dear moxie

Dear Moxie,

My husband and I are getting more comfortable with “Exploring” more in our sex lives. I’m a little more experienced when it comes to more kinky acts but he’s super willing and eager to try stuff and I don’t know the best way for us to go about finding new things we both want to try.

S.C.

Hi S.C.,

I always love hearing about couples who are still learning and exploring together! I think you could definitely benefit from a ‘Yes, No, Maybe, List’! You can find one inside For The Love Of It (Wenatchee) or you can download their free PDF off their website (ftloi.net) from home. A “yes, no, maybe list” Is exactly what it sounds like. It will begin with some basic consent things – names to call you that you’re okay/not okay with, areas of the body that may be off-limits, certain triggers you may have and what to do if that trigger rears its head, so on. Then there will be a few pages of different acts/kinks/fetishes listed out and you both go through and fill out your own list with either a yes, a no, or a maybe (as in you are open to talking about it but still unsure) and whether you would want to “give” or “receive” said act. Then you both compare lists which will not only offer answers about what the other or person may like or be interested in, it will help kickstart more of that conversation naturally just by going through your lists together. Good luck and have fun!

Dear Moxie,

I really enjoyed your last article about the toxicity of Fifty Shades of Grey. My partner and I have started exploring more of a Dom/sub dynamic for our intimate life- 50 shades always had a sort of red flag feeling for me, especially since I am the “sub“ in our dynamic. My understanding is that the sub actually holds all the power in that dynamic because they are giving their consent for the other person to act out the Dom roll. So thank you! -AG

Hi AG!

Thank you so much! I’m very glad that that article was well received and resonated with people. But there is something I want to expand on a little bit that your email points out. The whole idea of “The sub has all the power” is a common misconception, albeit a well-meaning one. The truth is no one actually has ALL the power- and that’s because both the roll of the Dom and the roll of the sub are filled by people who both had to get their consent. Don’t get me wrong, I completely understand where this idea comes from. The role of the sub is usually the one on the “receiving end” of different acts that may become too intense and they wish to stop the ‘scene’ or act- for example: impact play such as spanking, paddling, or flogging or edge play such as sexual asphyxiation (choking). But both parties had to consent to these acts and these roles and both are equally able to withdraw their consent at any time. For any reason. A sub may wish to withdraw their consent, even if it’s just temporary to take a break, because the physical act they are on the receiving end of is becoming too intense for them (this is just one of many examples). But it’s not uncommon for a Dom to feel an emotional impact of playing that aggressive role towards their partner. For this reason (and many others) the Dom may wish to “safeword” and take a break from that role or act. Their withdrawal of consent and feelings around it should be as equally respected as the sub’s. It’s not a real power struggle- it’s a consensual exchange of power for the purpose of a role you are both playing. No one person should have ALL the power.

Dear Moxie,

I recently purchased a vaginal tightening cream but it’s extremely irritating (but I’m normally already very sensitive and prone to irritation in that area) and I’m wondering if you could recommend something like that that might be less irritating! Thank you!

CJ

Hi CJ!

Ah- oh no, please don’t use tightening creams! They’re a scam and extremely unhealthy for the vagina! First off, the vagina is never as loose as people believe and the whole idea that that could happen to the point of being a problem is an idea that is almost always perpetuated by misogyny. Because let’s be honest… The entire process of getting “aroused” is supposed to relax the vaginal muscles and self lubricate them to prepare for sexual activity, the point being that if your muscles are more relaxed you don’t run the risk of micro tears or internal bruising or general soreness from something being inserted into the vagina before it’s ready. I absolutely understand where some people who have experienced any sort of muscular atrophy in the vagina, from birth, age, menopause, not working Kegel muscles, etc. would think a “tightening cream” sounds like magic. Vaginal muscle atrophy IS a thing- but a tightening cream is not. Let me explain- The notion of having a “tight” vagina is directly related to your Kegel muscles, your pelvic floor. A stronger pelvic floor, stronger Kegel muscles not only has the feeling of being “tighter“, it can help prevent and in some cases solve “Incontinence issues,” it can help in preparation for and the recovery from birth, it helps keep those muscles strong during menopause (or in general), and can even increase the intensity of your orgasms. The vagina is a muscle. Therefore “strengthening it” has to be done like any other muscle: exercise. A so-called “tightening cream” is not going to exercise your muscles. If we could do that… It should be able to work on any muscle and gyms would become obsolete. Would you like to know how tightening creams really work? They are an astringent. You know, an astringent, the thing that you can put on your face if you’re super oily and need to dry the skin out a little bit. And that’s exactly why you feel like you are “tightening“. Because you didn’t actually strengthen the muscle, you tanked its elasticity so that it could not stretch. One of the active ingredients in almost all tightening creams is called potassium alum- which is instrumental in tanning animal hides. That is the astringent.

