Who I Am and Why I Bother

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 writer. 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.

9 thoughts on “Who I Am and Why I Bother

  1. Mad Coyote

    Funny, not only does your post actually remind me of the difference between a friend of mine and I, but I happened to be thinking of that difference earlier today for an odd reason.

    My friend J loves porn. Loves it. Yet he would never seriously date, let alone marry an ex-porn star. Sleep with one, no problem, but a real relationship? NEVER.

    My take’s a little different.

    Myself, I like a woman to like sex as much as I do. Which is a lot. And if she happens to be that extra little bit nasty, all the better.

    To me, a woman who’s had multiple partners doesn’t say “slut” to me…at least not in a negative way. To me, it says that she probably likes sex a lot. And that’s a good thing, in my eyes. In fact, I prefer a woman with a lot of experience- she usually knows what she wants and what she likes, and isn’t so afraid to say so. Which makes in-the-bedroom communication that much easier (nothing worse than that sudden “stillness” when you think you did something she’s not comfortable with but she’s not forthcoming).

    So Steff, I say explore as much as you feel comfortable. In my opinion there’s nothing taboo as long as all participants are of (legal) age and fully consenting (though I have to admit there’s stuff you’ll never catch me doing- watersports and electroshock among them-). And keep in mind- I can’t be the only guy out there who feels this way. So I say enjoy the journey. ‘Cause it’s a fun one.

  2. scribe called steff

    Oh, sure, it’s fun, but there’re still STDs et al out there, and I do wish to remain on the cautious side of quantity.

    I’d prefer, personally, to find a somewhat emotionally, um, reigned-in (hard to explain, yes, emotions, but no to the conventional definitions…) sexually available relationship with one person. Lots of regular sex, good times, but not so many complications. Friends with benefits, I suppose, but hopefully a little more intimate and experimental.

    I’m at too tumultuous a place to decide on a relationship with someone right now. Conventions won’t work for me at the moment, so, we’ll see what I happen on.

  3. AlwaysArousedGirl

    Love your whole post, but especially the last paragraph. Part of the reason I’m trying to blog my way through a very cold marriage. I have to keep learning and growing in the sexual arena, even if (tragically) it’s not with my husband.

    Thank you. Oh, the new eye-picture is very nice.

  4. scribe called steff

    AGG — Thanks. Not a lot of feedback on this one, but I don’t care, I liked it. Glad you did too.

    Writing your way through adversity allows you to take so much more away from the negative experience, so it’s great that you’ve chosen to do something about it in that way.

    (And for all those others to take something away from it, too.)

  5. scribe called steff

    THANK YOU.

    Fucking people. Christ. I’ve read her the riot act, and emailed the system operators. I’ve been paid to be published on their site before, so I suspect they’ll respond and delete the plagiarizing bitch’s entry. Sigh. I hate it when people steal my work and pretend it’s theirs.

    Imitation is the strongest form of flattery? Fuck no. Geez. GRR.

    I love that, “For a 19 year old you seem to have gone on a really steep learning curve.”

    Well, duh. Heh. I’m 32 and I just figured that shit out. Christ. Do the math — if it walks like a duck… Heh.

    Thanks for taking the time and effort to make me aware of that, I really appreciate it.

  6. Anonymous

    I just stumbled on your blog a couple weeks ago and I have been going through and reading some of your posts. I really like it a lot. I would love to be as open about stuff as you are and know myself as well as you do. This post hit close to home for me especially. Your life story sounds a lot like mine except I’m only 23, so I’m still in the “trying to figure out my life and the point of me” phase. I am currently going through the dark phase that you described that you went through for a few years and it’s really hard. I am 23 but I just lost my virginity last year and I am still trying to deal with the guilt I feel about not having waited until marriage as I learned to do growing up from going to church. I have slept with other guys since then casually which have just made me feel even worse about the whole situation and myself. I recently took an HIV test at school and I am waiting for the results and although I have never had unprotected sex I am scared that it might be positive because God might want to punish me for having sex. I know this is all irrational, but I can’t help what was drilled into my head for years about what happens to girls who don’t wait. I took a lot of religious studies classes at my college and realized how subjective it is, so I just feel lost because I question my religion now which was really a huge part of my life. I saw all my other friends at college express themselves sexually and not have any qualms about it and I was hoping I could but it’s really hard for me to. It is really sad how our society and religions repress women, especially sexually. So, because of this and other issues in my life I am struggling to get out of a depression. Now I just feel really lost and I just hope I come out on the other side as confident and self-assured as you are with some sort of direction in my life. I just hope this period in my life ends soon.

  7. scribe called steff

    Hey, Anon…

    Those periods can go on for a while. The thing is, they start improving slowly.

    I don’t know what advice I can give you — except maybe if sex is fucking with your head, that you should avoid it for awhile. I stayed out of relationships when I was working through shit because I knew I didn’t have the emotional ability to just love on the run. I knew that when things went south, I’d displace my anger about life onto them so I could avoid the real deal. Something to think about.

    Aside from that, try to have positive experiences — get out into the world on your own if you can’t handle too many people at any given time.

    I was absolutely lost. I was angry. I was beyond depression, into despair. I just took the time, learned to love myself, and one day, had an accident that changed my life (but I wouldn’t recommend that).

    It’s not an overnight process. It takes some time. You need to be patient.

    What’s more, you need to realize that almost everyone I know was depressed at the age you’re at now. The early 20s are not the party everyone leads you to believe — it’s a fucked up time of your life. Hang tight. And don’t be freaked out that you’re wasting “the best years” of your life in depression — again, everyone I know prefers their 30s to their 20s. It universally gets better, babe.

    Hang tight. 🙂 Be strong. When you’re on the other side, you’ll be so proud of yourself — and rightfully so.

    (I also recommend talking to your doctor about your depression… I’m a tough woman, but there came a time when I couldn’t achieve any more on my own: I went on a really mild anti-depressant. A few months later, my life had trasnformed. It just took enough of the edge off that I could move forward. And admitting it to a doc makes it all so much more valid, and takes some of the “man, I suck, I can’t deal” sense of failure off of you. Depression’s a disease, and if it doesn’t lift, you need to seek medical advice.

    A great book: Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by the Pulitzer-prize winning author William Styron, about his descent into suicidal depression, and how he climbed back out. Check it out. Hope you see this comment. Thanks for taking the time to read me…!)

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