Remittance Girl's Blog, page 21

Gender and Sexual Orientation: Authoritarian Desires to Label

I recently got caught up in a discussion on twitter with the charming Louise Sorensen over this article: “What Science Knows About Homosexuality.”

As much as I applaud any survey of scientific research on a subject, I have to say that there is an undercurrent of assumption in a lot of the scientific literature that gender and sexual orientation are fundamentally interlaced. This, to me, is a cultural assumption that taints a lot of the scientific work. Pervasive cultural models DO affect how scientists go about asking their research questions and must by necessity affect their results.

I have always felt that the whole GBLT grouping is odd for a number of reasons. Firstly because it implies an absolute polarity that I find forces people into camps they don’t necessarily always feel comfortable in. There is a continuum along the attraction to same gender – different gender line and I suspect that, free of cultural value judgements or social or environmental pressures, many people don’t reside at either pole. My second problem with the GBLT lumping is that I believe it reflects our intense discomfort talking about sexuality and associating it with gender.

All the experience I have had of transgendered people is that their individual sexual orientations are never a given. There are gay transmen and lesbian transwomen. The assumption that a transgendered person will automatically be heterosexual (to their trans self) is just as bigoted as assuming all cis-gendered people are hetero.  Far more helpful to me is to accept people as the gender they wish to be identified with, and then look at their sexual orientation as another issue altogether. Transgenderedness is an issue of gender. Not sexual orientation. And our overwhelming need to break things down into binaries is also a problem. I have met transgendered people who do not identify as strictly male or female but a nameless ‘other’. And these people seem to freak out practically everyone. But why? Just because we don’t have a word for it doesn’t make it, by necessity, bad or frightening or wrong or odd. It just shows up the poverty of our language to offer other possibilities.

That we feel the need to lump it together with GB & L speaks to our desire to marginalize people, and even to self-marginalize. It also speaks to our need to classify and manage. And this bothers me more.

To me, labels are about ‘managing’ things. And this, by necessity has an erosive effect on seeing and appreciating the individual as individual, first and foremost. Beyond their gender or their sexuality.

I hate identifying as ‘bi’. It’s a culturally loaded term which It implies that I’ll fuck anything. The truth is, I’m obsessively picky about who I’ll fuck. It’s simply that the gender the object of my desire identifies with has never been one of the criteria. I’m much more likely to make a decision based on political orientation, frankly.

I think the nature vs nurture debate is a dangerous one. It feeds in to a discourse that, to my mind, is fundamentally unethical because it is always predicated on exterior categorization. i.e. this person is male because they have a penis – says society, says science, says God. And there is an inherent power dynamic here when anyone is labeled or categorized from outside.

A far more ethical basis for the discourse is to ask: how would you like me to address you? What feels most appropriate to you in your flesh, in your bones, in your deeply held sense of self?

Moreover, we need to be prepared for the answer to be ‘I don’t know yet / now’ and to put aside our discomfort with not getting a answer or having it deferred. That discomfort with the undefined is a symptom of our need to control the other by slamming a label on them. And the quicker we can dispense with it, the better. Because when it becomes impossible to identify anyone as ‘other’, the better we start treating them as human beings, and the way we would want to be treated.

 

 

Hello

Hello

I like

and I’m so

fucking hungry.

Hello

I want

and you smell

like sanctuary.

Hello

I need

and you taste

like something very bad for me.

Hello

I touch

and my fingertips

twitch in time with the

pulsing vein at your neck.

Hello

he blinks

but he doesn’t

look away.

 

A Bright & Clever Hell

The glassy shell of you

black molten basalt

flinty brittle and bright

in the heat of the sun

the glittering armor

the trap of the hypnotic reflection

they gaze in the mirrored you

and believe themselves beautiful.

But every surface has cracks

hairline fractures accumulate

with the years of wear

the shock of dull malice

the erosion of banal greed

and pressure of gnawing demand

to be lovely and be loved.

It’s an intricate map

of disappointments

in the basic goodness of humanity.

And between the fractures

I see the light that pours out

of you.

*listening to ‘Parade’ by Magazine* Title stolen from the lyric.

Everyone Gets What They Want

“Sh-h,” I soothed, and stroked his brow, my lips against his temple.

I sat on the end of the high bed and he knelt beside it. My legs draped over his shoulders, his head caught between my knees.

“This is what you said you wanted, isn’t it? His cock in your mouth?” I squeezed my thighs, just to let him know; everyone gets what they want here.

We both looked up at the sound of the zipper. The wrestling out of the cock. The finality of the chink as the belted jeans hit the floor. I smiled at their owner.

“Open. Open wide,” I said, tugging his hair and his head back roughly when he didn’t obey quick enough.

“If you bite, I’ll break your neck.”

