66 Days of No Sex challenge ended March 7, 2017

(Previous week about female masturbation here)

Result: Failed (technical foul on Day 55, but no sex during the 66 days)

Mood: Pensive

I was destined to have sex last weekend.

My roommate was out of town and I had the place to myself. After two months of sexual hibernation, I expected anthropomorphic woodland critters to rally around my bed at the strike of midnight and welcome me back to the lifelong dance party featuring the Horizontal Mambo.

Instead, on Day 67, I sent nudes to an old friend with benefits. The red arrow next to his Snapchat name hollowed.

“How many guys you send that to?”

“Just you.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Have I ever lied to you?”

“Probably.”

We were regulars back in the day. He earned my trust when I told him I missed him and he told me he missed my body.

That’s the kind of respect I prefer: honesty in intention, not sweetness in speech.

It’s crazy how a guy who openly expresses interest in strictly sex is perceived as less respectful than the smooth talker who habitually apologizes for not replying to your texts and flaking on plans. The charming non-boyfriend figure that hangs out with you every weekend but doesn’t want to label what you have, who tells you how much he enjoys your company as you wait for him to come around and want more than your weekends.

My regular didn’t tell me pretty things. He established a relationship of utility rather than appearances, and for that I owe him the standard I now have for a serious, long-term partner: the courage to be transparent about your desires.

“Will I be the first [after 66 days]?” he asked.

“Yes, congratulations.”

“Winner winner chicken dinner.”

He’s prideful. Always wanting to be my only, even when I’m not his anything.

I’m attracted to how indifferent he is toward me.

It’s such a turnoff when I meet a guy and he immediately caters to me—compliments me and warps his very being to accommodate me. I don’t see attraction. I see weakness in the form of a man so easily manipulated, not by me but by a woman’s presence in general.

I can’t date someone who lacks emotional or sexual discipline. I can’t date someone like me.

Spoiler: We didn’t have sex that weekend because he never followed up. It was our last chance—he left Boston permanently a few days later for a job.

I’m now batting 0 for 3 for guys I’ve been interested in (Week 6’s non-date, Week 7’s fuck-you-dead guy).

The longer I keep up my 66 days, the less voluntary it feels. I question whether this journey of self-discovery and sexual liberation was really just a narrative of a girl who couldn’t get laid.

It happens this way—the ones I like don’t like me.

Rephrase: I tend to like guys who don’t like me. I’ve damned myself to a game of cat and mouse, where I always have to be the pursuer. The problem is I like chasing mice more than I like catching them.

A few guys have asked me to grab drinks the past two months. That gesture alone makes me lose interest. I’m prompt in declining because I don’t like leading people on—it’s rude to let people be happy when they have nothing to be happy about. I’d rather be presumptuous and clear than passive and misleading.

For the record, I hate the connotation of meeting someone at a bar: the all-or-nothing dichotomy that the relationship will escalate romantically or dissipate completely, with no middle ground for friendship.

To combat this, I’ve started handing out my business card in lieu of my phone number. There’s no faster boner killer than a business card. You’re laughing and chatting it up, all smiles and shots, and then you whip out a 2×3 inch piece of card stock to really drain the blood out of Australia and everything else down under.

I wish I could put “killing boners” on my resume. I don’t need a certification, I taught the damn class.

A business card sets the tone of wanting to stay connected as people as opposed to providing a line of communication for a booty call. It’s much harder to draft an email that says, “hey what are you doing tonight?”

It’s been working well. I’ve developed a few friendships with guys who would have otherwise been lost in my contacts under pseudonyms like “Rum Guy” or “Jake from Saturday.” The further I can remove myself from situations where it’s okay to ghost someone, the happier I am.

Day 69: a Friday night.

A good friend invited me out to meet his best friends from school.

Admittedly, I love unpredictability. The thrill of primping and going out to meet strangers gives me good jitters. It makes me question if I’m prepared to be in a relationship. I love the anything-could-happen feeling, and I’m not sure I’m ready to give up that nightly sense of adventure.

