Lizard brains evolved first, and the frontal lobe evolved last — no wonder there will be a clash of desires. Unable to resolve the conflict between my rational thinking and irrational desires, I must meticulously control the context in which I’m about to give up control.
I have difficulty orgasming because, mid-pounding, I would suddenly have thoughts like, “Is it morally appropriate for me to enjoy rough sex?” “Why do I enjoy it?” “What about coarse treatment is attractive?” and I would, therefore, lose the ability to orgasm.
So I have to be a couple of drinks in, enough to get me giggly, and the guy has to fuck me hard enough to get me drooling on the pillows, and only then am I able to cum. Otherwise, soft sex gives me too much “thinking time”.
Once, I had a guy over who liked it soft and gentle. I got so bored that I started reading an erotic novel on my bedside table to try to get aroused, even when he was already inside me. Very thankfully, though, he quickly came in around three minutes. His penis deflated like Squidward’s nose, and he pulled out — allowing me to finish myself off with my novel in peace.
There wasn’t anything special about roughness that I could think of, but perhaps its intensity was what I needed to distract from unhelpful thoughts. After the ordeal, this man had the audacity to ask if it was good for me. With a deadpan tone and sardonic smile, I sighed and replied, “Excellent.”
Due to my sexual inhibitions, I like simple guys who don’t think about social issues or ask existential questions. I “like” philosophy, or instead am forced to think about it — because being a woman, an “Other” category, is an existential reality that I have to cope with — and I could not think any other way. However, philosophical thinking in a guy is my number one boner killer. I want to be fucked silly without worrying that it has any relevance to the meaning of existence.
For example, my ex-CNC partner is into CNC, yet I don’t even bother to ask him why. I don’t consider it problematic or antifeminist for him to like it because he couldn’t give an answer, even if I asked. Being an unthinking, somewhat tepid guy, he’ll just say, “IDK, it seems hot.”
I have to control when I give up control: the guy has to be unthreatening to my ego, I must be sufficiently inebriated, find rational reasons to enjoy my desires, and so forth.
One day, I confessed to a friend about my feminist guilt, for which he gave some helpful advice: “You can do things to ease your guilt like donate to women’s charity after sex — it’s called corporate social responsibility!”
The thought is funny and ridiculous, but these moral anxieties aren’t uncommon. Women often need to find rational justifications for enjoying their desires, which manifests in different ways.
Erotica appealing to female sensibilities tends to contain plenty of deus ex machinas, such as billionaire kidnappings (“Oh no, now I am forced to enjoy caviar and owning a boyfriend-funded fashion label that operates at a monthly deficit!”), fuck-or-die (“Urgh, now I have to enjoy sex with this super hot guy I hate because a witch cast a deadly spell that can only be cured through an orgasm!”), and other plot devices that seem laughably ridiculous to anyone who does not understand the emotional needs behind fantasy — it is not the literal fantasy that satisfies us; instead, these convoluted scenarios fulfil a profound emotional craving that is difficult or shameful to express without these means.
In my case, I wonder whether there are ways to suck cock while absolving feminist guilt. I suppose such questions have no end to them. Shame and guilt — whether religious, ideological, or moral — drive people to rely on fantasy, imagine alternate universes, and create simulations.
The number one deterrent to entering Robert Nozick’s experience machine is that the people you interact with in the simulation do not have consciousness of their own. On the other hand, this, in my opinion, is the primary reason to enter the experience machine: to experience pleasures without thinking about how they affect other people.
I met Ryan through posting on a kink subreddit, for which I got half a thousand responses from men, most of whom creeped me out or frustrated me with their lousy intros. However, I agreed to meet with Ryan because he was hot — buff, young, and blonde — and wrote an amiable intro with enough detail that I could confidently believe that he had no major personality disorders to be alarmed of.
