Anthology of the Self - Entry XVI-XVII (that means therapy prose!)
TENTACULAR CELIBACY / KINETIC DIURETIC
A Duology on Sexuality
[Content Warning: Please don't read this if you know me IRL! It would be very awkward knowing you did!]
I. TENTACULAR CELIBACY
I think I write for sexual gratification. There’s too many parallels to ignore. I want to touch people through what I write, to capture their heart, to orchestrate their feelings. I want to be seen through my writing, to be gratified, inundated with praise until I’m bursting with a satiation I have no vision for where it caps off. I can see myself getting addicted to fame. Positive eyes are a valuable fucking currency. They assign you value, evaluate you as worth something. Self-valuation… is it all just virility?
Is it by pen that the coward fucks? When I feel like fucking, I write. When I feel like getting fucked, I experience other art. In that sense, I’m in a tentacular polycule of fucking. Sometimes the sex is so good you borrow its techniques, make them your own. This essay is too easy to write, I don’t like it. It’s flowing too easily. I really think it’s true. I get my rocks off more from having those I desire in some way praise my writing more than actually having them… I think. I wouldn’t know, would I?
I say I’m asexual, though I’m not sure if that’s true. I absolutely find people attractive in a deep, hormonal way. I feel a spark at the bottom of my stomach, a burst of energy in my brain wrinkles. Suggestive vistas are as a whiff of coffee, as an aphysical jitter. These feelings are also quite pan, with certain types and biases, of course. What is true is thinking about having sex scares me, scares me too much to even think about it. For one, it’s such a grand disrespect! A lot of the people I fear this towards I treat in deep orchestral reverence. To have sex is inherently to make someone an object. I couldn’t dare objectify them, use them for my own pleasure! Probably a bottom bitch, I get it.
But worse than that, what do I do? I don’t even mean this in a virgin way, though I’ve never even felt comfortable enough to even kiss someone (a pathetic admittance)! Like sex, it’s something I kinda know I want with some people, but could never actually approach in context. I mean it in like… what role do I serve? Who am I allowed to love? How am I allowed to love? I think it always comes back to loathing my body, being unable to love having one no matter how much I try to reason with myself.
I don’t want this to be another fucking essay about my body. I want to work somewhere smaller tonight. I have a really bad sense of longing right now. So you’re lonely? Yes, I’m talking to a fucking Google doc (and at this point, my therapist), but that’s not all! I want to be loved really badly right now. Even more badly than I want to go swimming again, so you know it’s serious! Like, to be hugged and appreciated and held close. I get compliments and they help, but I want something unspoken. I want to be touched. Recently, art has stopped being enough. I’ve been working my ass off for stuff that other people will be able to enjoy! Games, write-ups, bettering my website! It’s all to draw people towards me. The prettiest flowers get the freakiest bees, and all that. It’s all, it feels subconsciously, for sexual gratification. It’s always virility deep down that motivates action.
I could say that’s masculine of me, but the whole act of claiming power for oneself, of having sex, of asserting oneself, also feels masculine. I think I shrink away from ever being assertive on these things for that reason, but it does beg the question. Are all my essays just dangling penises serving as fish-bait for luring in admirable people?
If sex is as tentacularly linked to art as I’ve thus far felt it out to be, then they are. Could works be the opposite, be receivers? Can art be a thing acted upon, a thing done violence to, a thing entered and colonised? Art can be reduced, and when vague enough, repackaged and repurposed. It’s really quite easy, but it’s tied to the intent of the audience. I do think we have a tendency to slot narratives into our own narrative framework and adjust the nozzle to dampen out applying our literacy more combatively to things we like. But is that enough to call it all, call this malleable?
Even if art could be receptacle, it doesn’t work in the metaphor. The art is objectified at the expense of the artist. The artist gains nothing, engages in nothing, by being objectified. The whole system falls apart, for the art becomes pornographic rather than emblematic of anything. Objectification is distanced voyeurism, an invisible force that can culturally shape my legacy, but in no way responds to my calls. It sees but does not touch.
The penis art acts on contact, blows a brain load that pinballs around your emotions. While that can be sweet and all, this is a Freudian dead-end for me. The art-penis fucks and pleasures, but the artist feels nothing. They have a numb member. Perhaps for art with a price-tag, people motivated by that kinda thing are like prostitutes. But that’s not what drives me nor what I do. I want to rawly assert myself. The pleasure I get is knowing other people had a good time fucking me.
Sometimes the conversation is good about what I did, but too it feels voyeuristic. But the act of conversing? The ability to bring about a conversation? I think we’re back to sex. Fucking eachother within the bed I built! Wow, hope it’s stable under scrutiny! Seriously though, a good conversation is also sex, but a lot closer. It’s also asexual (as in not of-the-sexes, idk if there’s a word here), for both parties simultaneously are offering and receiving. It’s that ebb and flow.
