Vulvacabulary

• Non-Fiction Essays by Katie Schwartz
• 3 Comments on Vulvacabulary
• Posted on 7 April, 20111 July, 2011
• by Katie Schwartz

Until I reached puberty, my vadgarincess wasn’t even on my radar. Unlike boys who stood up to hold their outdoor plumbing and pee, I sat down because I had indoor plumbing—this was the extent of my vadgeoledge. Though I liked boys at twelve, puberty officially courted me when I was sixteen. That was when I experienced how saucy and luxurious my blessed beav was, and I cherished her dearly for it.

I got my first kiss in 8th grade and thought I was disturbingly Vanilla-Ice cool, the shame of it. All year, I pined for a darling, chubby redhead covered in head-to-toe freckles. Michael was three inches shorter than I was and carried a backpack his weight and size. On the last day of school, everyone was gathered on a patch of grass celebrating our graduation. During the year, we passed notes to each other through our friends. It was very serious. Michael knew I wanted him. I was sitting with a small circle of friends; my eyes were fixed on him across the field playing catch with his friends. He was the sexiest boy alive, wearing his hallmark red and white striped rugby shirt over his slouchy posture and oversized Ross Dress for Less baggy jeans. God, I loved that man-boy. Mid-game, he stumbled over, tripping on a rock as he approached (my heart leapt out of my chest). The closer he got, I could smell the Old Spice after shave emitting from his pores. I sprang from the grass, so excited, I tripped over my shoelace and landed on his mud stained Adidas sneakers, covering his dingy white athletic socks. Popping up quickly, hoping to avoid a scene, unbeknownst to me, he’d already leaned over to assist me, my head walloped his chin. Michael clutched his face in agony as I consoled him, apologizing profusely. After a few minutes, he grabbed my ass, raised his head, stood on his tippy toes and kissed me. Not knowing what to do, I followed suit, reached for his ass and kneaded it like bread. He told me to open my mouth and rolled his tongue into mine, while we bruised each other’s asses. Everyone watched and laughed at us, I came to learn, not with us.

I made a hobby of tongue-jousting my freshman year, making out with as many boys as I could pack into a weekend, averaging 2-6 a month, some repeats. I kept a “make-out journal” of all of my conquests. Quality was insignificant, I was journaling for quantity, so I could tally how many boys I’d made out with by the end of the year (including summer—it counted).

As a teenager, my menses was highly un-festive. The vice-gripping cramps and torrential downpour warranted the acquisition of gargantuan maxi-pads. Being bowlegged three days a month due to menstruation, and not dick wasn’t even slightly hip.

My sophomore year, I took my sexuality out for a spin, deciding it was time to experiment. I still made-out a lot, but loved the new side dish– getting felt up, all the time. My junior year I graduated to hand jobs and became the queen and spokesperson for fingerbanging. My senior year, I kicked off the oral parade by sucking cock aplenty, but at the age of eighteen, I was still living on Cherry Lane, smack dab in the center of Virginville. It was time for me to pop my cork.

When I was a freshman in college, I was still a virgin, igniting my sexual awkwardness. I wanted to break-up with my hymen so badly, yet I was nervous about it. With men, I was either too aggressive and assertive or painfully shy and withdrawn. As a result, they were never ambivalent about their attraction. They either wanted to fuck me stupid, or saw me as the funny sidekick; you know, “wingman-with-vagina.”

That’s when I coined my fruit cup “Radar”. I’ve yet to find a man willing to call her Radar, of course; yet, I refuse to forego the nickname. Radar was and remains my dark side and the voice of reason. Radar’s back-story is that she’s sexually liberated with a ravenous appetite for cock. She drinks single malt scotch, smokes unfiltered cigarettes and speaks in a husky, monotone voice. She also has a zero tolerance policy for my low self-esteem peen choices. In those instances, she makes her presence known.

She’s a storm in the port, sending shameless missives when I need them the most. Pre and post-devirginization and, into my early twenties, I was attracted to peenies that made me feel as special as their sweaty ball sack grime. I allowed men to compartmentalize me and stop seeing me as a person beyond their needs. It was never subtle, it was always abrupt. I tried to change it, not too much, though, because that would require admitting to, and convincing myself that I was worth more than nothing. I lived on Self Loathing Lane intersecting How Can I Berate Myself Avenue. It made me sick to admit all of this; I didn’t want to lose what little I had with my peens. Shame. Shame. Shame. I clutched onto the idealized version of what spurned my initial attraction, ignoring that they were maelstroms of need and narcissism, straight up assholic pricks. Each time, what I wanted became irrelevant and I willingly accommodated and bypassed the backseat to dump my ass in the trunk.

