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Welcome to Venus Voices

Would you like to share your story? To become a contributor at VenusBlogs, send your ideas, poems, fictional works or true stories to:

Dori Hartley, Editor
dori@venusblogs.com

All submissions must relate to women and women’s issues, ex: love, sexual self-esteem, body image, vaginal politics, rape, etc…

The White Stuff of Nightmares

HEALTH & WELL BEING
Tameka Mullins | VenusBlogs Contributor
Photo: A Scenery of Loss
Originally published here on VenusBlogs March 8, 2013

“I wasn’t born, I was adopted.”

Those six words won me a Smith Magazine Facebook contest in 2011. Because I had breathed life into those few words, some saw it as poetry. My prize was to take the stage at the 92Y Tribeca in the “I Am Turning Into My Mother” six-word story slam show and recite my poem along with a five minute back-story. As I was preparing for the show, another group of words sat in the corner of my mind, facing the wall. “I wasn’t raped, I was molested.” Another set of six. Just sitting. Waiting to be unleashed in public. I chose the safe and sexy six though.

Whenever I mention the fact that I’m adopted people’s eyes get really wide. It’s so mysterious not knowing who your parents are. Everyone wants to ask questions and suggest you contact Oprah so she can miraculously find your mom and bring you two together in talk-show bliss. No one wants to talk about being molested. But it happens. It happened to me in one of the foster homes I lived in. I was five-years-old.

The day had been long. I was really tired and as I was falling asleep about to dream about lollipops and puppy dogs, I felt a presence in my room. Moments later I felt a touch. Fingers were trying to enter a place they had no business. Then before I could protest the fingers were replaced by something more fierce. It was foreign and didn’t belong near a five-year old. It was rude, this thing. It tried to invade an innocent space. I knew something was wrong. I felt dirty. Violated. I was a little girl though and couldn’t articulate those feelings. I began to cry. The rude thing never gained occupancy, but it had fun trying. Its insistence ended in a white liquid silhouette that clouded my mind for years. Read more

The Topic No One Wants to Tackle

HEALTH & WELL BEING, RELATIONSHIPS
Tameka Mullins | VenusBlogs Contributor
art: Bebe Moore Campbell

Imagine being adopted and then over the course of your life reuniting with your biological mother, cousins and then your siblings. I don’t have to imagine this because I am currently living it. Over the past 10 years and most recently as two years ago, I learned that I have over 12 siblings! Being separated from your natural family brings up a whole host of issues and then when you do reunite with them, even more concerns crop up and you’re left wading in waters that have been slowly rising for years.

There are so many things to delve into here, but what I’d like to focus on is something a lot of reunited siblings and other biological relatives have encountered, but no one wants to talk about. GSA. What is GSA? Well, the technical term is called Genetic Sexual Attraction. Let’s sit with that a minute.

According to Wikipedia, it’s a sexual attraction between close relatives, such as siblings or half-siblings, a parent and offspring, or first and second cousins, who first meet as adults. Read more

Musings of a Menopausal Bitch

MENOPAUSE, SEX
Jaguar Jones | VenusBlogs Contributor

I hate sex.

Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes, you read that right. I hate sex. I don’t want to have it, I don’t want to think about it and I don’t ever want to be told that it’s my birth rite to keep having it until the day I die. I don’t want it! I’m tired of it. I’m all fucked out. I’ve had sexual intercourse 20,000 times in my life (give or take a few) and I think experience has bought me the right to say, “Leave me alone! I’ve done it! I’m finished with sex.”

After all, I’m the one living my life, correct? And so, while the whole world obsesses over how tight, wet and fabulicious they should be, or how sex with another million-year-old person is just the bee’s frikkin knees, I’ll be over here totally happy to not be getting slippery, slidy and smelly.

Calm down, it’s okay. It’s OK to not want sex. Why? Because I said so and what makes me an authority is that I am a menopausal woman who is thrilled out of her ever lovin’ gourd that she can finally blame her lack of sexual desire on something everybody believes to be the be-all-and-end-all of sexual destruction: menopause. Yay! I can finally get away with not wanting sex! Read more

Flying the Coop

MOMS
Linda Hill | VenusBlogs Contributor

I remember the day he was born – or rather the week he was born. He was my first. My water broke slowly over the period of that week and I slept so little that I was able to read a 1700 page novel in three days. When it was time to push (sans epidural – they didn’t offer them in the province of Quebec at the time) I did so for hours before they told me a physical defect in the base of my spine would make it impossible to deliver naturally.

After recovering from my c-section a week later we brought him home. Like many new parents we had no idea what to do with him. No matter what we did, he cried — oh how he cried. His appetite was almost insatiable. And even though he kept me up for months on end I loved him more than anything, ever. I was mom.

We moms give birth, nurture, feed, clothe and kiss it all better; we are mom. Mother is the universal feeling to all of us who have grown up and been loved by a maternal figure — even when we’re not related to her by blood, she is mom.

