleasure is tangible: the very idea of me whimpering and writhing naked under his painstaking attentions makes him rock-hard.

But as much as we want to do this, we cannot, because we are each, in law and in practicality, bound to another. He must hand me back to my husband in good order, unmarked and to all intents and purposes untouched. (Not that he always has, of course. From time to time, and with a thrill of delight, I have had to hide a handprint here or a slight welt there, along with burns and scrapes on elbow or knee, and even the occasional bruise sustained in the fury of our love-making, for as he often notes, we fuck like tigers.)

So for now at least, we try to rest content with a kind of ritualistic enactment of our deepest longing, something more akin to Gawain’s symbolic nick on the neck than to the full-on gore of the Green Knight. Even so, the marks that fade by nightfall on the flesh are no less powerful as tokens of ownership and belonging, for the outline of every one is printed indelibly on the heart.

********************

In the reading room

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 15:07:12 GMT

I’ve been binge-reading lately, and one of my favourite reading-binge writers is Fay Weldon. The authorial equivalent of a triple gin and tonic, dry with just a hint of bitterness, effervescent with wicked humour, and ever so slightly medicinal, Weldon always packs an unexpected and thoroughly satisfying punch.

I’ve noticed that younger women of the smart sort seem to dismiss her as a crusty old feminist, but they should look again. Weldon in fact explores the boundaries of modern life to discover where women are “liberated”, as we used to say, and where exactly female sexuality parts company with feminist theory. And that’s where she gets interested, and interesting.

Here is Alexandra in Worst Fears meditating on worst-case scenarios after her womanizing husband’s death:

“That God was not good…..That the earth you stood upon shifted, and chasms yawned; that people, falling, clutched one another for help and none was forthcoming….That in receiving Ned’s flesh into her body, so often and with such a powerful awareness of love---so that it seemed to be far more than a physical excitation, a sacrament, a connection through to the source of the universe, the light which suffused all things, and was there, if you had eyes for it, in the glow of the sun against the stone walls, as well as in the dancing of butterflies---that in this she had been mocked.”

And here she is again, reflecting on the unwanted advances of her husband’s brother:

“He was not very adult, not very male, not very nice. He pawed and picked at her; he didn’t assault her or engulf her. He was a fly crawling over the skin, not a wasp stinging.”

Note the use of words like “sacrament” and “assault“: sex involves a kind of religious experience as well as violence. This is the sort of sex that Alexandra craves from an “adult…male…nice” man. She wants to be engulfed, stung, overwhelmed, transfixed. She wants, not bodice-ripping sex as titillation, but sex within the context of love so intense it makes a sacrament of every fuck.

Crusty old feminist? Nuh-uh. Which is why I binge on Weldon: not only does she write about sex from angles that are decidedly un---, or post---, or best of all, a---feminist, she also keeps it at the centre of the male-female puzzle, right where it belongs.

*****************

String of pearls

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 20:12:53 GMT

In the little black dress and the killer heels that bring my shoulders level with his, and with the pearls he gave me---the opera-length string of pearls he pushed into my cunt---looped twice to adorn my décolletage: thus I appear on his arm at the rather swish literary function in the decidedly posh hotel.

Faces turn to us, curious, wondering: Who’s that with _____? Walking tall and feeling twenty pounds slimmer, I’m wearing my face-the-devil smile. Do I look as lucky as I feel? Hands reach out in greeting.

He introduces me as a visitor, a friend of a friend, and a fellow-writer, but they all know, and he knows they know, and he wants them to know, that in just a few hours, in a rather nice room just a few floors up, when I’m finally wearing nothing but a sheen of sweat, he’s going fuck me senseless.

*******************

One more sleep, and a reflection upon Gerard Manley Hopkins

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:36:13 GMT

Even in the preparation, there is the thrill of arousal. Not that the preparation is in any way extraordinary, of course: I can’t afford to attract undue attention from my husband. No, it’s the usual girly stuff: shaving, trimming, smoothing, softening, getting rid of anything too prickly, bushy, or flaky. The thrill happens when I run my hands up my legs and higher, when I remember that tomorrow, this will be my lover’s focus, this is where his hands will play, not to mention his tongue, and eventually, the entire sweetly-labouring bulk of him and his cock, buried to the hilt in me.

So yes, I am meeting him tomorrow, and no, in all my primping, creaming, and fluffing, I neither aim for nor achieve anywhere near beauty-mag perfection. My skin has always been troublesome: blindingly pale and impertinent, it blooms algae-like in perverse freckles at the slightest touch of sun. In addition, the wear and tear of living is showing up as it never does in the magazine ladies, in clusters of thread-veins, incipient knee wrinkles, and silvery stretch marks.

Lucky for me, my lover does not expect air-brushed, botoxed perfection. Perhaps it is his poet’s eye or his forgiving nature, or maybe he’s simply old enough to have avoided the tyranny of the metrosexualist mind-set and its impossible, anti-human rule: all flesh, whether male or female, must be made hairless, firm and uniformly golden. He’s not into people as manikins, my lover, he’s into living, breathing, dappled things, he’s into things “counter, original, spare, and strange”. So if my skin is stippled with rose-moles and my belly too soft and creamy for fashion, he doesn’t care a fig. What matters is that everything works, that my nipples rise to his tongue, my arse flames to his palm, and my legs spread at his command.

And that’s enough to get me wet just thinking about this time tomorrow.

********************

After-images

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 20:21:42 GMT

Afterwards, when I closed my eyes, I saw you above me still, but in silhouette, square-shouldered and bearish, pummeling your way upwards to bliss for the second time, throwing back your head at the summit and roaring: BITCH! The day was so hot. Whatever did the maid make of those soaking wet sheets?

Afterwards, fresh and fragile from your arms and blinking in the sunshine, I wandered with the summer shoppers, mechanically seeking a few of the things on my list: a sensible bra, mushroom-toned hand towels, replacement watercolour pans in cerulean blue and Naples yellow (my essential sky hues, if you must know), a straw shopper to tote it all home in, all the necessary evidence of a four-hour “shopping” trip.

Afterwards, for hours, there were whiffs of you from my hair and cunt. Our shower notwithstanding, I fair reeked of you. I ached of you too: nipples sore from the chopsticks, skin burning from the flogger, ligaments screaming from the positions you ordered me to assume and hold, my whole body a living after-image of your desire.

**************