My partner Q and I moved back to Colorado, a few months earlier than originally planned due to Q’s new job, and it is fucking fantabulous…at least the six days I was able to spend there before I headed out of Providence, RI to speak at the Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health (on Ethical Pornography), and now at Brown University (On Body Positivity and Autonomy as Sexual Freedom and then with Megan Andelloux on Being a Sex Educator in the Real World). I’m then back in Denver for about 48 hours, if that, before I head out to Portland to teach at KinkFest (Safer Sex for Kinksters, Poly and Kink, and Communication in a Kink Context). Then thank the mooses, I’m back for about 10 days before heading to Washington, DC to speak at Momentum (on Intersections of Identities and on 3 panels about ethics and blogging, feminism in the adult industry and public vs privacy in blogging) and Sugar (Sex positions for EVERYONE!). Phew.  Then it’s back to AZ twice in April for a class and Phoenix Pride, and then to San Diego for AASECT. Finally, I get to chill a bit in May, really get to re-settle into Colorado, work a little more on planning the wedding, etc.

In the midst of all this, I also had to help my mother put down our family cat of eleven years, the wonderful and caring Anastasia, who was a rescue cat from a dementia patient who was abusing her back in 2000. It was incredibly tough, especially with all of the emotions running high still from the move, some of the body pain I’m dealing with, and then traipsing across the country…

Anyways, I’ll try to be better about putting more posts up here, and you can also check out thoughts, Q and A, upcoming workshops and more on ShannaKatz.com.

-Essin’ Em

What, pray tell, is the Love Industry? It is the capitalism in our society has found that by making people (particularly women, but people in general) feel back about not being in a relationship, not being in a “serious enough” relationship, not having the “perfect wedding” etc, that they will then rush out to spend tons and tons of money on ridiculous things. The worse you make people feel about their relationships (or lack thereof) with others, the more money they will spend.

Look at Valentine’s Day — people spend so much time and energy trying to make sure they have a partner on Valentine’s Day, and then once/if they do, they spend all this money trying to impress their partner and “show their love” by buying outrageous gifts that may or may not even suit their partners tastes. Clearly, every woman in existence wants a diamond necklace, right? I sure as heck don’t.  And then, when people say things like “I don’t think Valentine’s Day is important — I think love should happen year round,” they’re then told that they are just being jealous, petty, wishing they had a partner (or a partner that did better things for them, bought more expensive things, etc) and so on.  And of course, I work in the industry that hops onto this bandwagon — Valentine’s Day is one of our biggest seasons (but at least a vibrator lasts a lot longer than a bouquet of flowers, and can be used together).

This year, I picked up some pre-made food from Whole Foods and we ate it, cause I wasn’t in the mood to cook. Then we watched TV we’d missed, and worked on our duo-presentation for the National Collegiate Leadership Conference. Oh, and drove to the post office to drop off our application for a residence in Denver. Why? Because it was a Monday, and that is what needed to happen that Monday. My best friend and her husband went to Qudoba for dinner, and he wound up buying her a 6-pack of blueberry beer. It had nothing to do with money — they just decided that THAT was what they wanted to do. And that is how it should be.

Don’t even get me started on the wedding industry. Other than the fact that they are totally not queer inclusive (which they need to work on, given all the states passing same-sex marriage and civil unions), but honestly, this industry is vile at times. I keep getting sent wedding magazines, bride magazines, nesting magazines, where the “budget” dresses are one thousand to three thousand bucks. A “budget wedding” apparently comes in between twenty and thirty thousand. a BUDGET WEDDING means keeping it under a grand in my mind. We’re capping ours at $5000, and that includes outfits, locations, food, flowers, DJ, cupcakes, pumpkins for decorating, etc. We’re doing a cheap wedding of sorts, the way we like it (whether or not a burgundy ball dress is traditional, whether or not a DJ with a Rainbow Mohawk is appropriate, etc). But clearly, so many people buy into this fantasy that they are selling, this concept that with out an expensive white dress and prince to sweep you away, that we are nothing. Why? What is it that says this is “right” thing, other than the companies trying to sell it to us in the first place?

