Coming out

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a serial monogamist.

I am, I am coming to realize, in the minority on this issue. It wasn’t always so.

I came of age in a loosely networked community of lesbian anarchists, radical fairies, bisexual art students, and feminist intellectuals. What they all had in common was a need to accommodate ways of being in relationship that did not conform to the structures of compulsory heterosexuality, which, beyond universalizing heterosexual desire, assumes marriage or its equivalent to be the final cause of human relationship.

I never thought about it at the time, but it was from these friends that I learned about relationships, and it was among them that I first experienced love. It was, you could say, in the ether.

What has always been difficult for me is finding a language for these experiences. There are certain extant vocabularies to draw from—the multiple relationships of polyamory, for example, or the monogamy without fidelity of gay culture—but even these are based, in whole or in part, on the deep structure of dyadic, long-term relationships.

The thing that comes closest, I think, is the extended family of gay male culture, into which lovers are absorbed as intimate friends. This implied continuum of sex—friendship—family neither assumes a teleology of relationship, as in the case of serial monogamy, nor precludes the experience of love, as does the casual affair.

Is such a thing possible outside of gay culture? More to the point, can a woman create this kind of family?

These are not abstract questions, even if they seem that way.

I miss radical fairies

They were wonderful: a faggle of beautiful, young boys who lived at Kathedral B. They wore skirts and had pink and purple hair and did colossal amounts of drugs, which seemed only to enhance their sexual appetites, which were already nearly insatiable.

Sex, for the fairies, was an affectionate gesture. If you liked someone, you had sex with them; it was as simple as that.

And what sex they had – in every room of the house and on the front lawn and in the park across the street, in twosomes and threesomes and often more. Once, at least, they had a fairy orgy on the roof, which they videotaped and turned into a safe-sex film. I think I still have a copy of it somewhere.

Nicky was my favourite. He was seventeen and had come to Toronto from out east the year before, when his father beat him to within an inch of his life because he was gay. He was still missing a front tooth, which made him seem even prettier.

I called Nicky my kitty-cat, because he would curl into my lap and let me play with his hair while he looked up at me and talked about all of the things he had done that day. Looking back, they were all of them cats, forever lounging and stretching and purring as the days passed slowly around them.

What I liked most about the fairies was that they genuinely liked women, even though they didn’t have sex with them. I never discerned revulsion just under their words as I have with old queens, for whom the female body is merely a whipping post. No, we were mother-sisters to the fairy boys, with bodies that were as deserving of pleasure as theirs.

There are no radical fairies in grad school, which is a crying shame. It’d be so much more fun if there were.

On courage

Last night at the Copa, Alice said, having recently read de Beauvoir, that men know how to impose their will upon the world. They used to, I think, but far less so these days. Or were they always bluffing?

Still, it seems that women are so much more afraid, and Alice is full of fear. It’s never good enough, she’s never good enough, she doesn’t trust her competence or her talent. She fears that even her body will give her away.

We don’t trust ourselves because maybe we’ll fuck it all up and prove them right.

Rashid can’t understand it; he has absolute faith in Alice and doesn’t recognize her fear. He pushes her and she fights him for the space to be afraid. He tries but he can’t understand. She is driven to defend herself against his faith in her.

I see both sides of the argument.

I said to her: “He believes in you. Let him.”
I said to him: “Let her be. She’ll come into herself in time.”

She will. We all do. We reach a point where we are so retchingly sick of being afraid that we run straight at it, half-blind with desperation. We reach a point where we don’t care anymore because anything, even failure, is better than the endless, cramping fear. We impose our will upon the world as a measure of last resort, because we will suffocate if we don’t.

Walking home in my summer dress, I wondered which I am afraid of more: failure, or paralysis? Which is the bigger dog? I wondered this as I walked alone at three ‘o clock in the morning, wearing next to nothing, fearlessly.

Work

I spent almost eleven gloriously air-conditioned hours at the union office today. It was my favourite kind of work day, which consists of intense bursts of hyper-focused activity punctuated by languorous smoke breaks taken on the small, metal fire escape that services the office window.

This rhythm of work—and it is very much a rhythm—can only occur under certain conditions. To begin, it requires absolute solitude; for the time that I’m there, I need to feel that the room is wholly and completely mine. Secondly, it requires equally absolute silence; though I love music more than I can describe, I cannot listen to it while working. Thirdly, it is entirely dependent upon the fire escape, which not only facilitates cigarette smoking but the periods of reflection that are the hallmark of the habit.

In this way, my work time is clearly demarcated: action/reflection; tension/release; forward/back. In musical terms, it is the distinction and interplay between pushing and dragging the beat, a phenomenon that is based on a difference of microseconds, if that, but which nevertheless transforms the perception of rhythmic flow. A great deal of the art of jazz, and most R&B, resides in this small acoustic space.