We met at a restaurant on Hardware Lane. I was wearing a gathered polka dot crepe de chine mini dress from Sandro and a sheer black pantyhose, and he didn’t shy away from complimenting me on it. “You look riveting,” he said. I blushed.
He told me he was visiting from Sydney for work and would fly back by the end of the week. I ordered seared swordfish with pink peppercorn and crushed potatoes, he ordered salmon belly with ginger and lime dressing, and we shared Earl Grey pannacotta as dessert.
We sat next to each other, taking turns pouring wine into each other’s glasses. Our conversation started with laughter — Ryan’s stories were amusing and delivered with a good sense of humour, ending with languorous reverie as we had enough wine refills.
At some point in the conversation, he asked me how I had ended up on the subreddit. He said I didn’t seem like the type. I asked him what he meant. He replied that I looked innocent.
I told him that perhaps I was, which is why I could only do it with strangers. I am prone to embarrassment. I didn’t want anyone I knew outside this to see me that way. I would feel humiliated.
He didn’t say much, but based on the way he caressed my waist, I got the sense that he understood.
Returning to my apartment, I couldn’t take my high heels off fast enough, and just as I began to unzip the back of my dress, Ryan suddenly intervened: “Hold on, you can’t do that yourself. Let me take it off for you.” I stopped, and an ambiguous smile floated up to my face.
“Sorry, let me wash my hands first,” he said, hurrying into the bathroom. I scurried to the bed. There was the swish-swish sound of the tap, and then he came out of the bathroom and walked quickly towards me.
As soon as he’d run his eyes hungrily over my dress, he wrapped me in his arms. At the same time, he kissed my neck below my ears and gently stroked my arms, shoulders, and chest. This layer of skin-tight viscose and silk was my skin. Through it, I could feel everything even more intensely than when I was naked.
“You like it?” I murmured.
He said nothing, kissing the back of my ear and trailing his palms from my breasts, waist, to outer thighs.
“Can I tear this?” he asked, making a fist on the bottom hem of my dress.
“It’s six hundred dollars,” I laughed.
“I’ll buy you a new one.”
“It’s from an older collection; they no longer release this.”
He said nothing. His hand went in between my legs, caressing my inner thigh, spreading my legs open, and delicately rubbing my clit. Like the feeling of being touched through silk, being touched through a pantyhose also made me feel more intensely. A jet of heat throbbed lightly up my thighs as he adjusted his pressure. With every stroke of his thumb, every cell of my body sighed, trembling, and I could picture the rose between my legs contracting and unfolding.
“What about this?” he asked, gripping the fishnets between my thighs and stretching the sheer fabric with both hands.
“Yes, please…” My voice was muffled as if I were talking in my sleep. A carbolic fizzle of excitement tickled my heart.
He tore the fabric apart at the seams, forcefully at first, eventually coming apart effortlessly. I realised then that there is something beautiful about the sound of sheer fabric when it tears. You must hold your breath and keep your voice down. Otherwise, you’ll miss the beauty of that split second of sound.
After having made a convenient hole, he wasted no time pulling open the zipper to his jeans and putting on a condom as quickly as a magician. It was a little obvious and a bit shameless but very compelling.
He entered me tentatively at first and then gave himself to me with abandon. I stared wide-eyed at the ceiling and tried not to scream. The fire of the flesh had been lit, breathing his breath, being in his existence — such ecstasies left me senseless.
It truly was vulgar, but the rhythmic slapping we made with every powerful thrust was music to my ears. Mainly because, in such moments when shame creeps in, I couldn’t do it in a quiet room, as my thoughts would overwhelm the experience. But at that moment, my entire body — every single hair, each toe, and every inch of skin — belonged to him.
Above me, he was like my God, and I know it sounds cliché. But I would put on a pedestal anyone who could help me overcome shame — the greatest enemy of pleasure, a demon that consumes my joie de vivre.
He held a sword that stabbed through the heart of that demon and lifted me off the confines of its shell. Every stab was one step closer to the outside world; with each powerful thrust, I could see the light outside the tunnel; I could feel its warmth on my skin, inside me, rising through my body.
