the vagina monologues, stirring leeks, etc

what a happy day. kissing k in the sunshine was so bright and her eyes were so big. 2-2:30 was a beautiful moment.

i think i learned a secret about cooking making chili with k the other night. my job was to stir the onions and garlic exhaustively. and that stirring, something i had always associated with cooking, but only abstractly, i now realize is something i have always neglected. i have never stirred things, i have let them sit and poked at them occasionally and aggressively like a boyscout frustrated with his fire. but stirring is the key! stirring! i doggedly stirred leeks and garlic for my dinner, adding mushrooms and tomatoes in lightning interruptions, chopping like a maniac, to not not stir for too long. and that made everything terrific! i mean, it was all gray and saucy and didn't look very nice when i dumped it all on top of a steak i had topped with the tea kettle, but it tasted like the things i had been cooking, which is not what normally happens.

i also went to the vagina monologues. i wish i had seen it long ago. it's horrible the way i, men generally, probably, relate to women's pleasure, to their vaginas. i have a really horrible memory that sometimes dogs me from midway through my senior year of high school when i was dating a girl named amy. i wasn't technically a virgin at that point, but i was by any practical measure. and i had never really "done" anything with amy, we made out and touched each other desperately, as if touching each other represented the end of sexuality. and i felt like i wasn't living up to how sexual i thought i should be at my age. i wanted to have sex with her but that seemed like a lot. and so, in moments of passion, i wanted her to go down on me. i think i felt that that would have been sufficient to make me feel like a big, sexual man. what's striking about this is that it never ever occurred to me to go down on her, this pleasure, this next level of sex was entirely my prerogative and my pleasure. and i, clumsy, embarrassed and inarticulate as i was, remember once trying to push her head, be suggestive in that barbaric way, towards my sex while we were in the midst of one of our gaspingly intense making out and touching moments. and i she knew what i was doing, what i was trying to "suggest," and she didn't. my real shame here was in trying to do that that way, but there's also my shame at it never having occurred to me that i might have tried to give amy that pleasure.

and part of why i'm sure it never occurred to me is that vaginas were gross to me. they have, until extremely recently, been very gross to me. and that has meant neglecting, denying women's pleasure in a big way. if its incidental to love making, that is obviously what makes love making great, but going down on a woman, that ultimate consideration, that full bodied dedication to making a woman feel good that, as far as my sex is concerned, does not involve my pleasure, was not something i was willing to undertake. and that's ridiculously wrong. i mean, it would even be wrong if it never occurred to me that a woman might go down on me and all sex was was having sex, but with my mindset, feeling that blow jobs were a rightful part of my juvenile manhood, it was a clearly a deeply sexist and troubling thing. and the vagina monologues is great because that woman's pleasure is made so central and fundamental to the world. it MUST happen. and i wish i had felt that before, had that occur to me. because it must. didn't i ever think of how horrid looking my sex was? of that hair? i like to think i've grown up. though the vagina monologues presented me with the next frontier of this progressive view of the vagina: birth. i'm still definitely mortified by that, but maybe i'll even get over that some day. no promises.