Even with anticipation on high, I wore a backward baseball cap and dark purple lipstick because I didn’t expect to kiss anybody.

Handshake introductions, beers, and friendly bashing. I love how easy it is to break the ice with guys.

I was drinking a Cold Snap when my friend’s girlfriend came over.

“You vibing with any of them?” she asked, glancing at his group of friends. A decent bunch: good looks and better conversation.

“Which ones are available?” I laughed.

She spread her hands out across the dance floor.

“All of them.”

This is one of the things I’ll miss about the bachelorette life: the immense power of being the scarce female in a group of men. I’m the only thing on the menu tonight, boys. Surprise.

“I’m debating between A* and B*,” I said.

A* was sitting at the bar and B* was tearing up the dance floor.

“B* is really great,” she said. “I feel like A* could be douchey.”

“I think A* is more physically attractive, but B* is so funny. I love his personality.”

B* didn’t take himself too seriously. I appreciate when people are comfortable being the source of entertainment for a crowd. You can only derive so much happiness from looking at (or touching) an attractive person, and even that lives within a finite window of his or her age-based prime.

A good sense of humor, on the other hand, is a renewable fucking energy.

The drinks kept flowing and I lost count by the time we all went back to my friend’s house.

Funny people should be rewarded for bringing joy into the world, I thought.

I went to the bathroom, wadded up a few squares of toilet paper under the faucet, and wiped off my dark lipstick.

B* and I were rolling around on my friend’s bed, tongues in each other’s cheeks, senses spinning.

“I don’t want to have sex,” I blurted out.

We were having fun at the petting zoo, and I was already telling him about how my apartment didn’t allow goats.

“That’s fine, I—I didn’t think we were,” he said. “We can do other stuff.” He inched toward the edge of the bed and asked permission to go down on me.

Let this be a lesson to all: Always go for the nicer personality. Generosity translates to all aspects of life.

I wanted it. I don’t know what held me back, especially because he was a vetted prospect, the best friend of one of my best friends. This was exactly what I asked for a few days ago: an honest and familiar guy, saying yes to me.

“It’s okay, thank you.”

I said thank you. Like, “Thank you, kind sir, for your patronage at this restaurant. Please come again soon.”

Controlled eagerness is what I saw in him. He was a gentlemen about the disconnect between my actions and words and the other odd tidbits coming out of my mouth. We stopped touching each other as much, but still some. I felt bad.

“I don’t like it when guys like me,” I said.

“You’re a pretty girl.” He kissed me. “Guys are going to like you.”

“Let’s go back outside with everyone.”

“Okay.”

We slept on an air mattress in my friend’s living room. His other friends slept on the couch. Snores, a log of an arm draped on my side, morning like sabers through the blinds. I whispered I was cold so he would hold me closer. Throughout our drunken sleep, I rolled away and scooted back into his chest for attention.

Mouse in and out of shadows, waiting under clawed paws for the grip of life or death.

Read Part II: The 66 Days of No Sex Q&A

Day 65 of 66 Days of No Sex

(Previous week here)

Mood: Pleased

My friend with benefits closed my squeaky bedroom door behind us. He took off his baseball cap and wiped a sheen of sweat from his forehead, victim to the autumn’s dry heat.

“I was so bored today I jerked off like twice,” he said and flopped onto my bed.

“Yeah, I jerked off before you got here.” He raised a brow.

“Girls can’t jerk off.”

“Why?” I asked.

“…because you don’t have a penis.”

“You know what I mean though.”

“Why don’t you say masturbate?”

“It sounds so textbook-y. Like what you would say in sex ed. I like saying jerk off.”

He gave me that look whenever I did weird things like smell his armpits (I told him I liked the pheromones). We dropped the subject and did our business, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how women didn’t have the as many options as men when it came to talking casually about masturbation.

Wank it, whack off, jerk it, jack off. A million nursery rhyme combinations for guys going to town with their right hand.

