When I was a girl most of my playmates were boys. We lived an hour outside the city, where homes cost less, but were much larger and came with a lot more land. We had two acres right on a lazy river, and a five bedroom house. All of that for the same price as a small two bedroom home wedged into a tiny lot in the city.

There were seven houses on my street, and the street gave onto a highway. My three brothers were most of my playgroup, and the Carruthers boys were most of the rest. There was one girl, Amy, but she was mostly sickly and unavailable.

You would have thought this would make me into a tomboy, but that didn't happen. I was a dreamer, a reader, a fantasist. I adored Harry Potter and read the books over and over. I was awed by the movies. And I was a drama queen, according to mom.

The boys would have 'bang bang bang!" shootouts with their toy guns, and they were always pretending in their minds that they were action heroes saving the day. I liked to die - dramatically. I would get shot and do a melodramatic fall to lay sprawled out on the floor or across the sofa or table, a tragic victim.

I watched the boys, mostly, not that interested in sports. I certainly enjoyed swimming, and floating on plastic mattresses and toys on the river, and splashing and throwing beach balls around. I was considerably less impressed at being dunked or shoved into the water, which was something boys seemed to enjoy quite a bit.

I read a lot of Nancy Drew and imagined myself, the great genius detective, solving crimes with my mighty intellect and shrewd insight. The boys just wanted to fight with criminals.

I got interested in computers early, but more in what I could do with them and they for me, not in how they worked. I had no interest in opening them up and poking around, the way the boys did. I just wanted to use them to explore life.

As we grew older, a few of the guys got very good at understanding them, but I got good at finding things. I got to understand how keywords worked, and explored the way search engines functioned. I learned something of the math behind it, and the way that companies paying Google and other search engines screwed things up.

My mother just said I was nosy. And that was my motivation. I wanted to know everything.

I was very much a rules minder. Boys tended to break the rules. But I was a good girl. Set me a rule and I'd keep it, and I'd tattle on anyone who didn't. This did not always endear me to the boys, especially my brothers.

As I grew older and developed my 'differences' became blindingly apparent, and it was even harder to be 'one of the boys'. I tended to wear bulky clothes to disguise this, and also because the way the Carruthers brothers noticed my bits and pieces tended to provoke arguments with my brothers.

I was not an enthusiast for confrontation. I wanted people to be happy, and like each other, and like me. I didn't want shouting and anger, much less physical fights. I would overlook insults and pretend not to notice the way they sometimes tried to look down my tops. And I learned to stop tattling, at least for some things.

I mean, it was certainly against the rules for guys to grab my ass. But I didn't want to cause a big scene or anything by complaining too loudly, as long as they stopped.

I guess I was a bit... meek and mild-mannered - and still am, to be honest. That doesn't mean I'm afraid of anything. I just greatly prefer a happy, congenial gathering to people glaring and snarling at each other.

I dated some in high school. We had a small one, given where we lived, and most people knew each other, or each other's family. That it made it quite dangerous for a girl to do anything that might earn her a reputation, because sure as hell your parents would find out.

Knowing what society expected of you as a girl was a very difficult thing. Boys have it easy. They're expected to try to have sex with any girl they can, as often as they can. There are no rules on this aside from the requirement for consent from the target of their lust.

So sexual rules for boys, who are, by nature, horny bastards, are pretty lax.

Girls are swaddled in a tight, smothering, often contradictory set of rules and expectations which shifted seemingly by the day. We are expected to be hot and sexy - but not try to be hot and sexy. We're expected to cooperate at least to a degree with the boys desire to have sex, but how much varied wildly, depending on the situation and changed further as we grew older.

We're expected to be slim and shapely and have nice, toned bodies, but not to show them off or be seen to take pride in them. If we dress too sexy people sneer at us for dressing slutty. If we don't dress at all sexy people sneer at us for being prudes. And how sexy was the exact amount of sexy varies again by age and situation.

There are, in other words, a lot of judgment calls to make.

Sex. Having sex wasn't a requirement for the early years of high school. In fact, it was kind of frowned upon. The closer you got to senior, the more you were expected to be doing with boys you went out with. Sex mostly depended on the situation, on whether the guy had spent enough time with you, and you had a relationship of some kind.

Since I didn't really enjoy the company of any of the guys I dated well enough to want them as a boyfriend I remained a virgin.

See, the guys were sometimes interesting, but the ones I got along with, mostly weren't terribly sexy to me. My view of sex was bound up in what I'd found on the internet, and that was hot, animal sex with big, toned, ripped guys. Those guys, in high school, tended to be assholes who would broadcast everything you did the next morning.