Is conversation better than real sex? I don’t know, but it’s uninhibited by the shame-place-body barriers of sex, which is awesome. Kinda upsetting that there is such a platonic cultural divide between sexes. I get why, I’m not stupid: men have a sort of doctrine of existing only for other men with women being a supplementary object, and women don’t feel safe around the games and safety implications of the perceived “man”. Just a shame is all. If we all had really good a-sexual conversations, I think the world would be a much better place. We could disarm a lot of the othering through a simple perspective synthesis. It’s always sweet to see this happen.
But again. conversation isn’t sex, it can’t reach sex. It’s touchless, of variable quality even with the same partner. There is no touch, it’s all touchless, all sexlessness performed in pursuit of sexuality. As much as I take these meat-substitutes, experientially, only sex is sex. Only being there with another person, loving that person deeply, passionate embrace, all the other little trinkets of intimacy… that’s something that can’t be filled unless your arms are.
[Note: This essay was never finished, as I fell asleep writing it. However, I learned the term “demisexual” shortly after writing it. I think that’s a good place to call it!]
II. KINETIC DIURETIC
I’m not allowed to wear eyeliner. It’s a rule I’ve just made for myself. It makes me too cute for my health. Turns me into my own little fuck-magnet, selfie camera buzzing around myself. Dyssexual euphoria. Sometimes I want to drool into a mirror, lap up every little bit of Newtonian glass, sometimes my body is in a steel-alloy straitjacket where all viscera must be adamantly held within my skin-case. I’m a sexual mess, primed and empty (like with a lot of things).
My horns are numb yet deep in my gut, a yearn. An austere, unfelt desire! Either I think with my pituitary or logically, consciously want this. I’m not shocked. My aesthetic taste profile has moved towards erotica. Naked bodies move between deleterious, detestable sludge, fear pouches, squint-eyed spectacles and cuddle buddies with a hyper-wobble. My neurons link axons like a little barrel of monkeys and swing like a caffeinated pendulum between these disparate ideologies. Maybe leaving a browning banana on one will get them to calm the fuck down. For now, I just consume porn for funsies, both hands on the keyboard, manic grin, sucking down snacks.
Do I blame my mangled corpse, for whom my noggin has made her a volition slut; autonomous only so far as the art the aesthetic hog in my skull wishes to gurge down? Do I blame my generation of scopophilia and e-voyeurism, who drink the e-soup normally left to stew until all flavour extracted, instead now tattooed onto the belly of a chubby network? Do I blame my shy lil’ timidities, my performative softisms and hard-coded pillow-princess-isms? Do I blame the ink for continually edging my virility by means of loading my tongue with chemical pride? Do I blame the blame game and just go fuck someone already?
But I can’t go out, especially at night! I’m scared of this land, the beasts from ice, the spit-fire empty crucibles, the salacious eyedrool. I just want to cuddle, and my duvet is as good a pal as any! Plus I have to pee! Diuretics have turned me into a water hourglass, my organs into a waterlogged ball-and-chain! I must keep gulping down teacups to keep my lips from Ra’s wrath and Jack Frost’s licks! Bound to be an eternal porcelain princess! A cruel fate and a free pass for state oppression.
But I was born to run, to swim in pools, to kiss the sky’s felt! To spend a night warm! With a… hugging a… touched by the love of a… duvet once more. My duvet is actually an evil little leech, a lecherous battle-axe who wants me all for herself! All she does is lap up my heat and lather it back on me like it’s a special present! I would feign outrage, but she’s cute so I keep letting her get away with it.
I need my plushies to be executed, hung from the gallows. They’re holding my empathy hostage and it’s all because Toy Story fucked it’s way into my sponged-up toddler axioms. I still haven’t plucked it clean, for empathy is a sweet-juiced berry. But look how they hug me, those brutal sacks of fuzz-cloth and polyester beans! Let them hang until crow-pecked pastel fabrics tan across a gibbet! No more felt felt-meat! Rotten cotton of heart’s besotten! I want a love not misbegotten! Duplicitous bears! Perfidious penguins! Knavish cutie-pies! Now that I pause to think, maybe I’m barking up the wrong P.
Even as I hope to address my sexual despondency through ink-fishing, all I can do is curse out my bladder, blankets and bedside buds. I’ve come to realize sex is a very anti-think activity. But I am! Ergo sum! I’m a thinkin’ bitch or I ain’t a bitch at all! How can I fuck if I ain’t even there? Currently DMing the great deceiver to see if he is DTF, but that’s UTH and OMG I’m doing it again.
I don’t hold onto the ephemera of labels, but I believe the splay of dolls I want to doink would fall under the cooking utensil one. Any thinking bitch can tell you it ain’t about the body, it’s about the personality, though the straight men, common disseminators of this cliche, formulate the phrase as they formulate all things: steamed in heaping fuck-loads of irony. Me, though, I’m a sweetie-pie! I mean it dearly and sincerely! I’m sexually attracted to emotions, nerve-ends and philosophy! Read my essays!