And what do women get?

Flick the bean.

Perhaps the most underwhelming terminology one could think of for female self-love, especially when you consider that the clitoris has 8,000 nerve endings compared to the penis’s 4,000.

While guys refer to their privates as one-eyed sea dragons, soldiers, and even pork swords, female anatomy is reduced to pantry legumes.

We deserve at least a dignified salutation like Ms. Bean or Duchess Bean. But even then, I don’t like how female masturbation is classified as a dainty and graceful thing like blurry, soft-core porn where the camera man pans off into Naria like he forgot he was on set. 

“Flick the bean” would be appropriate in a world where I exclusively wore white lace dresses, frolicked in pastures, and drank afternoon tea with Mary Poppins, not a world where I am a proactive and assertive working woman who touches herself to get shit done.

Female needs and our reactions are just as intense (and dare I say common) as our male counterparts. Women should be able to speak as nonchalantly as our guy friends do about masturbation without resorting to dated and misrepresentative phrases like “flick the bean.”

So today, I’m officially coining the term “stab the cat” for female masturbation.

It’s spicy and playful like Taco Tuesday for your vagina, minus the hot sauce unless that’s your thing.

It’s an aggressive action word—because who doesn’t want to think about Detroit’s crime rate when they are pleasuring themselves?

Most importantly, it gives credit to female orgasms because when you stab a cat once, it still has eight lives.

The great thing about “stab the cat” is you can put your own spin on it:

• “My boyfriend was out of town so I cut up a full litter last week.”
• “I had some time before work so I killed Cecil in the shower.”
• “My fuck buddy asked if he could watch, so I ripped off my Tigger onesie said, ‘Meeeoooooww STABBY STABBY DOWNTON ABBEY.'”

I’m not trying to be ostentatious about my sexuality, which is the unfortunate default for any woman who talks or writes about sex. To me, masturbation is as natural as the desire for love and connection.

Acknowledging sex but not masturbation is like being okay with people eating, but then expecting them to pretend they aren’t hungry when they don’t have food.

It’s time we normalize female masturbation.

And as weird as it sounds, I think part of the problem is society oversexualizes the idea of female pleasure. Maybe overhype would be a better word.

When a guy admits he jerks off, he’s being honest. When a girl admits she stabs the cat, she’s a freak nasty pornstar who thinks about sex 24/7.

It shocks me when men are taken aback by how common female masturbation is—or better yet, how they react to a woman who owns up to touching herself. It’s comparable to me saying I pay taxes and someone responding with, “Wow, you’re so financially responsible!”

It’s not a big deal. And this disconnect in sexual liberation isn’t all on men. Ladies need to stop feeling ashamed. I certainly understand the average woman is not as vocal as I am and that is perfectly okay.

However, there’s a difference between being private and being apologetic about your sex life. To my closet feline abusers who may feel iffy about owning the masturbation movement:

You are human. You bleed from your crotch plus or minus 12 times a year, you eat fancy brunches then poop them out, and you are allowed to touch your genitals once in a while. Say it with me: I am woman, hear me roar.

***

Data is a beautiful thing, and so is the curing of curiosity. I knew people would wonder about this “loophole” for a girl who thought 66 days without sex was a dry spell. No way Connie’s going cold turkey….

So from Day 1 of my challenge, I tracked how often I stabbed the cat. It’s cool to see my physical urges visually quantified, especially when I correlate the data to how I was feeling each week.

The hardest weeks were 3 and 4. After that, no sex felt like a normal part of my life. On Week 5, I was so busy at my writer’s conference that I didn’t really allocate any alone time. I think that short break stabilized my libido for the remaining weeks. Aside from my technical foul on Day 55, there wasn’t much temptation or general horniness from my end, which brought me to nice plateau.

So there you have it: sex fiend to statistician in 65 days.

I’ll end with a gold nugget from a little bird. Last week, I heard a girl was upset with her boyfriend for liking my latest post—she thought my writing was too erotic.