Pursuing these peens for all the wrong reasons was my substance abuse of choice. They didn’t want to be with me, which made me want them even more. These men didn’t carve out a place for me in their lives no matter how much I might’ve wanted them to. They didn’t care about me and I allowed them not to care. I meant nothing to them because I meant nothing to myself. I had this atrocious inclination to romanticize men that weren’t right for me and Radar protested with a barrage of yeast infections, bladder infections and always as I was about to fuck a new man, menstruation. If I couldn’t assert myself and my needs, she damn well could and did. I just wasn’t listening.

My theory was that if Radar and I worked as a team, we’d lead me in the direction of a suitable hymen bandit. Pre-devirginization, when we were on the move, I would say, “Mama’s gotta pop. Work your mojo. Find me a man with a dash of deviance and eye popping where-do-you-want-my-ankles charisma, sharp wit and intelligence. Eh, maybe just the first two.”

I don’t remember my cherry jacker’s name and don’t know that I’d recognize him on the street. I do know that we met at a kegger. What the hell was I doing at a kegger; it’s the most un-Jewvent going. A BYOSC (bring your own sour cream), to a latke party, sure, but a kegger? Our eyes probably locked over a heated game of Quarters. I know he had dark hair and his own apartment—criterion enough. When we got back to his place, I ripped my clothes off and demanded that he fuck me senseless. He asked if I was a virgin. That shocked the hell out of me. I thought for sure my sluttiness and aggressiveness offset the V-stigma. Fuck. Fuck. Motherfuck. Fuck. I got defensive, folded my arms, tapped my foot and demanded he tell me what I did that was sooooo virginee. He laughed. Prick.

“Your friend’s, friend’s, friend told me.” He scoffed.

Here I was whoring myself in the most evolved manner I could and he was relying on third party information. How very high school. Fearing he wouldn’t fuck me, I confessed to my virginity while slooooowwwwwllly getting dressed, “I am a virgin, it’s true. I also don’t know you and have no burning desire to get to know you. You’re cute. You’re here and I’m mostly naked. What’s your plan?”

He offered me a drink. Frustrated, I plopped onto his Barcalounger, saturated in drunk-while-eating, beef-filled, Gordita Supremes and fake nacho cheese Chalupas. He handed me a Pina Colada wine cooler and said exactly what I didn’t want to hear, “I want your first time to be special.”

Oh. My. God. If I wanted my first time to be special, I wouldn’t have chosen him, a wailing, “Booyah! Fuck yeah. I’m the man” kinda guy and rabid Quarters fanatic, preening like a tomcat for “the ladies” every time he sank one in the cup. Please.

There was no way I was walking out of his apartment a virgin. If I had to plug Radar with his flaccid penis while he slept, I would (well, not really, but I was considering it). I needed to convince this man to deliver his package.

If memory serves, it took me two hours to get his pants off. He wanted scented blueberry drugstore candles. As long as his penis remained on site, candles were a non-ish. He wanted Journey playing softly in the background, to set the mood and to engage in pre-sex chatter, like an actual let’s-get-to-know-each-other conversation, complete with hair smoothing and long gazes. This was not on my “To Do” list or Radar’s. I kept telling myself, “Eye on the prize. You want to spin on this man’s pole, start spilling.”

Instead, I did the reflective listening thing to avoid discussion about myself and to give the illusion of being engaged. Every time he’d start a new topic, I’d flip my hair and flirtatiously run my fingers through his. Within an hour, I’d managed to toss one leg over one of his legs. Three beers and halfway through the second hour, I slid my half naked body onto his lap and propelled my tongue down his throat. I unabashedly ripped his t-shirt off. To make certain discussion was a thing of the past; I shoved my nipples in his mouth and my hands down his pants. Oh my, he did have quite the throbbing thrill hammer, didn’t he? Yes, indeedy he did.

“Wait!” he roared.

“Wait?!”  My mouth dropped—I know it did. I was inches away from popping my cork. I’d come so far. No. No. No. Hadn’t I done enough to earn his cocksicle?

