Things I Do Not Get: Virginization Fetishes

Looking through swingers’ ads, there are all these couples touting, “WHO WANTS TO TAKE US FOR OUR FIRST TIME?” And judging by their follow-up posts, they get a ton of responses.
Me?  I always think of FOR DUMMIES books.
See, when I used to purchase computer books for Walden’s, everyone was used to the sales pattern of other books: Stephen King’s latest novel was out!  And it would sell great guns the first week, pretty good for a month, then slide downhill.  If you didn’t have it in stock that first month, you missed out on something like 70% of the sales.
Computer books weren’t like that.  My management would pressure me to buy thousands of copies of WINDOWS 98 FOR DUMMIES, because Windows 98 was coming out this fall and when it did, hoo boy!  We’d be rolling in the dough.  They were frustrated when I lowballed the inventory, even though the publishers were offering all these incentives and sales to stock our stores to the roof with WINDOWS 98 WINDOWS 98 WINDOWS 98.
The trick was this: realizing that the day that Windows 98 came out was the day that the fewest people would own Windows 98.
That first month was actually the slowest, because most people don’t buy upgrades to their PCs the way they go after a movie or a game.  They get it when they get a new computer, or when a game they need demands Windows 98 to run.
So that first month of Windows 98 books was actually inevitably a slow, disappointing sale.  The first three months were slow, actually, panicking the higher-ups.  But as time went by, and more people converted, WINDOWS 98 FOR DUMMIES was our hands-down bestseller for 1999.
When I think of virgins, that’s what I think of: you’re the least knowledgeable you’re ever going to be about sex at that moment.  It’s not a bad thing, certainly not something to be shunned…
…but I don’t get why anyone would specifically seek out virginity as a specific kink, just because they want to take that virginity.  Those virgins are the new Windows 98, at their weakest; come back a year or two, when they’ve gained all this power, and it’s gonna be awesome. But now, they’re just experimenting, and chances are pretty good it’s going to end messily in one way or another as they make mistakes.
I don’t want inexperienced women sexually; I like women who’ve had a lot of sex and know what they’re doing.  I don’t want inexperienced poly partners; I like women who’ve got a good handle on what they need, and have spent some time protecting their boundaries.
And yes, my first time at the club was with someone who was as inexperienced as I was, and it was awesome… But I’m pretty sure whatever I do will be even more awesome a year from now.  If I was out to swing with a couple, I’d be scanning their profile to see if they were attractive, if their posts had proper grammar, if we looked like we’d be sexually compatible – and not at all allured by the promise of breaking that ground before anyone else.
I dunno.  The whole virginity fetish strikes me as having this nasty undertone, the moral equivalent of fucking someone and shouting “FIRST!” in their sexual comment thread.  If you want someone because they’re hot, sexy, and compelling?  Great.  But if you want them just because hey, you get to pop that cherry, well fuck you and keep your goddamned paws off of anyone around me.
People are people.  Not records to be broken.

An Interesting Quote, And Musings

Here’s a quote I’ve run across that strikes me as interesting:

You know, I think I understand what you’re like now. You’re very beautiful and you think men are only interested in you because you’re beautiful, but you want them to be interested in you because you’re you. The problem is, aside from all that beauty, you’re not very interesting. You’re rude, you’re hostile, you’re sullen, you’re withdrawn. I know you want someone to look past all that at the real person underneath but the only reason anyone would bother to look past all that is because you’re beautful. Ironic, isn’t it? In an odd way you’re your own problem.

That’s from the 1994 movie Wolf, which appears to be one of those films that managed to be terrible despite a stellar cast.  And it’s troublesome because the original line is spoken by Jack Nicholson, doubtlessly with all of his usual hyper-masculine, oh-you-wimmen, raised-eyebrows intonation, which adds a spiteful flavor I’m not thrilled with.  When I first read it, I imagined it spoken by a young Dustin Hoffman – earnest, perhaps a little sad.
As a general thing, I don’t entirely agree with it (though I have known women like this), but it is resonant with something I’ve seen that damages a lot of beautiful women: they get so used to men coming after them in every shape and form, glomming onto their every interest with an eager “Oh, I love to do that!” that they become blase.  At some point, expressing enthusiasm becomes a hazard to them, because horny dicks will use this to try to surf their way in… So they shut down, becoming distrustful of enthusiasm in general, both other people’s and their own.  And they lead their lives oozing a cynical boredom, living behind sunglasses and not particularly interacting.
I dunno.  I’m a big ol’ golden retriever; if I like you, or anything, my tail will be wagging so hard it knocks over your coffee.  Maybe that damped-down life works for them, and that crooked smile they only half-give when something amuses indicates a deep inner life.  But to me, it just strikes me as sad that they have to be aloof just to get by.
Then Frank Zappa comes to mind, as he always does:

Beauty knows no pain
So what you cryin’ about
Girl

Towards A Greater Understanding Of Strip Games

When I posted the rules for Strip Rock Band yesterday, I had many people saying, “Why worry about shy people?  Shy people don’t play strip games.”
This is fundamentally untrue.  If a crowd was composed of all bold people, there would be but one strip game ever, and it would be called “Let’s take our clothes off!”, and it would be played at every opportunity.
No, the bold folks are the ones suggesting Strip Halo…. but they are not the majority, else everyone’s underwear would already be scattered across the rug.  The purpose of a strip game is to encourage a bunch of shy(er) people, who wish they were bold, to doff their clothes one bit at a time.  They wouldn’t do it if there wasn’t that delicious combination of:
a)  Peer pressure;
b)  A slow pace of removal, so they can adjust to their topless status before moving on to a bottomless status;
c)  A feeling of some control, since by playing well they can at least hope to stave off their own nakedness;
d)  A deep, deep desire to see the other people naked.
This is why strip games work.  If you make it fast, then all the shy people get immediately self-conscious, leaving a bunch of bold people running around starkers and the shy ones feeling ashamed, shunned, and stupid.  If you remove the control element, then shy people feel like they’re just doffing clothes at random, at which point they feel like slo-mo strippers.
This is not to say that the strip game necessarily requires deep skill… Just the illusion of skill.  I’ve played Strip Candyland, and I’m pretty sure the most skilled of professional Candyland players don’t have much of an edge on me.  But I felt like rolling the dice was some form of control to stop me from flopping Little Elvis out prematurely, and so I was more comfortable when the King put in his inevitable appearance.
But to think that no shy people play strip games is to misunderstand the whole reason behind Strip Settlers of Catan. The strip game is specifically done to lure in the folks who are reluctant but eager, to allow them to show off the bits that they normally would uncover.
Then the bold ones try to talk them into an orgy. Alas, there’s no camouflage game for that.

Boy Stories And Girl Stories And, Oh Yeah, Sales

The good news is, I sold the audio rights for my story “A Window, Clear As A Mirror” to PodCastle.  This is awesome, because a) if you’ll recall, it’s my favorite story ever, and b) PodCastle did such a great job on my story “As Below, So Above” I that I can’t wait to see what they do with the more-humorous-but-more-melancholy tone of “Window.”
But their choice of narrator threw me. I wanted a woman to read this; they said it should be a male.
Which is odd, because to me, “A Window” reads very clearly as a female story, even though the lead character is a male.  In fact, when I read it, I read it in a woman’s voice – I have a high voice to begin with, and I spent years working at a receptionist agency where the patients yelled less if you presented as female, so I have a very good female voice.  And both times I’ve read it, I find my vocal tones rising, me adopting a female slant.
Whereas Dave then told me that if I ever sold “‘Run,’ Bakri Says,” then that would need a female narrator.  And to me, “Bakri” reads so strongly as masculine that I can’t envision what it would sound like with a woman’s voice reading it… Even though the protagonist is a teenaged girl.
I dunno.  On the one hand, he has a point about readers expecting a male protagonist to be read by a male voice, and considering that he’s co-editing an insanely great podcast, I defer to his experience about creating an awesome production. Yet on the other hand, I think about how Neil Gaiman said that he wrote gendered stories; American Gods is a boy book, whereas Stardust is a girl book.  And to me, “Bakri” is a boy story, and “Window” is a girl story, and having opposite-gendered readers feels vaguely like indulging in transgenderism.  (Which is not a bad thing – as noted, I love dressing in high heels and stockings – but it is a little odd at first.)
Gini pointed out that perhaps I was being stereotypical – “Window” is a girl-story because the lead character is dissecting a broken romance, and “Bakri” is a military, “let’s-solve-this-problem” kinda tale.  And there’s an element of that in there, even as “Sauerkraut Station” – which is at least ostensibly about a war – is extremely feminine (though that could be because the inspiration that story is derived wholly from “Little House On The Prairie”).  “iTime,” a problem-solver story if ever there was one, is feminine, whereas “The Backdated Romance” is masculine.  “Camera Obscured” is feminine, “My Father’s Wounds” is masculine.
(On a side note, you know how awesome it is to have so many published stories that I can link to them like this? It’s totally awesome.)
I don’t know. In my head, there’s some trigger where a story is female or male, and it has little to do with the protagonist.  Nor is it necessarily that the story is about problem-solving or relationships, although it does stereotypically tilt slightly that way.  It’s just that to me, certain stories are boy stories and others are girl stories – neither better nor worse, but just flavored in a way that I’ve been drawing this distinction all along, and it only comes up now that I see my girl story putting on a mustache and Don Draper’s suit.
I dunno.  If you write, are your stories gendered at all?  If you read, or have at least read some of the stories here, do you think of them as boy or girl stories now that your attention is drawn to it?