Recently, I discovered this video by AFP (Amanda Fucking Palmer) which is about pubic hair (watch out, it’s very catchy):

Now, the video is awesome, I love the fabulous merkins (vulva wigs), the beat is rocking…but I have some issues with the message. I totally 100% believe that we need to do away with the myths that a shaved vulva is sexier, that natural hair is gross, that shaving/waxing/etc is a cleaner option, and so on. Obviously, these are all bullshit, and just one more way to control women and their bodies.

HOWEVER, I’ve talked about this before and I’ll talk about it again. It is NOT sex positive or feminist in anyway to tell people that what they CHOOSE to do to their body is wrong, or as this song puts it “whack.” Vagina Monologues (which has its other issues as well) has a piece called Hair, in which it says “You cannot love the Vagina unless you love hair.” First of all, this is anatomically incorrect, as the vulva is where there is hair, not the vagina…and secondly, it tells those people that like the feel of having less/styled/different/no public hair that they clearly don’t love their vulva/vaginas or those of a partner.

I have done almost everything that there is to do with pubic hair (except dying it). I have cut it, styled it, shaved it, waxed it (never again — way too fucking expensive), etc. It is certainly NOT for any male gaze. And I identify as a sex positive woman and with parts of the femininist movement. Does this mean that I don’t love my vulva? That I’m wack? NO. I like the sensations of toys and tongues both with and without hair, and enjoy the differences that hair does and doesn’t provide. Some months I grow it out, other months I chop it off. My public hair and how I style it does not define me as a person, or whether or not a love female assigned genitala. The end.

I don’t know what the answer is. How do we reclaim the sexiness of having hair as an option without stepping on shavers/waxers/etc? It’s the same as how can we run the fat positive movement without saying horrible things about skinny people? (some people are naturally a size two, and yet often times the FP movement talks about them as if they are bulimic or anorexic when they are not, or calls them skinny bitches, etc). To be truly sex positive, or the type of feminist I identify as involves elevating global thinking WITHOUT HURTING others. When we step on people, say hurtful things, call them names, etc, solely in order to futher our own thoughts about things, we set all of us back.

So yes, I will probably continue to sing this song under my breathe, and I will DEFINITELY be using Map of Tasmania in the future. But Amanda Fucking Palmer, Eve Ensler, and the rest of you? Please stop judging people for choices that they make. Pubic hair is NOT gross…but not having it doesn’t make you a bad person, a failure as a woman, or even whack.

-Essin’ Em

When I got home, Q had left that morning. Because she’s awesome, she’s facilitating this amazing social justice leadership retreat up in Prescott all week, and won’t be back until Saturday night. The apartment felt so empty without her, the cats all crowding around me for attention that they hadn’t gotten all day, demanding pets and love. All I wanted was to curl up in bed with her arms around me, having been apart almost a week already.

I travel a fair amount, but with my disability and relationship, I try to keep it down to less than a week a month. When it’s longer, I try to come home in the middle for at least a night so that we can regroup and reconnect. This almost two week period is the longest amount of time that we haven’t slept together in almost a year and a half, and shockingly to me, it’s harder than I thought. I was such an independent person for so long, rarely spending the night or letting others spend the night, that it seems odd to me that just a few days apart from my partner makes me feel weird and lonely. But if I’m honest with myself, which I try to be, it does. It bothers me. I feel lonely in bed without her pressed up against me, or her heavy breathing in my ear.

I never expected to be in a mostly monogamous, long term relationship. When I pictured my future, it was never a part of it. Now, I’m incredibly happy to be in one now, with such an amazing person, but it certainly goes to show how much you never know, and how different the future may be than what you expect it to be.