As a member of the internet-generation, the “series of tubes” were actually covert straws to trinken und trinken up our sincerity and critical-thinking. My word-processor has been bungled by so much self-falsification that it leaks like Chemical X to poison my authenticity, but to make it a hyper-powered fission-fueled spectacle. I’m cursed with sigils of drainage and a cosplay wardrobe! I don’t write, I power-puff hurl!
My sexual identity is surely in my data-bank! I must parse my garbled fuck-code through psycho-analysis, for my mouse-twitches and thumbnail-clickery spills the little beans of identity. Algostrology performed through palm-reading one’s cursor. My computer could be a great mystic, for she knows me better than any spouse I could have. I have always whispered my secrets to her before any other! My, and when I tell people online my secrets, I always forget she is in the room with us! Cheeky fly on the wall, “I see pee you!” Love the gal, but the pan sadly ain’t big enough to include her. It’s alright, we fuck in different ways; rubbing her keys until her fans heave. Oh, and the game she plays where she makes sure the USB is always the wrong way for entry is basically foreplay.
Though spinning this web is an absolute ball, I must acknowledge my structural beat-around-the bushisms, my tentacular tangent-abilities. When you vomit out as much paint as I do, sometimes you just gotta ride the wave. Surf’s up, so I take my liquid cruise! The obvious answer is just fucking ask someone, make an active effort to communicate with the person you’re interested in and be transparent with your feelings in hope they’ll reciprocate. My smart cookie-dom and 7/8ths of a philosophy degree are my truest vice! To know all the answers and still not hear your own vociferous wiles spew is maddening.
Yet, I’m still one hell of a moral maiden! Kant would slobber all over me if he was still alive! Er, I forgot he was a big phrenology guy, so he’d probably be into transvestigations. I’ve enough on my plate to brace against the advances of a trans-exclusionary radical moralist. Horny powder-wig aside, I again point to Toy Story to say I’m too poisoned with goody-two-shoe-isms to be the stone-cold slut of my platonic ideal. An emphatic empathy and the reduction of the individual to an objectified body is a boots-quakin’ prospect! Yet, slowly doth it seem… my body has itself become prop for my junk-huffing brain. All paint needs a canvas, and given the aestheticization, both verbally and visually, of smut, my body has been moved into my empirical butterfly-net.
Yet, if I’ve proven anything across my self-obsessed anthology, it’s that “I” is a comet jockey, desperately clinging to crumbling rock as it barrels through a nebula of artistries and twinkling constellation profundities, so many and so rapidly that the “I” has enough neuron-retentaculating within a georotation to be axiomatically distinct. Big colourful rainbow-tunnel speed-livin’! Temporality and well-portioned meals are for chumps! This is one phase on a throughline, one colour in the neverending jaw-breaker. What is gratification? How much more will be moved into insatiety, artistic redundancy and further want before I can kick it back? Hold on a second… reread what I just said… real talk? Who the fuck wants to kick it back! I like being a libidinous cosmic cluster!
I like being a spiderweb in a hurricane! This my shit! Let the breeze run through me, carry me, become me. Let me get ran through and toyed with by a gustatory gust! I am a bucket with a hole in it being walked to its destination. Yet, I’m also a dope! Don’t block the hole, you fucking moron, keep throwing new water in! Make the pavement drool! Drag the hose with us! Right now I bleed discontent at my physicality. Engaging in combat with a squadron of queer artists has primed me for self-normalcy, for landing my rocket back in acceptable exceptionalisms. The government says otherwise, but they can kiss my eczematous knuckles! If I am acting authentically and am happy that I am, why the fuck should I shrink? Law is for the moral-less!
So I think I’m gonna take a new perspective. I’m not gonna be a sex-pest or get really slutty to fight back against my years (god, knowing my brain? the want to accumulate encounters like Letterboxd films is not out of imaginability… I’m a skinner-box slut). I’m just gonna be a little less crusty-eyed and a little more dewy-eyed towards the people around me. I’m getting sick of this “order” and “shame” schtick. Just fucking say what you’re thinking, pay attention, share affection, be open and assertive with getting to know the people around you. Digital simulacra of these experiences show your heart bleeds honey with the right cozy tones! Gentle hands, calm tones, feeling framed, warmth-bartering… I think I’m just not acquainted with tectonic preferences! Life’s too short to wish you got to know people better. You realized you were a woman when you put that eyeliner on correctly, when you started visualizing differently, when you looked down at your body and thought you looked like Misato, when you looked at a picture with your friend and thought you looked like a couple, when some people seemed to sincerely stop noticing. And now you deny it yourself, deny *this* from yourself. Be who you are… for your pride! There’s already enough shit your identity is making you worry about, so don’t make your own mind one of them. We’re all friends here. Own your shit, bitch. Be there, be sincere, be tender-hearted and open-eared. Don’t just listen to people’s words, feel them. Don’t just look at people, admire them. You’ve been on this jaded shit far before you were traumatized, so you know the sardonic act is a choice. In times like these, in fucked up times like these, maybe it’s a choice to reconsider. Now put that eyeliner back on, bitch.