He picked me up and carried me down the hall and past his Hootie and the Blowfish poster, onto his bed. He yanked his pants off. He manhandled me and he had his way with me.

Though I don’t remember whatever-we-called-him and I wasn’t looking for a memorable first time, I do remember it was over and over and over again. After I popped, I knew that Radar and I were an idyllic team.

In my late twenties, I hit bottom and became soft porn for the self-help community to feast on. A short lived Starter Marriage and many peenyfairs later, feeling miserable, dejected and thoroughly disgusted with myself, Radar’s sirens no longer fell on deaf ears. Overly yeasted and bladder infected, her lippy moxie finally paid off. She gave me the chutzpah to stop choosing men that fueled my low self-esteem, which became exhausting, by the by.

A humiliating discovery unearthing my cock-history, forced to recognize that I was the problem, not them. Was it my parents’ divorce? Being raised to become a self-reliant woman? Unresolved abandonment issues? Commitment issues? What the fuck quarantined my self-worth? I couldn’t figure it out. And, finally one day while eating one of my favorite comfort foods, an eggplant and Finnish cheese sandwich at Mario’s Cigar Shop in San Francisco, I got the message: though I felt like I loved no-strings, fuck-buddy, casual sex and knew that was never going to change, I needed to take a peenyatus, to regroup and resolve why I detested myself so much because that was the issue.

I knew I could fuck like an MBA student whoring to pay my tuition, but I couldn’t be vulnerable. Acquainting vulnerability with weakness, yet seeing it as strength in others. Susceptibility to needing someone felt like sacrificing my independence, a non-negotiable. I could orally engage the male pleasure plunger as notoriously as any glory hole queen, yet, I couldn’t be intimate. Intimacy? I would’ve preferred an outdoor, chemical skin peel during a heat wave while having my head shaved then lathered in Baby Oil. The idea of giving a fuckable carte blanche into my heart and soul paralleled choking. If I gave that to a man I was fucking, I would need him, his counsel, his tenderness, his strength, perhaps, thus diminishing my capacity to care for myself. I could talk sluttier and dirtier than any trollop whose idea of fun is fucking every male at her trailer park. I just couldn’t admit to a man, much less myself that I wanted more than the scraps I so willingly settled for. Castrating myself under the guise of saving myself, convinced I was honoring my independence, when actually, I was disrespecting it. I thought I’d outgrow it, evolve past it and eighty-six the luggage… But, I hadn’t yet.

While on peenyatus I also learned that buried somewhere inaccessibly there was something I wanted. It wasn’t “Mister Right” or “Mister Right Now.” I wanted to like myself and discover qualities within myself that I could be proud of. My friends and family saw me, whereas I only saw the distorted version.

I decided to backtrack. I was looking for commonalities between each man, anything to interlink them. It was a fascinating, mind-bending exercise.

And I didn’t learn shit.

Sexually, I was compatible with the majority of the men I hooked up with, which was a plus. Politically, they were painfully conservative, whereas I’ve always been a liberal. We had no common ground in that arena at all. Intellectually, they skewed scientific, mathematical or engineerish. None of those topics intrigued me from their perspective because none of it was rooted or presented in creativity. Emotionally, and this is where the ultimate connection was finally exposed, we were aloof, distant, lacked intimacy and fled from vulnerability. Instead of choosing men that challenged me to be the best person I could be by exploring those aspects of myself, they lit meth-lab size fires, to enable those issues.

Emotional intimacy with a penis consistently dwelling in my vagina scared the hell out of me. I thought, “He’s in my vagina, that’s not access enough for him?!”

If I wanted to be happy, I had to renegotiate my terms: Fear of intimacy and vulnerability, not rejection. Check—

Though Radar’s sluttiness can override our better judgment, only if it’s a one-night stand, what’s a girl to do? Say no? Maybe she should. I wasn’t committing to anything, not then anyway and not now. Sharing the deepest parts of myself with men I am fucking is just not something I enjoy doing. Though forcing myself to expose my emotional innards doesn’t come easily, it prevents me from categorizing men and dropping them into a dick buffet. I compromised so much of what I needed and wanted because I was too busy idolizing them on the pedestal I’d built, thus avoiding my heart, mind and soul from entering into the equation. It worked-ish for a while, anyway. 

Radar and I needed to act in each other’s best interest. All relationships take work, even my relationship with my vagina.

(If that fails, I can always knit her a v-string.)