Sarah Martinez's Blog, page 5

Kerry Cohen's Loose Girl: Part 1

I have decided to break this post up into two parts. The first will be where I explain a bit about my experience in order to explain why this book and the author mattered so much to me. It took me a full month to figure out how to present this interview honestly, a straight Q&A seemed to be cheating somehow.

Kerry noted that so many of us engage in the exact same behaviors and feel alone with them. Well, here is one more to add to the pile and maybe by reading me someone else can feel less alone as well. I thought too, that if she could be this honest and brave when writing her experiences and motivations, I could at least do a blog post. *

It also occurred to me that some readers may not be interested in my story, and for those, you will be spared most, but not all by reading only Part 2 which I will post tomorrow.

I first became aware of Kerry Cohen and Loose Girl: a memoir of promiscuity, when she gave a few lines of praise for Stripping Down. After that it took me a few months to get around to reading the book. I eyed it the same way I do books about grief and loss. I was afraid of what I would find and worried that it would prove that I hadn’t come as far in my emotional growth as I had hoped.

I was right to be concerned. I interviewed Kerry in April and am just now able to rework and post this. The last month, if I haven’t been plowing through revisions for my current novel, I have been trying to sort out what I want to say about my own youthful adventures. This led to thinking about how I would approach my own memoir, and to look at larger issues of what I am trying to do in my fiction.

Parts of this book read as if the author were actually there in my head for some of the shit I did, she merely changed a few surface details around. This, as a reader is both a thrilling and terrifying place to be. Someone gets me! Oh, but that’s not me…that’s someone I don’t like very much…

At times I was also bothered by the feeling that there was something I did that was altogether different and that difference, I believe, will be the key to trying to explain what I did with men, how I tried so hard to become like them in an attempt to escape feeling at all. For much of my youth I was convinced that men had no feelings and this state of being was obviously preferable to my own overly emotional existence.  Who isn’t emotional at fourteen? The problem is that I didn’t know this then. So the experience of reading Loose Girl was one of both profound identification, and it also prompted a serious introspection.

When I began running away from home, being promiscuous became more of a necessity than the desperate amusement it had been prior, though finding anyone who was willing to fuck me, if they weren’t really old and scary, still afforded a sense of validation no matter where I was. At the same time I compared myself to her and saw the differences, I was aware of a restless, almost physical need to distance myself as far as possible from the desperation and ugliness she presented in this book.

I wasn’t like this. No way. Let me count the ways…

Kerry, for the places you were like me, and for making me think about the places you were not, I am deeply grateful.

Stay tuned for Part 2…

*Except for the gushy ones and the weird book reviews, the only people that currently read my blog already know this stuff anyway.

For the Mommies: a few words about mommy porn

In honor of mother’s day, this post is dedicated to the mommies, though not kid friendly.

This ABC piece seems to be in favor of mommy porn.

This article is very much against.

Do I give a shit? No. I am not for or against Shades of Gray, Twilight or any of the other products that apparently fall into the classification of “mommy porn,” at least for the purposes of this post.

What I am posting this sunny Mother’s Day afternoon is a good old fashioned rant along the lines of the cursing mommy. Don’t expect this to be pretty or even very coherent*.  As I write I am thinking about the mommies. Those strong, brave, fully functioning women who even after years of marriage, even after having kids still have sex. What a concept, one the rest of the world seems to have forgotten. So because you have kids, and care about your kids athletic and educational endeavors, does that mean that you have morphed into some nonsexual being? Apparently, or else they wouldn’t call smut which does not even feature mommies getting sexed up,  or even porn made by women who have children, “mommy porn.”

Who came up with this term anyway? I suspect it was some cute little twenty three year old who is still laboring under the delusion that the random sex she might be lucky to get a few times a week with young inexperienced men can come close to what is possible in the mommy world. Or maybe we can thank some sixty year old editor at the UK Daily mail who has to take drugs just to be able to service his wife and the mistress he desperately needs to convince himself he is virile. I would like to tell whoever it is that this is the stupidest most condescending label to come along in quite a while.

I hate labels in general, it irks me to no end that people need to put other people in boxes because their imaginations are too small to conceive of human beings who have more than one side to their personality. Gay men who ride horses, or what about the porn star who has children. Yeah… this particular trend seems to horrify people all over the place. Like they finally figured out what all those parts were really for. Assholes who get offended by women who nurse in public but can’t get enough of the titty fuck scenes in the porno movies. What did you think that white stuff was on that enormous breast? I guess it would be better to imagine a giant glob of semen than milk that would feed a child. Cripes. Told you this might not be pretty.

