1. I'm nearly 23, and I've never kissed anyone, much less had sex. I don't regret it, usually.
2. I'm horny all the time. If you were to look inside my head at random points throughout the day, you'd probably find something sex-related 9 times out of 10, and my underclothes are generally wet by the time I've had them on for five minutes, sometimes ten.
3. Call it a curse or a blessing – I usually call it a blessing – but I got extraordinarily sensitive senses of touch and taste from Mom's side of the family. This means that a lot of casual, innocent touches feel really good, and some foods are practically orgasmic. My friends laugh at the faces I make: even though they know, technically, that I'm a hypertaster, they don't quite understand what that means on an every-day basis. Oh well: while they're laughing, I'm shivering from a really good glass of port. Their loss!
4. This is probably related back to the general state of horniness, but I masturbate a lot. Mostly at night, because I work during the day with kids and getting myself off in the bathroom there would feel extraordinarily wrong, but days off, too.
5. Some nights I don't get myself off, but that's usually a lack of motivation, not a lack of desire. I just can't seem to do anything, times like that; it's hard to make myself get up to use the restroom, much less masturbate. Those are pretty much the only times I regret not being sexually active; I'd love to have a partner then who'd pamper me, do the work of pleasuring us both while I lay back.
6. By now I'm calling myself more or less pansexual. I like men, I like women, I like everything in between, and if we ran into aliens tomorrow – well, I'd probably be fine with that too. I'm comfortable with this, but some of the questions I get irritate me. (Yes, I'm pansexual. No, that doesn't mean I'm attracted to everyone and everything I see any more than heterosexual makes you attracted to everyone of the opposite sex.)
7. While I'm comfortable with being pansexual, I haven't told most of my family, much less my church. The overwhelming reactions would fall into one of two categories: OMG, where did we go wrong?!, tempered with, relax, she's just doing it for attention, it's not like zie dates anyways, zie'll settle down with a nice young person eventually. A few more would jump on me and try to use me as a political tool, thanks to the current splits in my denomination. I'm heavily involved in my church – I'm a deacon, working with missions and youth and etc., my dad's the pastor – and I have no desire to upset the status quo that badly. Revelations can wait until I'm in a different area and can tell people before ever joining a new congregation – things are just easier that way.
8. There are only three people I really worry about telling, outside of church politics: my mom, one of my brothers, and one of my sisters. My mom likely won't let me anywhere near my younger sibs again until they all turn 18, when I tell her. My brother will disown me. My sister will spend the next few decades praying for my soul and refusing to allow me near any children she might have. My other siblings won't care, and will probably try to hook me up with more people.
9. I consider my dad to be a trade-off for my extraordinarily bigoted grandparents and cousins (who will never speak to me again after I officially come out. This will actually be a positive side-effect of the whole deal). He's awesome – he's known for a few years, and doesn't spread it about at my request. He'll point out pretty people of either gender to ask my opinion, and his only real stake in the entire issue is to make sure that I'm happy, whomever I end up with; he doesn't fuss so much about the casing, or even things like poly relationships, though he's uncomfortable with poly and not allowed to publicly condone it anyway because of his job.
10. Which, speaking of, I might be. I don't really know. The idea of poly relationships appeals to me very strongly. That's not to say that I dislike the idea of monogamy; I just think that in some cases, multiple partners might be worth the extra work done to keep the relationship(s) stable. I've never had a chance to test that, though.
11. My biological sex and assigned gender are female and woman; I'm told that most of my neurological wiring is coded male. I don't identify with a set gender, either masculine or feminine, but don't really consider myself to be androgynous, either. Sometimes I dress feminine; sometimes I dress masculine; most often I dress in whatever I feel like at that moment. If I put my hair up right I have no problem passing for a man, on the days when I don't want to be a woman. I've been told that I would be a good candidate for gender reassignment surgery, but I don't really see the point in it. Sure, I'm not a “woman”, but that doesn't mean I'm a “man” – I don't care for either of those labels.
12. I love long hair, especially when it's taken care of and at least down to the butt. The sex/gender of the person with said hair is generally less relevant than the hair itself – 6'4'' and strapping muscles, 5'0'' and petite, doesn't matter, I'm going to enjoy looking at the hair.
13. I've had two romantic relationships, both with my best friends at the time. The first one, S., lasted from about 13 to 19. He was tall, a few months younger than I was, romantic, and quite smart. Things started going sour the last six months of our relationship, to the point where I didn't recognize him any more, but it still hurt when we broke up – he'd been my best friend for eight years, and I'd had no idea what had happened to change things. The second time, I was 21 and dating a woman, M., with whom I'd been good friends for two or three years. It was a giddy summertime romance that lasted into the fall. That October, the day I was supposed to tell my dad about the two of us, she told me via email that we couldn't be together any more because God disapproved of gays and besides, she didn't want to tell her family, ever. She hooked up with my ex S. a couple weeks later. I haven't had a relationship since then, mostly because this area is absurdly conservative: the women are generally appalled at any hint of lesbian interests, the men buy into neo-McCarthian gender roles, and the religious right disapprove of it all. I'm looking forward to moving someplace more accepting.