Read more

Can We Just Be Friends?

RELATIONSHIPS
Esmée St James | VenusBlogs Contributor
Hotwire Your Life® – Mojo For Boomer Chicks®

“ARGH, WHY DIDN’T YOU BREAK UP with your boyfriend before we went away!? We could’ve… you know… I still lust for you.”

Lexie, a newly divorced girlfriend indignantly recites this email snippet to me during an emergency phone pow-wow. It is the juicy part of correspondence just in from Tim, her handsome, charming male friend of more than thirty years. Two days prior she had returned from a Florida beach vacation with him, one of many platonic vacations together.

Okay, these two dated as teens and have always remained friends, emotionally supporting each other through a divorce and many more relationships each. Over three and a half decades a beautiful friendship based on mutual trust and respect has evolved. During ‘single’ episodes they’d been surrogate dates for friends’ weddings and out of town concert junkets, all platonic. Of course there’s been flirting but only of the healthy, verbal variety.

Sound familiar? Read more

Cover Up

BEAUTY
Lyn Rochelle | VenusBlogs Poet and Contributor
Photo: Body Sock / Image / Tess Kincaid

Once and for all
the farce of my attachment
to a notion of beauty
is exposed
as the entrapment
of conceit itself.

What was I thinking
so many years ago
with that
outburst of allure?

An old image,
smile and say cheese,
proves me a fool.

Nothing speaks
the truth of absurdity
like the shape
of my appearance,

my mind’s eye now
rolling with derision
at “how could I”?

Read more

What it Really Means to be a Woman

HEALTH & WELL BEING, POLITICS
Tameka Mullins | VenusBlogs Contributor
Artwork: Ysabel LeMay

Being female. What does that really mean? Beyond the shapes of our bodies and our vaginas which are the nucleus of all existence, who are we?

We are strength and doubt. We strut and slump and power our way through life knowing exactly what we want and then in the next moment we know nothing. We are the dreams of our ancestors, the hopes of our mothers and the nightmares of our children. We inspire, provoke and incite or so they say. Everything we do means something and if we do nothing — that means more than what we actually do.

We are walking billboards. If we are absent of a smile at any moment of the day we will be spotted and informed. How dare we not be bubbly 24-7? We are the sun, moon and stars and we are to be illuminated at all times. Read more

Flirting with the Shop Girl

BEAUTY, LGBT, MOMS
Arden Leavelle | VenusBlogs Contributor
From the Midnight Confessions Series

I love when life gives you an unexpected gift. There are the little ‘finding a $10 bill in your jeans’ or ‘stumbling onto a forgotten bottle of wine in your pantry’ gifts. Then there’s the kind of gift that stirs something deep within and reminds you that you’re a sexual, sensual woman – if only for a brief moment.

It was Christmas Eve and I was still searching for a certain kitchen item for my mom, so I went to a nearby specialty shop – sort of like a locally owned Williams-Sonoma – to get it. With my cranky five-year-old in tow, I jockeyed through the other procrastinators shoppers to work my way toward the back of the store. I silently berated myself for landing myself in this situation. I’ve always been the last-minute girl, and it only intensifies with age. Read more

Young Mom, Old Soul

HEALTH, MOMS, RELATIONSHIPS
Kristal Heath | VenusBlogs Contributor

I was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I lived until I was eight years old. After my parents’ divorce was finalized, my mother packed up shop and brought us to Lorain, Ohio. Supposedly, this was to be a bright and fresh beginning; to be around her family, to find happiness. And yet, all I can remember is the struggle.

My mother suffered many injuries to her feet. Being a single parent, she never had time to recover and heal properly, and over time, these small instances became quite serious. She was diagnosed with a rare disease called Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy (RSDS). The doctors sent her to specialists and pain management clinics, only to tell her there was not much they could do. Read more

Pussy Defined

V TALK
Linda Hill | VenusBlogs Contributor

Pussy. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the definition is:
1. Cat, or 2. A catkin of the pussy willow.
My question is — where did the word come from to describe the vagina? Yes, the dictionary goes on to give that as a definition as well, but I’ll get to that later.

With pussy being a notable omission in last week’s list of ‘Names for the Vagina’ (I’ll Have The Rack of Clam, Please), and one that I, personally, dislike, my thought processes (strange as they are) compelled me do a few comparisons to the vagina and its feline counterpart. I came up with a few.

For instance, a vagina doesn’t purr, at least not in any literal sense. You don’t see them rubbing up against other people’s legs… hmm… Okay. What else? I concede that under perfectly healthy conditions a vagina is somewhat self-cleaning. Though I’ve never met a cat that would enjoy a bath or a shower — or a swim — as much as I do. And speaking from personal experience, my vagina has never spit up a hairball — so as long as I keep it neatly trimmed, neither will any of my partners. Read more