(I wrote this in August last year for an artistic feminist porn project that I shot to come out late this year with Post Reverie but I thought I’d post it here too because… because writing this felt important at the time. Because it’s intense and personal and that is important. The photo is one I took awhile back.)
I want to find words that consolidate all the pieces of who I am and what I desire, I want to use language to pin myself down and hold myself still so that we can spend some time together. But isn’t the reality of the thing that we are all phenomena in flux? Shifting somethings consisting of chemistry, biology, shapes, patterns, atoms. As soon as I believe I perceive the shape of myself, it begins to melt into something else.
But in this current moment, the shape I am is probably this. This 33 year old female thing with hair she feels is too thin and eyes that can’t see too far, with heavy breasts that men suck the nipples of for too long, an arse she likes to spread open and a cunt that she has lasered the hair off because the feeling of permanent pornographic exposure arouses her and because she likes the subtle sensations of her girlfriend’s tongue.
That shape calls itself “me”, “I” and a few different names depending on the context. So this is me. I am a creature, a thing of meat and flesh in flux, morphing and shifting as time passes through me. And what do I like? What do I like? How can I expect to solidify my sexual identity when nothing else stays still? I cannot. But the moment I say that, it feels as meaningless as everything and I feel mute and unable to connect or communicate. So I find my definitions in common themes and currents and stories of where I’ve been and how I’m seen. I start to say “I am”.
My cultural context is that I am an outsider. I’ve wrapped myself in words like “polyamorous, kinky, sex worker, slut”, I inhabit the periphery of society with other words like “disabled, artist, queer, woman”. My cultural context is that I am an insider. Existence has arbitrarily granted me privileges of education, relative wealth, the colour of my skin and the dumb luck of being born into a time and place where I can express my notions of myself without being stoned to death.
I am monstrous feminine and devious perversion, an abject other protected by a thin veneer of respectability and the tiny smidge of extra freedom allowed to artists. Words are used to tame, “eccentric, quirky, strange” and alleviate the fears my difference arouses. Strict, paternalistic, dictatorships are right to distrust and restrict the freedom of anyone whose existence subverts the dominant and comforting paradigm, we reveal the horrifying, chaotic truth of reality – that the only truth is change. I am cute and small, I am gigantic and terrifying.
I am a filthy whore who is familiar with the feeling of choking on cock while drool runs down her chin and neck. I am an insatiable slut who eats pussy like she is starving, pushing her entire face into the labia as if she is trying to merge with it. I am a wild thing that craves the calming catharsis of violent beatings and a hand around my throat. I am a beautiful animal who wears colours that stimulate her salivary glands and low cut tops to attract the attention of potential mates. I am a sweaty old pervert who sits at home wearing ugly stained pyjamas and masturbates to porn she finds morally questionable.
I am soft. My physicality and my sensitivity. I wish more lovers would tell me they love my belly the way I love my belly. I’ve never wanted it to be flat. I am strong. Living is hard work that eventually destroys every single being. I am hurt. I am angry. I am furious. I am fucking furious.
For a little while, I played at being property. I gave myself over entirely to another, to my Dom. I let him dictate how I dressed, who I fucked, how I was fucked. With my consent, he beat me, he berated me, he violated me and he loved me. I loved him. I was intoxicated by the intensity of it all, the humiliation, the adoration. I was shocked at the depths of my emotional entanglement with him, when he threatened to have his property tattooed, I was horrified at the knowledge that I would probably acquiesce. Head in the toilet, mouth full of his piss, licking his horrible friend’s balls and altering my entire identity to suit his whims, I was addicted to the dark music of this subterranean microcosm we had constructed. I found myself traversing territories with few other tourists and we touched upon private vulnerabilities and taboos that I may only ever carry internally, until they fade and fall away from memory. For the entirety of that time, I invested my identity into a single word… “submissive”.
That thing we had, that intoxicating, magical, horrible thing… it ended suddenly, violently. It ended well before its time. We should have had many more years yet, we should have watched each other grow old and so I am left with the feeling of carrying around an open wound that leaves me howling. Now I have a knowledge that sex can leave me utterly drunken and immersed and so I feel a new fury at him for destroying the precious thing we had because yes, I blame him completely. Trust is slow to build, fundamentally important and so easy to exterminate. So lately… I feel rage. At him. At everyone. At the sort of selfishness, greed and fear which is causing the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef and the destruction of every little thing that is beautiful and strange and precious and will never exist again. At the ugly, hateful selfishness that destroyed us.
Fuck.
It hurts.
The thing that’s hard to express, however, is that rage is its own sort of intoxicant. I am flirting with my anger and my hurt, attempting to find a way into it that will allow me to harness this wild new energy and channel it into my own agendas. Into a new sort of strength and power and sex that I can invest into other loves. I’m painting more and just recently, I beat a man and sunk my teeth so deeply into his skin that the marks were purple. The sound I made while doing it was the same bellow of animal fury I used to make when my Dom would painfully penetrate me. And then the man fucked me and we made sure that it hurt in all the right ways. I always want it to hurt.
The next night, my girlfriend ordered me to sit still on her bed. She covered my head with a pillowcase and violently pushed a butt plug into my arse so that it actually bled a little which, of course, I like. She then brutally fucked me with a strap-on and the combination of the plug in my arse and her cock in my cunt which is relatively small and tight caused me to scream and cry and cum loudly and violently. She is brilliant, that beautiful, glowing woman who I love and I was so grateful to discover that I can still lose myself in the sublime, ugly violence of sex. And that somewhere in that lies a thread of fury.
It’s new to me, this anger stuff. I don’t yet have the stories and words to define or explain it. All I know is that it feels big and important. He ignited this fury, that stupid, wonderful man I loved. Love. Will probably always love. He unlocked the filthy whore inside me and for that I will be eternally grateful to him. He also gifted me with his rage but I don’t want mine to be mean, petty and uncontrolled like his, I want mine to be brilliantly radiant. And I want to stay soft, radically soft. And I want to stay kind, furiously kind. His sort of anger destroys worlds, I hope that my sort of anger will protect them.
My collision with that man who I love caused a nuclear explosion and the effects were devastating and almost fatal. But now strange new flowers are growing in the altered landscape of my self-perception and their scent intrigues me. I am beautiful, ugly, monstrous feminine and lately as I hold up every single part of myself with curiosity and pride, I feel like maybe I am really fucking powerful.