Getting rid of your skin’s elasticity in order to feel tighter not only puts you at risk for vaginal micro tears, which can put you at a much higher risk for infection such as bacterial vaginosis, they can also screw with your body‘s natural pH balance, which can make you more prone to and even cause yeast infections. So when you are using a “tightening cream“ you are not actually tightening anything. You are taking away the vagina’s ability to stretch, drying it out to do so. It also is only a temporary fix. Exercising your pelvic floor, your Kegel muscles, will actually change the strength. It will actually work those muscles.

If you want to feel where your Kegel muscles are- imagine going to the bathroom and stopping your urine mid flow, the muscles that you used to do that are your Kegel muscles. So holding them tight like that can help exercise them- you could also look up various Kegel exercises, or use things like a Ben Wa/ Kegel balls (which you can usually find at your local adult store, such as For The Love Of It here in Wenatchee). If those exercises don’t seem to be enough, or you are unable to do them, or you are still having things like incontinence issues despite working those Kegel muscles- it is always good to explore the option of visiting a pelvic floor physical therapist.

Moxie Rose:

(sex and kink advice/education) from For The Love Of It in Wenatchee, WA.

The information provided in this column is for educational purposes only, and does not substitute for professional medical advice.

Questions or comments: dearmoxierose@gmail.com c

ARTHUR WESLEY DOW’S FLOATING WORLD:

Examples from the “Dark-and-Light Composition” chapter in Dow’s 1905 edition of Composition NOTE: This article was written in Europe so different spellings and grammar rules apply. Probably. -The Comet

Widely celebrated by art historians as the first design text of the American Arts & Crafts movement, Arthur Wesley Dow’s Composition: A Series of Exercises Selected From a New System of Art Education revolutionized the American classroom. When Dow’s program for liberating individual artistic “Power” (his term for self-expression) came along in 1899, arts education was still locked into the academic tradition of copying the masters. Dow gave primary, secondary school, and even university teachers a visual grammar, a pattern language toolbox that could be used to make every aesthetic decision: right down to the decoration of their studios or the parlors in their homes. Composition’s presentation of visual art as an analytic and constructive — rather than imitative — activity was the first tangible breath of abstraction to reach the American classroom. And, for more than half a century, it was hailed by artists and art instructors alike as offering a system to create freely constructed images on the basis of harmonic relations between lines, colors, and patterns. Dow’s pedagogical mastery had humble Yankee roots; as an eighteen-year-old high school graduate in 1875, he taught farm children and teenagers in a one-room schoolhouse in a remote corner of Ipswich, Massachusetts. About this same time, Dow took up sketching as a complement to his pioneering antiquarian research in Ipswich’s town records, and then, finding inadequate the heliotype productions of his own hands and those of Boston printers, he began to practice wood engraving and lithography, always with a craftsman’s rigor. (He once spent an entire day hand-grinding a carpenter’s awl into an engraving tool for his first experiments with carving local pear wood.) Absent from the early editions of Composition, some of these experiments appear in the greatly expanded 1913 edition, which also includes color plates.

Printed in green-gray ink, the 1905 edition beautifully conveys Dow’s central principle of “Notan” — a neologism adopted from Ernest Fenellosa, the influential art historian and Boston Museum of Fine Arts curator of Oriental Art, who combined the Japanese words for “light” and “dark” to describe the play and placement of contrast, without the distraction of other elements like color, texture, and fine details. Drawing on Dow’s experiences with students at both Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute (1896–1903) and his own Ipswich Summer School of Art (founded in 1890), Composition was unique in its inclusion of student work right alongside that of Renaissance and Japanese masters.

