Everything But.

Lately I've had a spate of everything-but sex. In the last three months I've had sex like twenty times and I don't think I've been properly (penisly) penetrated once. There've been orgasms aplenty, male and female, but all from hands or mouths or toys.

I guess this is supposed to be the ideal? Seems like one of the few things Cosmo and most feminists radical and non could agree on is that "foreplay" is the real play and that everything-but is better for women than sex. Even relatively enlightened sexpert-types often describe intercourse as something that women trade to men in exchange for receiving orgasms the genteel womanly way. Fucking is for boys, diddling is for girls.

And yet I can't help but feel unfulfilled being unfilled. Partly this is because of baggage: if a guy can't get it up for intercourse that means I'm not sexy and if he refuses intercourse that means he doesn't really like me. (Especially as popular wisdom holds that guys never refuse intercourse, therefore if it happens to me it must be really bad news.) Some of that's probably true, too. Not "augh I'm a warthog," but "I don't have a close enough relationship with anyone for them to be fully sexually open to me" really is true, I think.

Partly it's physical. Dildos and hands can give me the deep penetration and vaginal orgasms, but even just physically, sex is more than genitals interlocking; it's a full-body experience of muscles and sweat and hips and arms and mouths. Fucking is everything at once, pleasuring and being pleasured, watching and being watched, losing control of yourself as he loses his own control. Everything-but always feels like a dissection of fucking, a deliberate and piecemeal simulation.

And hell, maybe it is only a cultural expectation that "fucking is the only real sex," but I'm in that culture and recognizing it doesn't make it vanish.

Man, I just want to get fucked. Man.