13.10
Friday
13 January 2006
fuck the populist sexuality. there's more
desire and heat in women who actually fuck art, instead of
playing themselves off like a cheap watercolor made by a fatman
in tallahassee.
i'm only interested in schizo-(fill-in-the-blank)
women. only they can turn a mundane experience of going to a
laser show or filling a tank of gas into a sexual explosion.
nothing else is remotely relevant or enticing anymore.
for most men, the unwilling half-drunk missionary
champion is a glorious sight. that's fine and good, similar to
sinking a trivial shot on a really nice pool table. cheers,
mr. bo-jangles. i raise my pint glass in your honor, such
that i may further trivialize your exploit in an entirely
non-sectarian, non-denominational, humorous fashion. guess
what? you still suck at pool.
—alan fay
But more than all these was something
else at which I have already hinted and which can hardly be put
into words—the strange sense of excessive pleasure which
seemed somehow to be communicated to him through all his senses
at once. I use the word "excessive" because Ransom himself
could only describe it by saying that for his first few days
on Perelandra he was haunted, not by a feeling of guilt, but by
surprise that he had no such feeling. There was an exuberance
or prodigality of sweetness about the mere act of living which
our race finds it difficult not to associate with forbidden and
extravagant actions. Yet it is a violent world too.
—C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
Something pretty personal has been on my mind for the past few days, and I say personal because it took me a long time to decide whether it should be placed upon the public domain herein, and I say personal not because I'm ashamed of it in the slightest, but because I'm very very terrified about whether people that I like and respect could think a little bit less of me for it, and in return, I would think quite a lot less of them for judging me like that, for not respecting something about me into which I've put a tremendous amount of thought.
I'm talking about being a slut, something I've been called before both in the cum-guzzling worthless human being sense (by a misogynistic and pathetic person who was primarily taking out his impotency and aggression on me), but also in a way that, I'd like to think—and that's the crux, connotes some level of class, and empowered sexual ethics.
• × • × • × •
I attempted to make my very first email address mathslut@aol.com, but my dad was half-livid and half-bewildered about it, and deleted my account. He tried to explain to me the meaning of the word, perhaps assuming that I must not have KNOWN that people typically used it as a slur. It wasn't something I could talk about with my dad, but I already thought that people who enjoyed sex were cooler than those who withheld it. There was a part of me that wanted to go straight from being a happy virginal teenager to an accomplished courtesan who had slept with hundreds of powerful and intelligent men. There was a part of me that didn't want to ever think about the number of people she'd had sex with as something that could mark her as a whore; she could never be one, no matter what, and anyone who deemed her as much was less evolved than she was.
I don't really know how I knew at that age the level of respect I would later have for sex and for sophistication and rigor in sexual interaction. I was fourteen and after the one kiss I'd had in my life so far, a year prior, I had cried in the backseat of my mom's car after she took us home from the movie theater. I was surely crying in shock that, suddenly, I was very clearly not a child anymore, and being an active participant in the game of sex wasn't nearly as fun and exciting as I had hoped. It was weird, and more than a little bit horrifyingly scary.
I guess I could have told thirteen-year-old Marilyn not to worry, she wouldn't have to have a boy's tongue down her throat again for a good four years. She would develop crushes on boys, probably intentionally, who didn't know she existed, and she would seize up in terror when a boy did try to talk to her like a normal human being.
She would treat her first boyfriend abysmally those many years later, and not really understand why she was doing it. She liked him so much, and was shocked beyond belief at the amount that he worshipped her. She was mean to him because she knew she didn't really deserve to have someone like her as much as he did.
I've written before about the horror I feel at the potential to hurt other people. When my engagement ended, while I was reeling with my own fear over how I might be able to make my life make sense again, I would try to make sure nick was doing okay, and get emails in return:
I have no desire to ever talk to you, look at you or remember you. If you try to get in touch with me again, the depths to which I will fuck up everything you hold dear are both unfathomable and unconscionable. Thankfully, I no longer feel restrained by conscience. That's the thing you took.
[Meanwhile, he was fucking the same girl with which he had cheated on me, though I didn't realize either of those things until months later. She was my best friend in Atlanta at the time.]
I started dating a boy who was sweet and fun and took me on pretty bike rides and to GOOD rock shows almost every single night and let me get drunk and dance and not THINK about my life, just about the things that were fun in this fucking world.
And then he told me he loved me, and I cried my fucking eyes out, because he deserved so much better than my broken mess of a girl.
• × • × • × •
So I began to seek out boys that didn't want any real emotional attachment from me, beyond friendship. I thought I found one, slept with him the first night I met him, and a few weeks later, when he gave me a look that clearly meant: yes, he would take it personally if and when I chose to hang out with my friends instead of him, I immediately drove out to another friend's house, got drunk and slept with him, and didn't talk to the other boy for over a month.
• × • × • × •
Sex, besides being the only thing that truly makes me feel no-holds-barred and no-doubts-in-my-mind fabulous about the way I look and about who I am, became THE WAY I could interact with people and show that I cared about this goddamn species of humanity enough to want to provide a little bit of happiness to someone if I could.
• × • × • × •
And so sex became a lot more linked in my mind with the love that I have for my friends. Giggly, drunken making-out with girls is not going to end with tears and bitter accusations. It's a much simpler and easier kind of love for me. It's happy and it's fun and it's a sweet thing in my mind that I can hug my best friend and kiss her pretty neck and she knows that it doesn't mean I want to hold her down and fight about jealousy and insist that she care for me more than anyone else; it just means I love her.
• × • × • × •
But I know this boy and he makes me want to save all my kisses for no one but him. He makes me think I'm capable of things I haven't thought myself capable of in years. Or maybe ever.