No comment, but I love the idea of someone having to clear my blog from their browser history. Life goals I didn’t know I had ’til now.

After the challenge…

Day 61 of 66 Days of No Sex (date of incident was Day 55)

(Previous week here)

Mood: Amused/Disappointed

I’m splitting a pitcher of Budweiser with a friend and two of his buddies at Side Bar, a divey joint in the heart of downtown Boston.

“So you’re on what, Day 50 or something?” one of them asks with a grin like young Simba.

I met this guy a year ago at an ugly Christmas sweater party when I tried and failed to get in his pants. He left after we played a few games of beer pong. Our interactions after that were limited to a Facebook friend request and reciprocal picture likes. I’m surprised he’s aware of the challenge.

“Why are you doing it?” he asks.

I push myself away from the bar and sit up as if I’ve prepared something more polished than what comes out of my mouth.

”I just feel like I was doing a lot of dumb shit. Every person I was hooking up with was a mistake in some way: coworker, had a girlfriend, so on. And I wasn’t behaving in a way that was in line with what I wanted. So if I figured if I couldn’t have sex responsibly, I shouldn’t have sex at all.”

They always ask if it’s hard.

“The first few weeks, but then you get used to it.”

“And you can always touch yourself.” He doesn’t look at me when he says that, just hovers his hand over the top of his beer, rests his fingertips on the edges of the plastic cup.

“Right.” I take a sip. “You guys single?”

Of the three guys, two of them are, including Christmas party guy.

“I’m picky,” he says.

“Me, too.” I smile and hold my beer up to toast the early night. “Cheers,” I look at the taken one, “to your happiness.”

***

Literally two Budweisers later, I’m sitting on the lap of a blond dreadhead at Highball Lounge, sucking on the side of his neck because it felt so good when he kissed mine.

Two months without any real physical contact does wonders for heightening the senses—the baby hairs of his neck under my tongue, the brush of his thumb on my thigh. It’s euphoric.

Dreadhead and I shamelessly make out in one of the oversized armchairs, and I have no idea where my friends are or if they are watching my live action hypocrisy.

When I consume more than 2 ounces of alcohol, I act like it’s the first time I’ve ever encountered a member of the male species. 

Dreadhead whispers in my ear, “I really want to fuck you.”

I bite on his lip and press my cheek against his.

“That’s not going to happen.”

I’ve gotten good at saying that. I have to say it a lot at work when my prospective candidates have unrealistic salary expectations near the end of their interview processes.

The words sound harsh aloud, but putting hope to rest is one of the nicest things you can do for a person.

So I kill Dreadhead’s fantasies before he can tell me the details and explain the arbitrary 66 days and magical date of March 8^th. I don’t think any of it is sinking in, so I pat him on the shoulder and go find my friends. Exit right.

I rejoin Christmas Party guy at the bar. Another Budweiser. A leggy bartender walks down the length of the tabletop, and pours champagne into my mouth from what looks like a glass bong with the spout of a genie lamp. From that height, it fizzes into my mouth and splashes against my chest when she tapers the stream.

My spaghetti strap top is drenched, and champagne is dripping from my chin and the tip of my nose. I’m the lead engineer and the caboose of the Hot Mess Express.

I dab the wetness from my face and turn to Christmas Party guy.

“I think you’re cute and I want to kiss you,” I say. He gives me that shy Simba smile.

I don’t remember what happens  here, how we transitioned from acquaintances to physically familiar. He tells me we shouldn’t, but he lets me. It all happens fast.

I’m grinding on him in the dark and crowded dance floor, pushing him against the wall, grabbing him by the wrists and running his hands along my silhouette and down the front of my sticky, sequined tank top. And although he’s going along with it, I feel resistance in his muscles and a drag in his motions.

At this moment, I’m grateful that double standards are benefiting me as a woman.

Because if I were a guy forcing a woman’s hand over my crotch at a bar, it would be perceived as the rapiest thing ever.