With Ryan, I couldn’t contain my thirst for his skin. It was a sexual thirst so deep that my body ceased to exist. I became this thirst, a walking, talking, screaming thirst — almost as if I forgot my own existence, the materiality of my body ceased, and I became merely a thing that time moves through. I was water, and he was the mountain; I was the moon, and he was the sun; I was a vessel, and he was time.
He moved his body closer to mine and lifted me; I held onto him tightly like a koala as he stood up. I wrapped my legs around him like a vice and lost my mind as he began to move again as if I’d come down with some illness. It was called desire, blossoming and spreading through my whole body like a terrible fever. The fever spread from my core to my thighs, down my legs, and then up my spine until it was inside my head — and in such moments, I finally stopped thinking; he seduced my mind by controlling my body.
“Come on,” he said softly, his voice like music floating up from the bottom of the sea, “Give it to me… Give it to me.”
The pleasure accumulated in my core and my head like a rising tide, more and more, until finally, the orgasm that exploded in my head could have turned the Pacific Ocean inside out. It was electric, ethereal, radiant — and a great many things for which I could not find names. “I’m coming,” I murmured, closing my eyes and clawing his back.
At that moment, I was suddenly overcome with a feeling of both emptiness and satisfaction combined. It felt like a kind of blankness, a floating sensation that went deep into my bones, deep in a way that makes people knit their brows when they climax, groaning as if they might die at any minute.
He threw me on the bed, quickly removed the condom, and came on top of my belly.
Nestled against a tall pile of pillows, we drank lemongrass and ginger tea, chatting occasionally.
“Do you know what’s so attractive about you?” I asked.
“Tell me,” he laughed a bit awkwardly.
“You’ve got a great deal of tenderness.”
“Oh?” he commented noncommittally, his arm resting on my shoulder. “I thought you were into coarser treatment.”
“Yes, but there’s something else about you. I couldn’t explain it.”
We lay there with our eyes closed and didn’t speak. Having had a long day, he fell asleep before me and began to snore softly.
The window let in the city’s light at night without a curtain to cover it. The sky was neither black nor deep blue, but rather a leaden grey mixed with deep red, like the background in a vampire movie. On the street, nineteen floors below, cars flew past one after another, and the whooshing sound they made mingled with the drizzle of the rain did not bring about the usual feelings of mellow loneliness, perhaps because I was nested in Ryan’s arms.
Or such were the impressions of a chronic insomniac.
I asked him when I could see him again. Ryan says he doesn’t know when he’ll return to Melbourne, but he’ll be in touch.
I think I felt a bit lonely after he left. I sent him a picture of my nude body, with Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness in between my thighs. He found the reference clever.
Writing and social contact made me aware of my existence as a person, but it was sex — especially sex combined with tenderness — that made me aware of my existence as a woman. I thought of this every time I heard Portishead’s lead singer croon mournfully: “Give me a reason to be a woman.”
There is something a bit feminist about sinking into femininity. Some feminists may think that being a woman is fundamentally humiliating, but I believe there is honour in the female experience. After all, it is a privilege only afforded to women.
I desire that one day, I’m able to let go of my need for control rather than letting it control me, that I can use it as a tool to use and drop as I wish, that I can be fluid in my body — like water, the seasons, and the lunar cycle.
After all, the body is merely a thing that time moves through.
—
This post was previously published on Celine Hosea’s blog.
***
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Thanks for sharing Celine. We have all confronted these issues. My partner and I have discovered a few key elements to great sex. Learn on yourself. Practice being naked and masturbating. This is how most of us learn what we really want, physically and in fantasies. Gather some great fantasies from erotica or from your own creativity. Standard penetration sex is okay, but we recommend “outercourse” with fingers and tongue, and go slowly. Don’t be afraid to tell a guy what you really want. Be an animal, have fun!