7 Days down and 4.5 more to go until I have someone to hug and cuddle with, someone else to cook for, someone to laugh at my jokes and swat my butt while I’m cooking. I never thought I would miss that, because I never had it to begin with…but now that Q is such a huge part of my life, the space that is there when she is gone is so much more noticable than I ever would have thought.

-Essin’ Em

Essin' Em at the AVNs

Check me out at the AVN awards, wearing a sassy blue dress (my first ever One-Strap Dress), and the awesome 3-D glasses for the 3-D segment of the awards. Yep, I’m that cool.

Like last year, lots of queer and sex positive movies were nominated for the awards, including CrashPadSeries.com for best alternative website, Courtney Trouble’s Seven Minutes in Heaven for Pro-Am, Dangerous Curves for best niche movie (starring April Flores, directed by Carlos Batts), Good Releasing for best company, Jamye Waxman’s Sex Positions for Couples, etc. None of them won, sadly (although Good Vibrations and Babeland did win the two categories that Fascinations was nominated for…if we had to lose, what great companies to lose to!). JeJoue won both best small toy company and best toy for women with the JeJoue G-Ki.

Also, I got an Njoy Eleven. Get ready for my entire life to change. Well, I mean, at least the sexual part and art collector part of it. I also now have a La Palma harness from Spareparts to try, which I am super excited about, and a sample of one of Buck Angel’s new AWESOME glass toys! I can’t wait for his whole line to come out.

Smitten Kitten threw a fabulous party on Thursday night, and I am incredibly grateful to them. In this field, it can be extremely hard to be a sex positive person, particularly since many of us are the only people in the industry in our area. We are often alone in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Wisconsin, LA, or wherever it is we happen to be. Outside of San Francisco and New York, there are not many groupings of sex educators, sex positive toy store owners, etc. However, attending this party was like coming home, meeting all sorts of other awesome people in the field, sharing triumphs and tribulations, asking questions that related to our own ethical views of certain toy lines, talking about the latest this, and the most interesting that. My hat goes off to Smitten Kitten for organizing such a great event (and with such delicious vegetarian and organic food/drink options to boot!) and helping to connect sex positive people in the adult/sex industry in a way that rarely has happened before. Plus, their crew is awesome.

Sometimes, I feel like I’m straddling the mainstream world and the sex positive world, and I don’t quite fit either. Where I work is sex positive, but we also have 16 stores and a website, so we do things very differently than a small company with just one or two stores. On my own, I am as sex positive as I can possibly be, but when I’m seen as part of Fascinations, I feel like I’m sometimes shunned from the sex positive community for having chosen to work with a more mainstream company, and that the literally dozens of free classes we offer, sex educators we employe, products we choose to carry (and not carry) don’t even matter, because it’s not my own store, or a well know store in the sex positive world. It’s tough. I felt that same way working for HotMoviesForHer, because at the time, few people were ok with the fact that many women DO like porn, and like more than just super touchy feely couples porn at that. I’m always feeling a little like a black sheep…but at least black is my favorite color, and I think sheep are cute. I do look forward to moving back to Colorado for many reasons, and one is being closer to other sex positive people in the adult industry, and the folks at the Denver SK are awesome.

That’s it for now…I’ll try to get back to posting more regularly from now on.

-Essin’ Em

Q has decided to eat predominantly vegetarian/pescitarian. Which is awesome. Our house is pretty much vegetarian anyways (aside from the occasionaly sliced turkey for Q’s sandwiches), but this means it will be 100% veggie, and that we’re going to both be vegetarian, at least for a bit while Q tries this out. As someone who has been vegetarian for 19 years, it’ll be nice having a mostly veg partner. I’ve never ever been the preachy type — I’ve only ever dated one other vegetarian. I don’t judge, and I don’t tell people what they shouldn’t eat (especially as long as they don’t tell me what I SHOULD eat), but it’s nice having someone on the same page as me.

