Reflections on 2015 heterosexual experiments

loneberry:

It is night it is night it is night and I’m typing on my cell phone typing into this New Year that passes while I like a somnambulist cross over unaware that I’m thirsty or that time passes my heart on fire for all the love lost and returned in a single dream of songs sung wildly in the splendid dream cave.

We rose

To where

Our voices would echo

Like Cecilia Vicuña the voice the voice I weep for the fragments of dream lost but I woke my soul still stirring from breathing in all the voices that echoed there, in that dream cave in the sky

Palace of sand

It’s my heart

Why has it become so hard to hear my heart?

Sing

Sing

Sing into my mouth

The feminists danced into the new year to Talking Heads, “This Must Be The Place” and Lana Del Rey and to Tove Lo singing about blotting out the agony affects that accrue to the body of the one who has just lost love

“You’re gone and I gotta get

hiiiigh all the tiiiiimmmee

To keep you off my mind”

Now that I’ve dabbled with heterosexuality I know the true meaning of pop:

To train you to love

To condition, domesticate and *generate* desire

To induce heterosexual desire

To shape it

Your object

The form of your desire

The tempo of your desire

The fantasies that emerge around your desire

To feed you narratives

Scripts

A catchy melody becomes a mnemonic device for the heterosexuality scripts

I found myself wanting it

That forever-love

That obliterative, sentimental love

That home-in-you feeling

It is a feeling for femininity

A feeling for femininity I never had before

As I have always felt more alien than feminine


On New Year’s Day I woke with the thought

Should I go back to being a lesbian

In 2016

Should this be a kind of…resolution?

Because heterosexuality is anti-woman

To make heterosexuality work you have to become anti-woman

And by that I mean, unbecome

Or aligned yourself with masculinity and against women–to *become* through heterosexuality

I feel like I have something unpleasant sticking to my skin

Maybe heterosexuality is the feeling of having something gross sticking to your skin

You trade your subjecthood for the subject position of the girlfriend

But can you even be a full subject outside the heterosexual matrix?

But what are you as a girlfriend?

The subject position of an…appendage.

Becoming-girlfriend is the pits when you just wanna be weird sisters.

Maybe my 2015 heterosexual experiments were not like the scenarios I alluded to above.

Or were they?

I have been the “mentor” to young men who feel I am more powerful. In 2015 I dated a guy who would constantly fret about what he felt was my intellectual superiority and then I would have to nurse his singed ego back to health by apologizing for being smart or feigning stupidity.

I want that “top-in-life, bottom-in-bed” arrangement Berlant told me about over dinner once.

But is this even possible in heterosexuality?

What is a “powerful woman” in a hetero context?


Women are scorned and seen as weak for loving too much

Resented or seen as cold for not loving enough

In heterosexuality women always lose

Even when these men I’ve been with say I have so much more power than them

The truth is I forfeit a chunk of my power when I enter a heterosexual arrangement

On New Years Eve B, who was drunk, rolled into bed with me while I was brooding

She said, “do you feel like your full self with him? Like full JACKIE WANG?” And I hesitated before saying, well, no, but who do I feel like my full self with?

And then while going through old pictures of all my punky outfits I feel a pang of sadness thinking maybe that shitty dude’s criticism of my clothes got to me more than I thought, because my look/sartorial sensibility has been evolving away from queer punk to something else, not exactly bland femme, but something more subdue, like classy goth witch. Have I lost my élan? What am I becoming?

What I also don’t understand is why these men who are drawn to willful women like me resent me for being willful

Like–why not seek someone out who is submissive? Or is that just no fun?

It’s funny that multiple times my feminism has been attacked after not giving men something that they wanted

In heterosexuality, women lose psychically. Actually I see now that being outside the masculine recognition system for so long protected me, allowed my personality to evolve in ways it never could have if I had been fretting about making myself attractive to men.

Women lose.

This year I dated a man who wanted to possess me fully while he was secretly romantically involved with women in other cities

I even offered to be in an open relationship

But he declined saying it would “damage” our relationship

What he really meant was that he was entitled to my complete loyalty and fidelity, while he had no obligation to me.

But while women in hetero relationships lose psychically, maybe they gain something materially…?

Unfortunately I lost materially with my main 2015 lover, bleh.

Well Alex said she wanted to read some of my reflections on venturing into the world of men for the first time, so late. I sincerely do want to make things work w my current lover, who is not very masculine and definitely not as sociopathic as the main 2015 lover, but I know what I have to give up to make a hetero relationship work. Entering into a hetero relationship is entering into an alliance with patriarchy.