Gotham Digest

In some way or another, we all want what we can't have. I was having a cup of coffee (which evidently I didn't want) with a friend who had emailed me a day or two earlier. She told me she had some questions about a guy in her life, and she didn't know what to do.

Women, all around me, are settling.  Not settling down, not finding Mr.Right, but finding Mr. Right Now.  It isn’t about dating someone who meets your standards, it’s about fucking someone who meets half of them.  Or, casually seeing someone who is “perfect” but unavailable.

It was long before I ever started getting interested in girls that I realized I would be no good at sex. I had a pretty solid understanding of the mechanics of the process at a very young age, and it..

Rachel Kramer Bussel is more than a “sexpert.” It would be more apt to describe her as a sexual curator, at the forefront of all things cutting edge sexy, from the educational to the entertaining. She wrote the famed “Lusty Lady” column for The Village Voice, and is currently the Senior Editor at Penthouse Variations. She has edited or co-edited more than 20 anthologies, including Naughty Spanking Stories from A to Z, and the most recent Dirty Girls, and presents the monthly reading series In The Flesh, where she combines her zeal for naughty writing with her passion for cupcakes. You can read her regularly at her blog, lustylady.blogspot.com.

For decades, the label "stalker’ has been tattooed as a gender-specific crime, committed by men. hings have changed drastically. Twelve to 13-percent of all stalkers are female. Although less in statistical number than males, female stalkers are just as predatory and dangerous.

Stalking, for the most part, is about relationships—prior, desired, or imagined. Sixty-percent of stalkers have a personal relationship with their victims before the stalking begins. However, 22% of stalking cases involve complete strangers.

According to many psychologists, our behavioral patterns, including how and whom we love, are developed by the age of six.

As children, our ability to communicate is minimal, but the power to observe and mimic as a survival skill is deeply rooted in the genetic coding of our species. This means that the relationships we seek as adults imitate the dynamic we observed between our parents or caregivers (up to when we were 6).  As we grew older and hopefully wiser, our parents may have tried to give contrary advice;  “Do as I say, not as I do (or did)”, but unfortunately the observed behavior was much more powerful than their contradicting advice.

Donna Wilshire, a friend of mine who writes about the Oral Tradition, explains that our species survived and thrived for many thousands of years without writing, without books.  In the beginning, people communicated with each other and passed information down to the next generation through stories that were told orally