As a woman, I get away with sexual domination in public settings, even when the guy is visibly trying to pump the brakes.

I also consider the hesitation is him protecting himself from the drunk girl who acts bolder than her sober self is willing to claim. He’s immersed in that grey area with me—kissing me back, still holding on to my hips as I press against him.

I feel powerful being the initiator, insulated by societal notions that I am never the predator, no matter what I try or how hard he pushes back.

In a brief commercial break from my own trash reality TV, I think about this season of The Bachelor. Who am I to judge Corinne for trying to fuck Nick on the 7^th date? I’m trying to fuck this guy on our 2^nd encounter. The only difference is it’s not on national TV, but should people really judge their actions based on how many people are watching?

Exit Highball Lounge. Christmas Party guy offers to drive me home, but we have a quick nightcap at Beantown Pub. He tells me I don’t have to finish it if I don’t want to. I tell him we don’t waste alcohol.

“I’m going to use the restroom,” he says. “You’ll be here when I return?”

I feel like a child, but he’s smart to consider I’d run away.

In the brighter atmosphere, we actually talk. He ended something serious recently. I tell him it’s a hard place to be, when everything around you reminds you of them.

“You’re not a bad-looking girl,” he says. “I just had to leave the party early last time.”

He’s not hitting on me at all. Rather, he’s reassuring me.

We walk to his car and I have to take my heels off on the way. The hard ground doesn’t hurt my feet that badly, but I complain because I want him to know I’m in pain. He offers to carry me and I say I’m fine.

It’s quiet. The windshield frames a 2-D world outside, while we’re in a cube of bright green and white lights inside. The car is moving now.

“I want to fuck you.”

Had I not heard the words earlier, maybe I wouldn’t have phrased it this way. But I want him now.

I want to fuck him dead (to the brink of it, not in the pre-existing state)—make love to him so relentlessly and mercilessly that he will cease to exist as a sentient person on this planet.

“I’m not that kind of guy,” he says. “I don’t do one night stands,” which is the worst thing he could have said because it only makes me want him more.

Tell me how long I need to date you then. Continued: the conflict of him wanting to get down on one knee and me wanting to get down on two.

“You’re so close [to 66 days],” he laughs. “You can do it, Connie. I’m not going anywhere.”

1) Did I just cockblock myself? 2) Did he just give me pre-sale consent?

“I saw you with that guy,” he says. The streetlights color his face in shadow panels as we cruise. “I knew you were wild.”

He doesn’t mean for it to hurt me.

I see myself in his passenger’s seat, almost like an out-of-body experience: Heels tossed on the floor, loose gravel stuck to the bottom of my blackened feet, wishing I had packed my bank statements or annual reviews, anything to show him I was a fully formed adult and not the girl who was begging to fuck him.

This is the feeling I don’t want anymore. I’m disappointed that I make it hard for guys to see the sincere me. I don’t have any right to complain about fuckbois who don’t take me seriously when I act like a fuckgirl who doesn’t take myself seriously.

It means nothing to spark attraction, to grab someone’s hands and place them on your body. I’m the wild card, the girl that guys want in their hands to use, not the one they need in the endgame.

That’s because I choose to be the wild card.

Christmas Party guy idles his car outside my place, doesn’t fully park. He really did just want to drive me home. I don’t wash off my makeup when I get inside.

I’m pissed I am less than 2 weeks away from 66 days and I fucked it up. (This is a violation of Rule #2: not explicitly or implicitly propositioning for sex). All I had to do was keep my mouth shut. Be civilized, and not tell boys I wanted to fuck them dead.

It wouldn’t be so frustrating had I not gone so long without incident, had I not done so well.

I wanted to prove to myself I could change through forced habit, but tonight my character caught up with me. 

I’m going to be six feet under and my tombstone will read:

Here lies Connie Chan

Daughter, sister, friend, and writer

Who fucked them all dead.

I blame Budweiser.

Next week here!