While scholars unanimously attribute Dow’s artistic embrace and pedagogical promotion of ukiyo-e — the “pictures of the floating world” depicted in Japanese woodblock prints — to his encounter in early 1891 with Fenellosa, Dow had for a dozen years been cultivating a wholly original program of minimalist abstraction that grew organically out of his love for Ipswich’s unparalleled riparian landscape. When he declared that “one evening with Hokusai gave me more light on composition and decorative effect than years of study of pictures”, it was due to a lifetime of haunting the marshy borders of the Ipswich River, Labor in Vain Creek, and Thatch Bank, which led Dow into mysticism, nurtured by his reading of Whitman and Thoreau as well as the Quietist tracts of French mystic Madame Guyon.

Copying the inscriptions on seventeenthcentury tombstones in Ipswich’s burying grounds, Dow appreciated how the blue, green, purple, and even pink-tinted slate gravestones harmonized with the hues of this region. His preference for the bluish haze of cyanotypes (a collection of 264 of which are viewable here) over photography was of a piece with his aversion to the stark white marble of modern headstones, which he called “coldly out of place by the side of the mossy green and purple slates of the first settlers, partaking of the colors of ground and sky”.

The woodblock stamp on Composition’s title page — which imaged the low drumlin Eagle Hill fairly floating in the midst of the “Silver Dragon”, Dow’s name for a meandering tributary of the Ipswich River — bears the Greek letters for synthesis. Dow’s emblem proclaimed not just the synthesis of East and West, but of one’s inner landscape with outer Nature, which for this native of an inland reach of Plum Island Sound’s tidal estuary, was a floating world of dories, gundalows, hardwood copses, salt hay ricks, and billowing cumulus clouds rolling in from the Atlantic.

Originally published in The Public Domain Review at publicdoaminreview.org. If you wish to reuse it please see: publicdomainreview.org/legal/ c

35

SHOW SOME FLOCKING RESPECT!

BY LANCE REESE

My wife has an addiction to new wave 80’s bands. Actually she has an addiction to all 80’s music, including an eclectic fixation on Australian bands; back in the day she had a pen pal down under and they used to exchange mix tapes. In an age long before www was a thing she had exposure to tons of stuff not circulating the US airwaves.

For today we focus on new wave and how because of her addiction I’ve been dragged to every 80’s reunion tour to come through the Pacific Northwest for the last 23 years. For sure there’s been some gems – anyone remember when she orchestrated Steve Kilbey to play at the bike shop a few years ago? But also some disappointments. She hates when fractured pieces of a one hit wonder roll through as she’s left distraught, and always with this sentiment: “I’m never going to see a band without the original line up….” But we always do. You have to take the bad with the good.

The Church’s 30th anniversary Starfish tour was magic, the ‘lips like sugar’ Echo and the Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch still oozing words on a voice of liquid gold.

Then there’s moments when she announces things like “We’re going to see A Flock of Seagulls,” in the basement of a local pub no less, and hell - I’m game. The pub is a favorite local watering hole and live music is live music. I’m not hard on local bands at the time so someone coming through that got international success with a music video, I’m there.

Because of circumstances we have an extra ticket – a big to do with her sister who wanted to go but couldn’t make it last minute because her cat was going to be sick later or something. But we have a free pass to give away so I hit up my buddy Chris, probably a bad idea as we always drink too much and have way to good a time. But no one minds an obnoxious drunk, right?

“Flock of Who?” he asks when I throw out the idea. “Seagulls? What song do they play?” They had a hit called “I Ran” I tell him and he say’s he’ll get back to me. Phone rings a short time later “Yeah – that’s the intro song to GTA – Vice City. I’m in.”

So we prep up. My wife spends 4 hours in the bathroom getting show ready and we’re off to the pub. We’re super early - if we’re doing it we want to get a good seat. The whole stage thing is a new addition here, a brand new addition off the side of the regular tap room so I haven’t been there or seen it yet. We check in and it’s just a big open space, stage in the middle on one side, bar against the wall opposite it. It’s set for standing room only – and really we’re in the mood to pull up a chair. I go back into the pub and ask the bartender if we can bring a table and chairs in to the venue to sit and watch the show.