Harkening back to yesterday’s post, it has become increasingly clear to me that one of the primary reasons that graduate students in the humanities are so woefully unproductive—and let’s face it, we are—is because we are given no physical space to work in. Science grads, as I have recently discovered, are given offices as part of their studies, which may or may not contain computers, internet connections, and phone lines, but which almost always come with a key. It is a space that is theirs but is not home, one that provides both the physical and temporal boundaries that delimit the sphere of work, and which grants de facto recognition of what transpires there as something that has value.

By contrast, we humanities types grab space wherever we can get it: at a library carrel, if we are lucky and one is available; in cafés, when our apartments are too hot and we can’t think straight anymore; on bus and train rides to other destinations. Mostly, though, we work from home, the place where we do all the other things that make up a life, the things that define a space as not-work. Where is the distinction? Between one part of a room and another? Between different times of the day? To use another musical analogy, you can’t get rid of the bleed: that is, the echo of other instruments when you’re trying to isolate one sound on a track. When sound bleeds, you can’t bring one element up in the mix without bringing up the others–you can’t demarcate sonic space, which means that you can’t control it.

I find myself coming back to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and to the notion that work that is considered to have social value is accorded a separate space. Women’s work, in this sense, is that which occurs in the undifferentiated space of the home: as such, it is not recognized as work. The humanities apprentice, who has become in many respects a feminized worker irrespective of their individual biology, suffers from the same lack of differentiation, and from a similar lack of acknowledgement of the intrinsic worth of what they do.

When the chemistry student dicks around with a formula for most of a day, even if it ultimately fails, he has still clocked in a day of work that is recognized as such because it occurs in his conferred work-space. When a philosophy student reads a part of a text, wanders away, reads another text, thinks about the second text for a little while, and then comes back to the first, all in her small kitchen, she has not clocked in a productive day at the office. In fact, she is perceived to have done nothing whatsoever of value until the moment that the process is defined, not within a space, but as a product: i.e. an article, a thesis, a book. Without the product, she might as well have been doing laundry.

Yes, we need a room of our own, or an atelier, or our monk’s quarters. Dibs on the one with the fire escape…

Hot

The only good thing about this heat is that I get to ogle men, which I’ve been doing a great deal of in recent days. Today, I watched a particularly striking specimen saunter down Bernard Street, clad in loosely fitting army shorts and a cream-coloured linen shirt that was fully unbuttoned, thus exposing a quite attractive torso. Suddenly, I understood the nobler aspects of the catcall: to audibly express admiration of the physical form, and the courage that is required to display it publicly.

Municipal workers excepted–and a few truly are exceptional–I can’t think of the last time I saw a heterosexual man’s chest in the public sphere. In fact, as women’s clothing has become more and more revealing, men’s attire has become correspondingly more modest, to the extent that one must take their corporeality on faith. Worse, men seem to have forgotten that they are legally permitted to remove their shirts, and that to avail themselves of this right during a heat wave would by no means be considered indecent.

Perhaps men have finally become as neurotically self-conscious about their bodies as women, which would be a terrible shame, especially since women are slowly reclaiming their right to inhabit imperfectly beautiful figures. Alternatively, it is possible that the earnest post-eroticism of the asexuality movement is catching on, and that we are doomed to ogle a generation of men draped in burkha-like layers of hemp clothing.

Whatever the cause, bravo to the man in the open linen shirt. You were, indisputably, the best thing about my day.

Footnote

A follow-up to Wednesday’s post, which consists of a Salon interview with the adolescent psychiatrist Lynn Ponton. Ponton shares my admittedly pessimistic take on the fellatio vs. cunnilingus issue, which James and I briefly debated at a book launch last night. He is, apparently, an optimist about these matters, if few others.

I like Ponton’s approach to the problem, which is sympathetic to teens of both genders and based on her twenty years of clinical experience as well as several recent studies. Still, I’m left feeling saddened, in part because of quotes like this:

“Girls are really educated about what’s involved in boys’ sexual pleasure — not in class, but by their peers. They spend hours devoted to how to give a good blow job. And they talk about technique. I don’t want to go into it in great detail, but there’s a lot of discussion about it. In my entire existence — some 20 years of listening to kids talk about sex — I have never, ever heard a group of boys discussing how to give girls good [oral sex].”

Obviously, the only solution is to implement a government program that would provide all female citizens with a vibrator on the occasion of their twelfth birthday. Then they’d know better.