What about daddy porn? Oh, wait, that’s been around forever, it’s called Playboy. Guys can flip through and remember the tight perky ass they used to get before their hair fell out, their gut expanded and their boobs grew in. Did it need a name? No because men aren’t expected to give up their sex drive at any age. I already mentioned they take pills to get the shit back.

Not like women. Apparently we have a much smaller window of time when it is acceptable for us to want sex. It seems like it is from about age eighteen to thirty… roughly. That’s what we get, about twelve years, less if we become mommies in our twenties.

ABC also did a bit on the young male porn star James Deen that some teenage  girls follow on twitter. Here is a link with some funny commentary afterward.  The tone of the piece was shock and awe that these girls were watching porn. The interviewer tried to accuse the poor dude of luring them in. Of course, the girls wouldn’t look for him on their own, they had to have been coerced or somehow talked in to it. The other incredibly insulting message that all of this gives is that we don’t know our own  minds.  It doesn’t matter that on the ground girls have been watching porn and (gasp) giving blow jobs, playing with themselves, and even in some extremely rare and unfortunate cases, getting knocked up—forever— though it is beyond the realm of public imagination to consider that teenage girls might get horny and or curious about their feelings and what to do with them.

Girls, as the standard story goes, only use sex to get boys to do something for them. He has to go to fucking Jared after all. And then once they have trapped that man into marrying them, you know that one preferably with rock hard abs and lots of money (according to the ABC piece, that’s what women want), they shut down again after they have kids and don’t care about sex anymore, then they need mommy porn to get the sex drive back. It is just inconceivable that a girl could want to sleep with a boy because she likes him, because he has pretty eyes, because he, of all things, listens to her. Never mind why a middle aged woman would want it.

What this stupid fucking term: “mommy porn” really means is that you need a separate type of porn because you have no idea how to be a sexual being on your own so you need these little entertainment aids.  And, because we don’t know what we want, we need some easy to read novels to explain it to us and make it all, you know accessible for our dull minds. According to popular notions, none of us has ever read Story of O, or read the Marquis de Sade.  If this wonderful mommy porn hadn’t come along, we women with our kids and dull clueless husbands would suffer a totally undersexed existence. Did it never occur to anyone, including the academic who wrote the piece about how fantasizing about submission  is setting the women’s movement back a hundred years, that books written about submission have been around forever. Sade, Masoch (nobody EVER brings up Venus in Furs when having that discussion because wanting to be submissive is only a female fantasy and evidence to the contrary would contradict the theory).

Fucking Please. Fuck Me Running. Fuck me at the top of a flag pole. My God. Ok, not as bad as the cursing mommy, but I continue to try.

Here are a few lines from Chronology of Water, by Lidia Yuknavitch, a memoir I read recently that made me stop and think. Like great lines do for me in books, these filled me with gratitude:

 “But more often there are regular people in the pool. Beautiful women seniors doing water aerobics-mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers-their massive breasts and guts reminding you how it is that women carry worlds.”

Women can carry worlds but they can’t experience them, according to the simple minded mainstream media. Why is it so incredibly hard for people to imagine mommies having any sort of life besides the domestic? No fantasy life. No sex life, which by the way common sense would tell you gets better the longer you are married. Fucking Duh.

Anne Rice wrote erotica after she had kids and nobody called that mommy porn did they? Marco Vassi wrote his memoirs and fiction after he got a woman pregnant. Does that negate the words, just because he had also at once time managed to procreate? Updike, Miller, and a slew of other men wrote their best smut after they became fathers and no one would dream of questioning their position in the world of sexual thinkers, that would just be stupid, yet some randy English woman and a Mormon with three kids write a few words and suddenly it’s “mommy porn.”

Say it with me: “Fuck This Shit.”

Fuck the labels. Let us want what we want and can we not use the term “mommy porn” to describe anything, ever, please? Fuck the labels. I don’t believe in them and no right minded mother should either. Let us fantasize, let us enjoy the bodies that are so often given over for the use of everyone else. We lovingly, willingly give them to our children, our spouse, for comfort, for sustenance, so why not acknowledge that we can also still feel pleasure and want to feel good? Fuck the labels. Let us live and read what we want and ignore those who would judge and try to stick some tiny label on us for doing so.

You can have kids and be an artist. You can have kids and be a thinker. You can have kids and never read anything by Stephanie Meyer or EL James because the shit bores the crap out of you. You can have kids and watch porn. You can have kids and read Twilight because that is all your hormone ravaged, sleep deprived brain will allow you to focus on. You can have kids and write smut if that’s what you want. You can have kids and read smut if you want.

Just don’t admit that you have kids and orgasms or their tiny tiny world will implode.

 

 

*Hubby is agitating for a trip to the park and I want to get this up before the sun goes down on this day dedicated to some of my favorite people.