Me and my filthy mind

First off, let me clarify: If you don’t know anything about me and you’ve stumbled across this blog post, you should know that I write erotic romance and erotica. Apparently, that’s otherwise known as smut. Whatever. It’s fun. If you don’t like it, I’ve got two words for you.

Bite me.

Yes. It's a pic of a naked guy. Who's not twenty-two.
And it's my blog, so I can do this if I want.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I can get on to what I wanted to say in today’s post. And that’s simply this:

I have a filthy mind. I know this about myself. I’m not going to deny it. Yes, it’s filthier than most, I do believe (I could be wrong on this point, but I’m betting I’m not). Even if it’s not filthier than most, I write down some of it, and that puts me in a class all by myself. Well, me and several thousand other smut writers. But that kind of went without saying.

Anyway, I started trying to figure out how I got here, and I’m not really sure, so I thought I’d throw out some ideas and see where they went.

First off, I grew up in an uber-ultraconservative home where being humble reigned supreme and they were proud to tell you how humble they were. My dad wanted to be the most important person at the church, which led to him not only working in the evenings as the custodian there, but served an even greater purpose – it gave him a few more minutes a day away from my mother. I sometimes went with him while he worked there. There was a reason for that. Hang on. I’m getting to it.

I was an insomniac until I got pregnant the first time, at which time I finally learned to not only sleep, but to love it. Why was I an insomniac, you ask? Because every night, for hours and hours, I had to listen to my parents fight. What were they fighting about?

Sex.

She didn’t want it. He did it wrong. He said the wrong things. She felt like a dirty whore when she had sex with him. Blah, blah, blah. Remember: This was all coming from a woman who told me just a few years ago that the nurses in the hospital were idiots because they inserted her catheter in the wrong place. She thought she urinated through her clitoris. When I asked her if, like Kathy Bates in Fried Green Tomatoes, had she ever taken a mirror and taken a good look at the “wonder down under,” she promptly said, “Eewwwww!” End of discussion.

All of this said, here’s the interesting part: My dad was a porn addict. While he was telling my mother that he didn’t have the money to buy us shoes or to send us to the clinic when we were sick, he was racking up the porn magazines and hiding them in the HVAC registers all over the house. Oh, and there was a loose floorboard in the attic too. He wasn’t especially creative.

Would I ever talk to my mother about sex? Hell, no. I’d get something like this: “Yeah, you’re just like your father,” which, in some ways, isn’t all that bad.

But, of course, there’s the year he insisted on getting us a Super8 movie projector. Then he’d never buy us movies for it. You can only watch the same two ten-minute movies a couple of times and you’re over it. I always wondered why he gave it to us when he didn’t want to buy more movies. And then one day, in their closet, I came across his movie purchases. Disney they weren’t.

As I got older, nobody talked to me about sex except my friends, and most of them didn’t know any more about it than I did. Their parents weren’t real forthcoming either. Or they were way too forthcoming and, well, I won’t go there. Suffice it to say I got a lot of really skewed, convoluted misinformation.

I married young to a man who was interested in his satisfaction. Mine was never a concern. Yay me. Unfortunately, I also spent a lot of time around my mother (a thing I have since rectified). In doing so, I got to listen to her gripe and complain about my dad, what a filthy mind he had, how he was gross and disgusting during sex.

Friends, if you don’t think listening to your mother bitch about her sex life will affect not only your attitude about sex but also your libido, think again.

Here’s the thing I know about myself, though. From an early age, I was very sexual. I think I started learning about nipple sensation when I was about six. I didn’t find my clitoris until I was maybe twelve. I didn’t know what it was. I only knew that I liked it – a lot. There was something else I liked a lot too.

Boys. Oh yeah. I liked boys A LOT. Lots and lots of boys. I wouldn’t exactly call myself a slut, but it didn’t take a lot of coercion. Maybe a little liquor, but not coercion.

Oh, who the hell am I kidding. I was a slut.

So I slept my way through my later years of high school – after 15, with the boy who’d later become my ex-husband, the only way I can even tolerate thinking of him – and when we split up, I took on anybody I fancied. I had myself some fun. My ultra-conservative parents were appalled (well, one of them anyway). I, on the other hand, was having the time of my life.

It was during that period that I met Sir. He’s always claimed he was a virgin when he met me. He is an absolute, positive liar, of this I’m absolutely positive. I can tell you, however, that he knew NOTHING about sex. By the way, that’s bold faced, underscored, and italicized for a reason, indeed it is. Everything he knows about good sex, I taught him. Now he’s a pro, whatever that is, but yeah, he’s pretty damn fine. So stay the hell away. He’s mine.

Anyway, I raised two kids, worked full time, had a partner who, back then, was gone four weeks and home two (and I do mean gone, like leave-and-don’t-come-back, won’t-be-here-for-the-holidays gone), and sex was something that really didn’t mean a lot. Then the kids grew up, Sir’s work moved to a four weeks on/four weeks off kind of thing, and we were together more. It was torture. Not kidding.

Worse yet, I had no libido. None. It was gone. Plus, for those who don’t know me, I’ve battled severe clinical depression my entire life. Finally, in 2011, after burying four family members in 18 months and living through a summer of sheer hell on earth, I decided my life either had to get better, or I had to die. For reasons I cannot explain, I decided it would get better.