On Difference

I keep coming back to Nick’s last comment, and although I don’t disagree, I keep wondering, “why?” I don’t mean to be a pain in the ass, but I can’t let it go. Bear with me, will you?

I don’t think it’s as simple as “men and women are different,” although sometimes they are. Sexuality is too amorphous a thing, and far too malleable. Besides, there’s too much intra-group variation for the statement to hold, or at least for it to tell us anything more than what we already know.

Sex is a biological impulse that acquires form through culture. We learn sex in the world as it is, which is why those first glimpses are so important, and so memorable. They are our first encounters with an experience we are inexplicably drawn to, but which has no pure form except as a refraction of the world as we encounter it, in real bodies and in real time.

Boys live in a world of erotic images that are meant for them; they attract that vague impulse and shape it, refine it, pull it toward the visual realm. Girls have fewer images, and those that exist are a thousand times more elusive: the video image in China Girl that escapes in an instant. Quick, rewind, did you see it? No? Then rewind again. There, and then gone.

So that itchy, insistent need draws some of us elsewhere, to sounds and smells and the written word. The blind senses. And so we learn to respond to the colour of a voice, the rhythm of breath; we catch that smell on someone and it’s game over. Oh yeah, the smell thing. That goddamn smell thing…

More than anywhere else, girls find sex on the page. In less than a decade we make our way from teen magazines to Harlequins to real novels, and eureka, we’ve found it: a few passages by Miller or Lawrence, more by Anais Nin, or whole genres of erotic fiction. And so we learn sex in narrative, even when it’s macho and ridiculous, or frustratingly femme; we can still imagine this world and ourselves in it.

I’ll let you in on a secret, though: sometimes, we look too. The shirt that rides up, exposing the crest of a hip; the calf that tightens as it bears down on a bike pedal; the faded jeans that hang just so. But I think the way we look is more idiosyncratic; we catch glimpses of sex in a thousand places because that’s what we’re used to, because no one thought to direct our gaze. Girls have wandering eyes – consider yourselves warned.

Clearly, I’m obsessing. It must be spring.

Another study that blows

By now, many of you will have seen the following headline, or some variation thereof, screaming from the front page of your favourite news source: Teens view oral sex as safer choice.

In a nutshell, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco have discovered that young teenagers are opting for oral sex as a strategy to reduce the risk of disease transmission, unplanned pregnancy, and peer disapproval. Sure, makes sense, right?

But something about the study has troubled me since I first happened across it yesterday morning. Reading the article again, I realized that nowhere in the piece is the term oral sex actually defined. Curious, no? As I progressed from feeling troubled to mildly suspicious, I commenced the following investigation.

First, I read over twenty different articles about the study published in reputable national newspapers. No definition. I then turned to articles about the study that have appeared in scientific and medical publications. Still nothing.

Finally I went to the source, the April issue of Pediatrics, whereupon I discovered the following:

1. The authors of the study, who account for the aims of their project and its methodological approach with the customary rigour, do not define the term “oral sex.” From the study:

“(A)lthough vaginal sex was defined explicitly on the survey, oral sex was not well defined and thus we cannot be sure which behaviors were included in participants’ understanding of oral sex.”

(Blinks.) Are you kidding me?!

2. Though the authors assert that “there were no gender differences in adolescents’ sexual experiences or intentions”, they briefly note two “significant interactions between gender and outcome estimates”:

(a) “Male adolescents believed that one’s relationship is more likely to get better from having vaginal than oral sex than did female adolescents”; and
(b) “Female adolescents believed that pleasure was more likely to occur from vaginal sex than oral sex”.

Pray, how to account for these variables? Allow me to speculate.

Had the study’s authors bothered to define their terms, and, more importantly, had they defined them to their interview subjects, they may have realized that there are, in fact, two broad categories of oral sex: (a) fellatio, and (b) cunnilingus.

Consequently, had their interview questions been reformulated to ask: “Have you ever engaged in fellatio?” or, “Do you intend to receive cunnilingus in the next six months?”, they may also have discovered that, among teenagers, the former is typically more prevalent than the latter. Which just might explain the responses noted above.

What I suspect all of this really means is that, throughout the United States and, presumably, Canada, a distressing number of young girls are not getting off. Worse, their experience of their own sexuality is being limited to furtively blowing their boyfriends and others without receiving the same consideration in return. Forgive the pun, but this totally sucks.

Don’t get me wrong: fellatio is a wonderful activity – at its best, an artform – one that can provide great pleasure to the giver as well as the receiver. But it galls me to think that a generation of girls – and boys, for that matter – may reach adulthood without any experiential understanding of the principle of sexual mutuality.

Didn’t we just have a sexual revolution? Or has it passed its expiry date? (Sighs.) I’ll go get my lighter…