When I started college I figured things would be different, but mostly, they weren't. Well, I was much more anonymous, so I could actually have sex without anyone gossiping about it. But the ripped, toned, big powerful muscular men were still mostly jocks, and mostly not interesting to me aside from the quick, cheap sex angle.

And I didn't want quick, cheap sex, I wanted good sex!

And, to be honest, I wanted nasty sex!

See, as a dramatist and a girl with a great imagination, as someone who was very impressed with big, broad, muscular chests and, well, big penises, my sexual fantasy life was kind of dark. I had lots of fantasies about sexual encounters of a type the feminists, not to mention the law, would never have approved of.

That's not to say I'm not independent minded and would accept being treated differently than guys, or that I didn't insist on being treated with respect - insofar as I ever insisted on anything. But when it came to sex I had somehow gotten this very cliched view of me as the helpless maiden being 'taken' by some big, rugged guy.

I recognized I was being shallow, and I tried to argue with myself, using logic. Obviously, a kind, sensitive man who would be sweet and gentle and caring was a way better match for me than some big ogre!

Yet, I still felt a thrill at being the noble victim, the helpless maiden, so tragic! So dramatic! Poor me!

That sort of image was the focus of my sexual fantasies since I had figured out that touching myself in certain ways felt really good, and so my mind had come to identify this with sexual arousal and excitement.

That didn't mean I wasn't willing to at least try sex. In my first year, I did finally lose my virginity. I had sex with three big jocks. One was a baseball player, one was a swimmer and one was a football player. None of them were particularly rough (and I was too shy to ask) and none was particularly good, nor took a very long time to finish.

I was not impressed, but not entirely sure if it was them or me. Were my perverted fantasies getting in the way? Had I spent so much time imagining dark, nasty, wicked sex as a helpless victim that I couldn't enjoy normal sex?

I didn't know, but I wasn't exactly preoccupied with the problem. I had a satisfying sex life with myself, so I didn't really need boys.

I continued to love fantasy - sexual or not - and a little ways into college I started dressing and acting a bit, well, like a goth. Mostly because my roommate was one and she was my only friend, at least at first. So I explored the scene.

They, after all, were kind of into drama, too, and fantasy. Theirs were kind of depressing, though, compared to mine. I dyed my hair black, at Dana's insistence that I would look really great. And to continuous accusations I was chicken, and not taking things seriously I got my tongue pierced, then my lower lip, then my nipples.

This made me look like a kind of sophisticated girl into sophisticated things (or so I thought) but aside from lots of dancing to bad music, and some fooling around with other girls (which was interesting) I didn't really get a lot out of it all. I wouldn't do drugs, because, well, that was illegal. And I had no interest in suicidal things or cutting myself, or thoughts of death either.

The ring in my lip got in my way too much so I got rid of it. But the tongue ring was good for oral sex, so I hung onto it. Oral sex is the default for dates where you don't want to have sex. They're usually satisfied with oral sex. And if not, well, there isn't a lot they can do about it with Mr. Softy between their legs.

The goth girls I hung around with all talked a lot about oral sex and the goal of deep throating. That, apparently, was what marked you as good at it. Being a practical girl, I practiced with my dildo, and I was able to learn deep throating relatively easily.

No one was impressed with this among the goth girls. In fact, they thought I was lying, and when I demonstrated with a hot dog, they called me a show-off and resented me.

I began to lose interest in goths around then anyway. It was end of term and I went home, where people were normal and teased me about my black hair.

I thought I looked good with black hair. It was nice and shiny and held together well, and was an interesting contrast with my very light colored skin.

Anyway, there are no jobs out there in the boonies, as you can imagine. I was taking Criminology at college. I didn't want to be a cop - not liking confrontation, but I imagined myself doing research on behalf of, like, detectives or FBI agents or something. I thought that would be really interesting work.

Since I had continued to focus on ways to find information and made no secret about it to my professors, one recommended me for a job as a junior researcher at a big law firm in the New York City. That was pretty much ideal for me, except that there was no way to commute from northern New York where I lived.

That problem was solved when a girl I'd gotten close to in college and I were chatting online, and she invited me to stay with her for the summer. I hesitated because she was one of the girls I'd fooled around with a little, and I wondered if the real reason for her invitation was wanting to explore that further.

I wasn't entirely opposed to trying that, but I was not especially into girls because my fantasies basically involved me being, to put it bluntly, dominated, and I didn't see girls as being able to do that. Still, it would be interesting to see what could come of it, as long as it was just friendly sex and she didn't expect some sort of commitment...