The first thing I did was go to a new doctor, one who actually did more than say, “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,” followed by, “Now, look.” I talked to her frankly. I told her that I had no libido. And I told her that I was depressed. She prescribed an antidepressant. I also went to a new gynecologist and told her that I had no libido, plus a lot of other symptoms which screamed menopause (I had a hysterectomy in 1983 and never received hormone replacement therapy). She started me on HRT. I started watching what I ate and working out. And something mysterious and wonderful happened. I don’t know where my libido had been, but it came back from its long, long vacation with some demands, namely “feed me,” “feed me,” and “feed me.”

But there was trouble in Paradise because, unbeknownst to me, the antidepressant I was taking had a horrible side effect: I developed anorgasmia. I don’t really want to explain that, so look it up. And considering that me and my libido were putting Sir through the ringer, god help him, it was devastating. I wound up at a women’s sexual health research facility in Nashville, Tennessee, and I’m proud to say that, after two years of treatment, I have a new “normal.” It’s not like the old “normal” (whatever that was), but rather is better in some ways and worse in others.

And now for my filthy mind.

Yes, I think about sex – a lot. I’m not going to lie about it. Hell, I’d better; I write about it. All my writing life I’ve heard it over and over: “Write what you know.” And I aim to do enough research to know exactly what I’m talking about when I write. Did some last night. Ha – WTMI! Whatever. But I do think about it a lot, and act on it too. Because of all this, I’ve learned some very important things.

One is that women really do think about and talk about sex more than men. They say a man thinks about sex five times every seven seconds. If that’s true, I don’t know how the average woman gets anything done except to say that women are exceptional multi-taskers, and you know I’m right. Anyway, I’d say I think about sex at least every seven seconds, maybe more. But I’m trying to write sex scenes, so I have an excuse. What’s yours? Oh, sorry. More WTMI.

Another is that women talk about sex more than men do. When my friend, lazy Hitler that he is, told me that, I scoffed. I also scoffed when he told me, “Guys don’t say boobs; they say tits.” And, with some observation, I discovered he was right. They also say “titties,” a word that just grates on my nerves, so don’t say it around me. I mean it. But I also discovered that he was right about the talking thing. We do talk about sex more than guys, and we’re way, way more graphic when we do. If you don’t believe me, come to a few author takeovers on Facebook and you’ll see.

Then there’s another difference between men and women: We can’t keep our hands to ourselves. I’ve seen several admonishments from authors regarding the cover models who sometimes accompany them to book signings, asking readers to please be respectful. One even said they’d appreciate it if readers didn’t grope the models and/or spend copious amounts of time telling them all the sexy, nasty things they’d like to do to the poor guys. Most of them are married and/or have kids, and they are super, super nice, friendly, sweet guys who don’t mind baring it for the camera but don’t especially want to sleep with every woman they meet. Apparently some women have trouble discerning “appropriate touching.” Frankly, I think that comes from a society where, as soon as they hit puberty, men are taught to keep their hands to themselves, but women are taught that guys like girls who are a little slutty. Problem is, we have trouble telling the difference.

And then there are the pictures. Oh, my god, the pictures. They’re all over Facebook, naked guys, half-naked guys, guys with cock socks, guys without cock socks, guys with full backal nudity. (Hmmmm. What’s the opposite of frontal? I’m not sure.) And gay porn. Oh, yeah, women like gay porn. I’m not sure why we do, but we do. It’s yummy. Maybe it’s because, as a general rule, gay guys pay way more attention to their appearances than straight guys. I know more than a few women who’ve had their pictures censored or even been blocked because of the pics they posted. Which is a damn shame, because I liked them.

Me? I try to show a little restraint. I posted a pic of a girl wearing a thong with a handprint on her ass that was obviously Photoshopped in and got a slap on the wrist. Asshats.

Put this all together, and you’ve got a bunch of horny, worked-up women running around, talking about sex, looking at porn, and grabbing the crotch of extremely hot guys (not me, I would never, never do that). Which has led me to an important conclusion.

I came by my filthy mind honestly. Fifty Shade of Grey was not made popular by male readers, although they’ve been looking at BDSM-themed pics in porn for years. No, it was made popular by female readers who either enjoy that type of sexual activity, or wish their guys would man up and give them that. And maybe they’re too shy to tell the guys that. Let me tell you, they’re not too shy to tell each other that – they’re talking about it ALL THE TIME.

Fortunately for me and my partners in crime, they’re reading about it too. There’s a lot of it in my books. Lazy Hitler read one and said, “There’s a lot of sex in there,” which prompted the discussion of tits and lady sex talk. I write it. I write it because Sir told me, after reading FSOG, “Honey, you write a lot better than this.” It's been very beneficial for our sex life, because I get to think about and write about this stuff all the time and make a little money to boot, so I fill page after page full of it as I chuckle and giggle and moan. He also knows me and he knows I can get that on paper, that moment when you’re teetering on the edge and you’re about to drop over. You know the one, where you’re writhing and crying out, eyes closed and rolled back in your head. The moment when you scream out . . .

Sorry. Gotta go. Sir’s home this weekend and time’s a-wasting.