So here’s the thing...when I say this is a favorite local watering hole, I’ve been a regular here for a very long time. Long before I should be served at a bar, I’ve been occupying a stool. Billed as the first micro brewery in the country - this place was brewing India Pale Ales before most of the country knew what hops were. More important were the Perfect Porter, the Russian Imperial Stout and the holy grail Scottish Ale. This was long before marketing departments took over naming beers.

My first experience there while I was working at a record store and we all decided to go down on a Friday night to catch local legends Quarter Mile Pumpkin (they’d later abbreviate to QMP after they sold their drag car and stopped racing.) They’re set up on a small stage in the corner when I get there a little late. The doorman eyed me as I walked up but before he could say anything I pointed at my group already seated in a corner booth. He looked at me and waived me in. Turns out when my boss got there the bouncer told him there was a $5 cover to which he responded, “We’re from the local record store, we don’t have to pay.” The big guy bought on it and when I walked up at 18 years old I was treated in kind. After that I was a regular, drank most nights there for the next three years underage. My first pint was a Scottish Ale pulled from a cask, and I drank it as I watched the band’s underage girlfriends huddle outside the back door in the cold unable to get in.

In the years that followed the pub was my second home, eating Scottish eggs, British bangers, half price Tuesdays meant $1.50 pints of black and tans, and five dollars meant I’d be well on the way and adventure was always to ensue. Climbing the brick wall on the face of the building, New Years dances on the table (not my fault they broke,” dousing Molly Lee and her big loud mouth with the last of a stout. Wound up on the upside and the downside of more than a few scuffles and at least once ended up in the back seat of a squad car.

All of this to say the staff knew me well here – I’m a hell of a tipper to boot – so when I ask to move a table into their standing only venue they say, “Sure – go for it.” So we do, find a nice spot in the center, back by the bar. It’s still early and we’ve got our drinks so we do our thing and the roadies set up the stage, putting up the gear, tuning guitars and such.

Pretty soon the place is filling up and security comes over “hey – you can’t have that table here, it’s blocking the walkway, we need to move you.” Shit, they’re going to put us in the corner somewhere and we won’t be able to see…. but no. They grab the table and stick it right up front. Right… up… front… dead center, pressed against the stage. The overhang of the table’s actually over the edge of the stage and almost into the mic and keyboard stand. We’re the heart of the crowd now, and because we’re early the pints keep coming, and they keep winding up empty so we keep ordering more until the room is packed around us and we see the roadies heading back to the stage, one last sound check we think, before the realization sets in - this is the band. No opener and it’s not the original line up – jut the OG singer/ keyboard player. The signature forehead swoop of hair was gone in favor of a long braided pony tail, his overalls looked comfortable but in no way played homage to the kid on MTV.

Biting our lips we look at each other, then up on stage. We’re staring up his nostrils, he’s got this look of resignation, a tired old circus animal doing his routine so he can return to his cage and get his dinner. Immediately he announces “I’ve got a really popular song that I wrote in the 80’s. I’ll play that later, but for now I’m going to play it how I would write it if I wrote it today.” And he launches into some new version of “I Ran.” It’s not well received and he can feel it. There’s a point in the original music video where he plays a note on the keyboard and holds it for too long, so long that he switches hands to play that same key with a different finger. Well he goes to hit that same note on the new version and blows it, like hits completely the wrong note. Loud. And for a minute he tries to go with it and stick it out, but it’s bad. I’m drunk by now, pretty sure Chris is too and we lose it. It was so disrespectful, I’d be appalled if I saw someone behaving like that towards an artist today, but that night we were that group, laughing at a performer – literally to their face as they struggled through a set, trying their best to hold it together. So much scorn in his eyes as he tried to look past us but the rest of the crowd wasn’t much better.

He played a minor hit or two, then finally the original version of “I Ran.” The crowd went nuts, so he followed it up with a couple of new songs that weren’t good. “Play ‘I Ran’ again,” we all started yelling. But apparently twice was already enough, he wrapped up his set and left the stage.

A couple years later I saw a VH1 documentary where they interviewed the original line up and tried to convince them to play a show together again. They hated each other by then, although they did get one guy to say he was game despite all the shit they’d been through. Then they asked the singer about the popularity of “I Ran.” “I fucking hate it,” he said “but it’s all anyone wants to hear, so I have to keep playing it.” Truer words may never have been spoken.

For the record, my wife still insists it was a really good show. God Bless the 80’s.