sex should be the opposite space of insecurity.
at first i thought of entering a sexual and or romantic relationship like how i was advised in deciding to take drugs - don’t take the drug unless you’re already having a great time, in a good mood, in the headspace that feels good. don’t take the drug to make the good time. don’t go into sex unless you’re already content with how you’re feeling.
i revisit this thought based on some things psychotherapist Esther Perel was saying on the podcast Note to Self hosted by Manoush Zomorodi 1 . Perel disagrees with the idea that you should feel good about yourself first before having relationships (any kind, not specifically romantic). She claims that we become through relationships, as inherently social creatures. through exchange we understand ourselves and how we feel. in a sense i agree - very broadly i am going to say that in seeing affirmations of me in others i feel better - fundamentally, i am reassured that right now i am not alone, and that i will continue to not be alone because i am accepted.
to bring it back to the space of sex.
the feeling of being desired is a turn on
2
. and, as someone with an incredibly sensitive body - i.e., i often feel not well - it is a bit of the matching here: when i feel well and capable, i feel desire, and when matched with being desired, it is insane the energy that comes. i think of this with reference to two reading points.
in Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman, Power describes the history of pornography, where preWWII or 1950s, pornography was humorous, full of different bodies, with tenderness and wit. People taking the piss out of each other and the playfulness that comes with intimacies - i.e., the shaking off of idealised portrayals of being an object to be desired that typically comes with sharing intimate spaces with people or where vulnerability physically is less easy to escape - the messy zones of less control when inclinations lean.
i love the queef for this reason, unexpected and present and raw. i also once had a roomate who could not not fart when fucking - we lived in a dormitory room and even with headphones i could hear this exchange with so many partners and was at first amazed and then so delighted by it, the continuing of the fuck! beautiful. growing up catholic where sex was holy and fart had a code name even between family members (“bunnies”- of course it had to be cuteified). in desire, bodies desiring, not much can get in the way when that undetermined charged field rises rises rises. grabbing groping roping eating by your eyes, when you can watch your body in a freedom, or attempt to freedom flight.
in the introduction of Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude, Adriana Cavarero describes, "Inclination bends and dispossesses the I. As is often said, the attractions of love remove self-control from the I, causing it to get carried away and to exit itself: this, precisely, is the meaning of ek-stasis” (7). to let go completely is an ecstatic act indeed, something i am almost never capable of doing 3 . in acts of movement that are just out of my control- running a speed too fast forward and past needing to stop, skiing down a too difficult slope, waterskiing when i don’t know if i remember how dropping too far sideways to the water arms pulling rope pulling, displaced by blackness and sound in a dirty club, fucking when the power is not mine.
Cavarero continues, "Maria Zambrano observes that in love “the center of gravity of the person moves, first of all, to the loved person, and when love disappears, that movement ‘outside of the self ’ remains, even though that position is difficult to maintain” (6-7).
i find this to apply to many things, any changes in general to elemental contributions to the continuation of one’s being and life. including the material body and inclination towards another, where the energy field was in the meeting of skin and exploration, feeling the exploration of another through your physical scape.the movements of inclinations in moods and times and tides. in proximity, willing sites of displacement of the self affirms the nonexistence of the fixed self. fear is affirmed and negated in the gap of ecstasy.
falling into it is an ultimate security, to exit the self and become.🝏