I’m thinking that next week, when I get back from the AEE/ANE/AVNs in Vegas, I’m going to try a raw diet for a week while Q is off teaching at a social justice leadership program. My old migraine meds (which I’ve finally titrated off of) helped me to gain 30+ pounds over the past year. Now that I’m off of them, I’m hoping a week of raw food might jumpstart my body into starting to lose some of those…and if not, at least it’s a very healthyl, vitamin filled week. Plus, we just bought a living social deal for 20 sessions of Hot Yoga each. I’m a little nervous, as I’ve dislocated my knees doing yoga before, but there are so few types of exercise I can do without massive pain that I’m figuring anything is worth a try right now.

My goals (NOT resolutions) for 2011:

*Book more lectures/workshops/classes at Colleges/Universities and Kink specific events (if you’re interested in having me, check out ShannaKatz.com for more info!)

*Finish at least one of the 4 books I’m currently working on and get it ready for publication

*Get more sex coaching/relationship counseling clients, both face to face and via skype.

*Move back to Colorado with Q and our kitties

*Help my mother get her house packed and ready for sale in 2012

*Have a fabulous queer celebration of love/wedding to the love of my life in October without going into any debt

*Make enough money to finally pay off medical 2008 and 2009 medical bills, so I can finally work towards paying my student loans

*Get an Njoy Eleven. No, seriously. It’s a goal. And heck, I really want a Spareparts La Palma harness too.

*Once back in CO, join a gym with both recumbant bikes and a pool so I can work on getting more cardio in. If I lose a little weight to where I was, I know my knees will feel better.

They are goals of sorts, but much more year-long and less number specific. I find that when I set goals like “lose 10 lbs by _____” or “make _____ money” or “get in touch with ________ friends,” I am less likely to follow through than when they are life changes.

Best of luck to everyone in the new year!

Essin’ Em

However, as much as I’ve always know I didn’t want kids, I’ve known I wanted cats. There was 9 months in my life with no cats, between our house burning down in May of 1999 (killing our two kitties), and moving in to the rebuilt house and adopting Phoenix and then Anastasia in spring of 2000. Even when I lived in Germany, my host family had two cats. As soon as I got my own apartment my senior year of undergrad, I adopted Kinsey. Cats to me are my children. I treat my kitties as members of the family, and when they depart, like Athena dying December 2008, my heart breaks for them (and I sat Shiva).

My cats are a part of my family, and when I was freely dating, they were a good measuring tool. If someone didn’t like cats, they were out. Now, if they were ambivelent, all they had to do was meet Kinsey, and usually their mind changed. If they met my cat or cats (depending on when), and the cats didn’t like them? Done. My cats like most people, and so I took them not liking someone as a sign of things to come. It only happened twice, but I found out later on that it was a very good sign to stay away.

And then I met Q. Q had a cat already (Jasper), and was more co-dependent with him than I was with Kinsey. Moreover, when I adopted Kali and had the whole traumatic experience of her in the ER for 3 days, Q let me call, text and rant, even though we were all of just a few months (if that) into dating. Q didn’t mind that the cats were allowed everywhere except the counter and the kitchen table, and embraced both cat hair and Kaili claiming Q as her own. When Q would go back to New York to visit, I’d come take care of Jasper, staying over to watch a movie with him, or reading out loud. When I was gone, Q would text me pictures of Kinsey and Kali missing me.

This sounds silly, yes, but I realized that the perfect kitty parent was a non-negotiable for me. And the other night, as I watched Q carefully scoop a certain amount of dry food into a dish, and then add the right amount of wet food, with a little extra water, and mash it all around to make it as appetizing to them as possible (they’re on a new UTI prevention diet), and then soak a cranberry pill, and gently give it to Jasper and stroke his throat until he swallowed…I realized that Q fit the mold. Q was the perfect kitty daddy (we like to play with gender, obviously) to me, the kitty mommy. Between the two of us, the cats always have someone to lie on, someone to pet them, someone to dangle a toy in front of them. We sit together, making up stories about what each cat is saying when they meow, about how they feel about leopard print, about Kali’s royal throne, about Jasper’s queen-y walk, about Kinsey’s rubber and latex fetish. We curl up in our bed, two of us and three very spoiled cats, and it just feels right.