But he couldn’t answer around the purpled, swollen cockhead. There was only the panicked shallow breaths, the tensing of his body. He reached upwards to naked hips, but I slapped his hands away.

I did not release him. Not through the tears or the gagging. Not for all his staggered whimpers. He wanted cock and got far more of it that he could have dreamed of. Until he was choking on it, and then the product of its labours. Until my thigh muscles ached under the pressure.

Then he was gasping and coughing and weeping. Tears and snot glazing his face, frothy seed edging his swollen lips.

“You said you wanted cock. You said you wanted it rough. Everyone gets what they want here.”

 

A Response: Beat

These tawdry designs you disdain,

worn now and dried to rusty scrawls

on a wall too high to climb,

are the record of my failure,

not to scale it, but to know that

it was eternally unscalable.

The bouquet of ifs and maybes

have been long since pressed

into the pages of a pillow book

of things that cannot be had

for love, or time, or any price.

The truth of me was always here,

in each of a thousand bruises,

in the million unkissed pulses,

in the many years of constancy.

But you cannot set free what

you haven’t captured, love.

You kept me in exile,

but we are always our own jailers.

 

(A ‘pillow book’ (Makura no Sōshi) was a ancient Japanese list of things that belong together, organized by season, emotion, or whim)

Fucking Propaganda

Fuck me all wrong.

Lose it in the hollow

of my hip and spill

your seed too soon.

Fuck me uncinematically

from hidden angles,

in positions never filmed

for human consumption.

Fuck my hand slippery

with sweat and drenched

in the stickiness

of my own machinations.

Fuck me with no hope

of measuring up to some

piece of fucking propaganda

on how real men do it.

 

 

The Writing of Perdition

Photo: Michele Africano

He whispers red light words, letter-shaped scythes that bite into tender flesh. Sentences like vortexes pull you down into that dark hole where monsters live. A call to skin-dive in a deep black sea. To night prayers. To step over the threshold and be soaked in the downpour. The monsoon of the damned and the divine, the vile and the sublime.

When all you want is to show him is how beautifully you bleed. How the rivulets of blood well up and spill over the living parchment to form responses to the call. The ichor answers in eloquent crimson flourishes: you seethe, you rage, you curse, you fear, you drink and drown in shared iniquities.

The writing of perdition.

The Hangman’s Revenge

On the ledge of tears,

at the trip of an orgasm,

exposed as an idiot,

choking on weeds,

disemboweled,

the stinking words

always puddled

around my feet

like several yards

of fresh colon

or the wrong

panties.

You always left

me hanging.

Rites of Passage

I separate summer clothes from winter, choose the books

I cannot do without, sometimes I even say goodbye.

But it’s always really abandonment, the unmade

bed, the wet towels, the half-smoked cigarette,

the half-finished bottle, and the sleeping body,

each thing undone in its own way.

I tell myself that stories never end,

you just need to know the right place

to step out of them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Sweet & Brutal Jouissance of the Story

Firstly, I’d like to call your attention to an interesting series of posts called On The Art of Erotica  going on at EroticWriter.wordpress.com hosted by Will Crimson. The first post is by him (Three Ways to Take a Woman), the second by me (The Wages of Sin), and there will be more going up in the next few days. It’s a delight to read people writing on writing. To see how people approach the craft differently, and how the order the subject in their minds.

This and the discussions that followed on twitter reminded me that I am often far too dour and dry in the way I write about my practice. I don’t often express the immense joy I get out of it. I can’t say it’s always a pleasure. Sometimes it starts that way – there is pleasure in the ideas I’m juggling – but by the time I sit down to write it I realize it will require a lot of intellectual effort to produce something crafted and perfect. Then it’s just hard work.

But sometimes it is entirely different. Do you remember falling in love with someone and being so addicted to them that it almost made you sick? You could not leave them alone, and when you had to, they were like a huge, dark cloud that blocked out half your horizon, so that everything you did was in a half-dream? You could still smell their sweat, still hear their breath in your ear? You felt the ghost of their hands on you hours afterwards?

Some of my pieces have been like that. I’m not sure that I produce them, but more that they erupt into my life and take it over. The story, the characters haunt me. I cannot eat, I cannot sleep. I need to be with it, to dwell in it, to sing it to the finish.

Some stories ride me like a voodoo god. I have to simply submit to them, give myself over to them. There is no other way to tell the story or get it out. Those stories are like insatiable, brutal lovers. Better than any sex. More intoxicating than any infatuation. They make me give and give and give until the story is wrung out of me. When it’s like that, I am in ecstasy. This is the jouissance of writing. And when it’s over, I feel emptied of everything, but not abandoned. Because the story is there and finished and lives.

I often wonder if my readers can tell which stories were like that for me. Part of me hopes they can’t. Part of me thinks they can smell the ones that were.

I just wanted you to know. Sometimes when I write, it’s just that glorious.