14. I don't care much for visual porn, but I've been reading erotica since I was eleven – first in science fiction novels, then fanfiction. Oddly enough, I didn't start writing it until I was nineteen, and I still don't write much of it.
15. There were a number of years where I claimed to hate romance novels, romance-centered fanfiction, and the like. Over time I've come to realize that that's not quite the case. It's not that I hate romance, or relationships, or erotica. Rather, I hated the entrenched gender-roles present in popular romance novels, movies, fanfiction, etc. Nowadays I read slash or queer fiction if I'm looking for something with romance, and otherwise stick to novels that contain het relationships, if at all, only as a very minor subplot... I go through a lot of science fiction that way.
16. While I don't care for visual porn, I do like looking at people. “Like” may be the wrong word, though – it's more reflexive than anything else, and my tastes tend to run all over the place. Suffice to say that if a person looks legal and under 70-ish, I'm probably admiring zem. Not always – there are a few people who just don't trigger that, for whatever reason – but far more often than not. I try to be discreet about it; I think mostly I succeed.
17. I don't have many body issues, and virtually no sense of body-shame or modesty. Skin is skin, whether you're two or twenty or fifty or eighty, and clothing is generally restrictive and uncomfortable. Nudity neither bothers nor titillates me, whether my own or someone else's. This lack of reaction, however, does bother my siblings and mother, as well as more conservative acquaintances.
18. I said I don't have many body issues, and that's true. But I would love to be 5'10'' instead of 5'6'', and I would really, really love to get rid of my female-based reproductive cycle. I like my vagina just fine, but I hate the hormones, and the thought of ever being pregnant absolutely appalls me. Sure, I'd like to have kids – but I never, never, never want to be pregnant. Ever. I'd be okay with flattening out my breasts, but I'm also okay with them remaining small; bras just bug me, and sometimes having breasts is irritating because they serve as gender-coded symbols.
19. M. and I never kissed or had sex, but we did a lot of cuddling, some petting, and quite a bit of mild pain-play (mostly because anything more would've led places neither of us, especially she, was quite ready for). I have a definite appreciation for certain types of pain. Scratching and spanking are great, but pinching isn't. Biting turns me on incredibly quickly: I go melty, submissive, and nonvocal faster than you can say masochist. Pressing or scratching into bruises gets nearly the same reaction, and blades make me shivery in the good sort of way.
20. I played with my ass quite a bit as a kid, left it more or less alone in junior high, and discovered it again towards the end of high school, with explosive results. Vaginal penetration feels good, sure, but anal feels so much more intense. I will never understand how people can dislike the sensation; it's easier for me to reach orgasm with anal play than with vaginal, and I almost never come without at least a little of it. Mostly I like deep penetration there, and preferably girth, too, but every once in a while it's enough to tease around and just inside of the rim. Sometimes I envy male-bodied individuals their prostates; I bet anal play would be even more intense then.
21. That envy never goes too far, but only because I then remember that vaginas mean the potential for double penetration, which is fantastic and tends to lead to amazing orgasms when I take the time for it.
22. For all the cliches about Christians, repressed sexuality, and guilt complexes, I really don't care that much about virginity – my own, to be specific. I don't attach any special value to it, and I'm not trying to preserve it. It's just that, while I like to look at people, I'm not remotely interested in casual sex. Some psychologists would classify me as borderline paranoid, especially when it comes to touch, so I'm not comfortable even with most of my friends touching me; also, while I don't put a huge premium on monogamy or virginity, I do on fidelity. Short-term relationships just aren't my style. If S. and I had stayed together once he hit college, we might have; M. and I weren't together long enough for it to be an issue. So while I do have my V-card, it's in a rather incidental sort of way.
23. I hear a lot of talk about G-spots. I've never managed to find mine. Every once in a while I explore for it. Then, when I fail to find it, I shrug philosophically: does it matter, when a vibe up my ass and finger on my clit's enough to send me thrashing and blank-eyed anyways?
24. I don't understand jealousy. I've never had problems with it, and jealous partners just tend to annoy me. Fidelity's a must for me, but that doesn't mean monogamy: instead, it means talking about things, and not going beyond what we agree on. Whether we agree to casual hookups, or poly relationships, or swinging, or monogamy, I expect both of us to follow the tenets of said agreement, and to put each other as first priority. And with that in mind, I have no issues with jealousy, because either zie'll follow those, and all's well, or zie won't, and we'll break up. Likewise, I'll follow them, because that's just the way I roll – so a partner getting jealous might as well be saying that I'm not trustworthy to follow through, which angers me.
25. Probably thanks to my early explorations of the internet and fandom culture, there's not much out there that can shock me any more. At this point, as long as it falls under RACK (Risk Aware Consensual Kink), I probably won't bat an eyelash. There are, however, a whole lot of things I look forward to exploring. After all, I am 22, almost 23.