Q is my kitty daddy, and is a better fit for me and our family of fur kids than I ever could have imagined.

-Essin’ Em

I’m nervous around her family. Why? Because I want them to like me so much. I want to fit in. I want to be the perfect daughter in law. I want everything to be so perfect, so right…

Because my family is so dysfunctional. My mother and sister apparently had a conversation about how my mother didn’t want to call me or email me to wish me happy birthday on my birthday. And then my aunt called this week, trying to convince me to convince my mother to sell her house and get baratric surgery, and yada yada…although she neglected to tell me that her partner was having another round of surgery for her breast cancer. Yeah. That’s how my family works. There are only a few of us (5? 6?) left in the US, but we’re all crazy. And so I wanted so bad to fit in with Q’s family.

They were so warm and welcoming. They had holiday gifts for me and even threw a little birthday/holiday dinner. Her mother made these AMAZING stuffed mushrooms and artichokes (I’d never had stuffed mushrooms before — they are so freaking tasty), and her Nana took us to lunch one day, and her aunts were so sweet. It was like having the holiday experiences that I’d always wanted to have, and that my family never had.

Family is what you make of it. You are born into a family, and while they are always your family in some ways, your family is chosen. My friends are my chosen family and Q and my kitties are my family, and now, hopefully, I’ll be gaining another type of family.

-Essin’ Em

For a long time, I thought I was going to be alone forever. I viewed myself as unloveable, as broken, as not worthy of love. I didn’t think anyone would find me “worth” dealing with, putting up with my insecurities, my disabilities, my career, my snarkiness, my messiness, my anthropormorphisizing of my cats.

And then, I met Q. At a strap on class that I was teaching even. Well, this way I knew that for the most part, sex ed wasn’t going to be an issue. Q is incredibly caring about social justice, about equality (or the lack there of), actually cares about politics and truly works towards creating change in this world. On top of that, Q is witty, hilarious, fun to be around, incredibly smart, and laughs at my ridiculous jokes…and Q is more co-dependent with Jasper (the Maine Coon) than I have ever been with my cats. Although I don’t believe in the concepts of perfect matches (because you have to work on making them work), I can’t imagine finding anyone more perfect for me than Q. I wonder sometimes if I even deserve such happiness. Q says I do.

There are few things more wonderful than waking up in the middle of the night from a bad dream, and having loving arms around you, or getting a “hello beautiful” text message in the morning, or an “I love you” sign on the holiday shrubbery, and knowing that the love is actually meant, and isn’t just some trite or cliche message. Few things more reassuring than your partner bringing you ice packs and pain killers when you can’t walk, or calling to see how your neurologist appointment went.

I am not perfect. I am a hard pill to swallow at times. It is hard to love me, and sometimes harder to be with me. I know all of this. And yet, I am lucky enough to have found someone as wonderful and driven and loving as Q, who takes me how I am.

Next October, we’re having our “Queer Celebration of Love” — AKA, the wedding. I’ll have to write about my views on marriage at some point, but the wedding is our celebration for our friends and family, a showing off of our love, a rejoycing in our connection.

Sadly, Q is still in New York for today’s anniversary, but Q’s family is important, and I understand that. Instead, this Saturday I’m making a special dinner for us, and for Christmas, we’re driving to a relaxing resort outside of Vegas to take advantage of their special pricing, and cooked food, and will celebrate there. I love being together, experiencing things together, trying new things together.

So happy anniversary stud muffin. I can’t imagine being happier with anyone else ever, anywhere, any time. Thank you for letting me love you and trust you,

Babycakes.