Strip Rock Band

I like naked people, and I like Rock Band.  And for years, I’ve been caught in this awful Scylla and Charybdis conundrum: Gee, I’m having fun being naked with these people, but I’d really like to be playing Rock Band. Or This Rock Band sure is entertaining, but all these clothes are too restrictive.
Hence, the need for official rules for Strip Rock Band.
Now, I have some friends in other locales who are famed for their strip Rock Band parties, but the local scuttlebutt is that the stripping proceeds asynchronously – some people have all of their clothes on, if they are not playing Rock Band.  This shall not do for me.  (And besides, it was more entertaining to try to devise them on my own.) Plus, there may be large numbers of people who’d want to attend a strip Rock Band party, and since the main goal of a strip game is to get everyone naked, doing it through the narrow gateway of one person every song seemed unduly laggardly.
In addition, some people wanted a punitive measure to allow the losers to catch up – if you were a great Rock Band player, you might never remove an item of clothing.  Some suggested that every winner should be forced to do a shot, but I’ve had bad experiences with drinking games – I turn into a real asshole if I don’t monitor my drinking carefully.  So I wanted to have an optional way where a) people who wanted to do it as a drinking game could, but b) those who chose not to drink would be forced to doff clothing.
Hence: The Official Beta-Rules Of Strip Rock Band.
1) Every person entering the house is assigned semi-randomly to one of four teams: tentatively called Paul, John, George, and Ringo.
2)  When you join a team, you must a) choose a difficulty setting (“Easy” to “Expert”), which you will play at all night, and b) decide whether you are in the “official drinkers” or not.
3) Each song must be manned by people from at least three different groups.  (So at least Paul, John, and Ringo must be playing on the song to count for strip purposes.)
4)  You “win” a song by achieving the highest percentage on the song.  If you “win,” all members of the team who are listed as “official drinkers” must do a shot.
5) You “lose” a song by achieving the lowest percentage on the song.  If you “lose,” all members of the team must remove an item of clothing.
6)  If two or more groups tie for a percentage, the wins or losses are spread across all groups.  (So if Paul and George both get 67% in a song, bottoming out, all members of Paul and George must lose an item of clothing.)
7)  You gotta at least try.  No bullshit dropping the controller to make everybody strip.  If I’m not allowing “NO FAIL” mode at my house, I’m not allowing auto-fail mode either.  🙂
The only problem we have thus far is the problem of late arrivers.  I’m still not sure whether they should just be forced to strip down on arrival, which is potentially humiliating but fair, or whether we force them to play repeatedly until they doff one at a time.  Or perhaps some other mechanism.  Certainly we’ll have an good idea of which team is the most losing team, so it should be easy to slot them on.
Also, it feels like this system is gamed fairly easily. If y’all have any improvements, I’m listening.