Now, if you know me, you know that while I’ve certainly tried non-Western medicine (accupuncture, reflexology, cranial sacral therapy, etc), I’m not much for what my friends often call “the woo-woo” stuff. I like my toilets to flush, I (while vegetarian) am not gluten free, and I shamefully will never use blood rags or pee clothes. Yes, I’ve made my own clothing, and tried raw food for meals, and like quinoa and loose leaf tea, but I’ve never been associated with the more spiritual side of things.

More so, when I dated F, she made me even less likely to want to experiement in this venue. Whenever we fought (often), she’d pull out crap like “clearly, you can only love with your head, not with your heart” and “I’m out of tune — you’re throwing me out of balance” instead of actually having a conversation about what the problem(s) was/were, and how we could work on improving our relationship.  She told me to stop taking migraine meds and just do Magnesium (that fucked shit up), that I didn’t need pain killers or surgery because clearly Arnica would solve all my knee problems, and that when sick, oil of oregano would fix me (it didn’t — I felt HORRIBLE for 2 weeks). Given all of that, and how she also rationalized doing ‘Shrooms because they were all natural and it was connecting to mother earth, you can see how I might have wanted to gain some distance from this perspective.

However, since Sedona, I’ve decided that it is very closed minded of me not to be willing to try and accept new experiences, and on the way back, Q and I talked about how I’d like to try Reiki to see if it could help with some of my joint pain and/or migraines. Well, what do you know, but the Weekly Plus coupon a week or two later was for an energy balancing with a reiki master (more energy centric than reiki, but still the general theme).

Finally, I was able to schedule my appointment this past Saturday.  I went in, no idea what to expect. The center where this took placed also offers massage, reiki, waxing, electralysis and chiropractic services…so I had no idea what to make of it. My “guide” or “healer” (what is the right terminology here?) was very nice.  However, when we sat down, having just met, and she told me she had made a list of her observations about my energy before having met me, my eyebrows raised.

Now, much of the list was accurate. A few things weren’t. I was trying to keep an open mind, but a) saying stuff like “you have a love-hate relationship in your life — what is that about” can apply to pretty much anyone at any given time. Some things were more specific, like my bad relationship with my mother, or the piece of my heart that is empty due to the loss of my father. I just had a hard time not questioning all of this…and a little voice in the back of my head kept nagging me that all she’d have to do was google my name, and she could have found out pretty much all of this.

That said, we talked about my chakras (root and the top were fine, my sacral was off to the left in the feminine, my solar plexus was depleted, torn and stealing people’s energy, my heart one was open but felt cold, my throat one was torn and hurting and empty, and my third eye chakra had a tight band around it, possibly causing my migraines), and then I hopped on the table, trying to clear my mind and listen to the music while she touched some of my joints and some of my chakras, letting her angels guide her as to where to place the energy.

So here’s the thing. I’m still not sure how I felt about this. She said I took and held the energy well, better than most first timers. I did feel more relaxed, but my overall anxiety hasn’t change, my pain and migraines are still here, and I have a new very sore pain in my upper shoulders, despite the tons of water I drank and the Epsom salt bath I attempted to take (as per her request). I’ve tried to touch my solar plexus when I feel needy and tell myself I’m really ok, and tell Q that I’m ok just letting something go, or moving it until tomorrow.

So did it do anything? Or did it just increase some of my self awareness, as a counseling session might? Did she truly read my energy, or was it what is commonly known as a “cold read” or the result of a google session?

I honestly don’t know any of these answers. She gave me a returning deal of 50% off another session, and I might give it a try. I can’t afford therapy right now, nor do I have the trust in my doctor to work with me on finding an anti-anxiety medication…and I either need to figure out some form of relaxation or release soon, because something has got to give. I am too stressed and too emotional not to make changes in my life.

I’d love to hear about other peoples’ experiences with energy work, to see how they felt, reacted, changed, etc,…or not. I am doing my best to keep a very open mind, and would love to hear from you.

-Essin’ Em