description of labor did not strike me as exceedingly distinct from what happens during sex, or at least some sex, or at least much of the sex I had heretofore taken to be good.
No one asked, How does one submit to falling forever, to going to pieces . A question from the inside.
In current “grrrl” culture, I’ve noted the ascendancy of the phrase “I need X like I need a dick in my ass.” Meaning, of course, that X is precisely what you don’t need (dick in my ass = hole in my head = fish with a bicycle, and so on). I’m all for girls feeling empowered to reject sexual practices that they don’t enjoy, and God knows many straight boys are all too happy to stick it in any hole, even one that hurts. But I worry that such expressions only underscore the “ongoing absence of a discourse of female anal eroticism … the flat fact that, since classical times, there has been no important and sustained Western discourse in which women’s anal eroticism means . Means anything.”
Sedgwick did an enormous amount to put women’s anal eroticism on the map (even though she was mostly into spanking, which is not precisely an anal pursuit). But while Sedgwick (and Fraiman) want to make space for women’s anal eroticism to mean , that is not the same as inquiring into how it feels . Even ex-ballerina Toni Bentley, who knocked herself out to become the culture’s go-to girl for anal sex in her memoir The Surrender , can’t seem to write a sentence about ass-fucking without obscuring it via metaphor, bad puns, or spiritual striving. And Fraiman exalts the female anus mostly for what it is not: the vagina (presumably a lost cause, for the sodomite).
I am not interested in a hermeneutics, or an erotics, or a metaphorics, of my anus. I am interested in ass-fucking. I am interested in the fact that the clitoris, disguised as a discrete button, sweeps over the entire area like a manta ray, impossible to tell where its eight thousand nerves begin and end. I am interested in the fact that the human anus is one of the most innervated parts of the body, as Mary Roach explained to Terry Gross in a perplexing piece of radio that I listened to while driving Iggy home from his twelve-month vaccinations. I checked on Iggy periodically in the rearview mirror for signs of a vaccine-induced neuromuscular breakdown while Roach explained that the anus has “tons of nerves. And the reason is that it needs to be able to discriminate, by feel, between solid, liquid and gas and be able to selectively release one or maybe all of those. And thank heavens for the anus because, you know, really a lot of gratitude, ladies and gentlemen, to the human anus.” To which Gross replied: “Let’s take a short break here, then we’ll talk some more. This is Fresh Air .”
A few months after Florida: you always wanting to fuck, raging with new hormones and new comfort in your skin; me vaulting fast into the unfuckable, not wanting to dislodge the hard-won baby seed, falling through the bed with dizziness whenever I turned my head— falling forever —all touch starting to sicken, as if the cells of my skin were individually nauseated.
That hormones can make the feel of wind, or the feel of fingers on one’s skin, change from arousing to nauseating is a mystery deeper than I can track or fathom. The mysteries of psychology pale in comparison, just as evolution strikes me as infinitely more spiritually profound than Genesis.
Our bodies grew stranger, to ourselves, to each other. You sprouted coarse hair in new places; new muscles fanned out across your hip bones. My breasts were sore for over a year, and while they don’t hurt anymore, they still feel like they belong to someone else (and in a sense, since I’m still nursing, they do). For years you were stone; now you strip your shirt off whenever you feel like it, emerge muscular, shirtless, into public spaces, go running—swimming, even.
Via T, you’ve experienced surges of heat, an adolescent
No one asked, How does one submit to falling forever, to going to pieces . A question from the inside.
In current “grrrl” culture, I’ve noted the ascendancy of the phrase “I need X like I need a dick in my ass.” Meaning, of course, that X is precisely what you don’t need (dick in my ass = hole in my head = fish with a bicycle, and so on). I’m all for girls feeling empowered to reject sexual practices that they don’t enjoy, and God knows many straight boys are all too happy to stick it in any hole, even one that hurts. But I worry that such expressions only underscore the “ongoing absence of a discourse of female anal eroticism … the flat fact that, since classical times, there has been no important and sustained Western discourse in which women’s anal eroticism means . Means anything.”
Sedgwick did an enormous amount to put women’s anal eroticism on the map (even though she was mostly into spanking, which is not precisely an anal pursuit). But while Sedgwick (and Fraiman) want to make space for women’s anal eroticism to mean , that is not the same as inquiring into how it feels . Even ex-ballerina Toni Bentley, who knocked herself out to become the culture’s go-to girl for anal sex in her memoir The Surrender , can’t seem to write a sentence about ass-fucking without obscuring it via metaphor, bad puns, or spiritual striving. And Fraiman exalts the female anus mostly for what it is not: the vagina (presumably a lost cause, for the sodomite).
I am not interested in a hermeneutics, or an erotics, or a metaphorics, of my anus. I am interested in ass-fucking. I am interested in the fact that the clitoris, disguised as a discrete button, sweeps over the entire area like a manta ray, impossible to tell where its eight thousand nerves begin and end. I am interested in the fact that the human anus is one of the most innervated parts of the body, as Mary Roach explained to Terry Gross in a perplexing piece of radio that I listened to while driving Iggy home from his twelve-month vaccinations. I checked on Iggy periodically in the rearview mirror for signs of a vaccine-induced neuromuscular breakdown while Roach explained that the anus has “tons of nerves. And the reason is that it needs to be able to discriminate, by feel, between solid, liquid and gas and be able to selectively release one or maybe all of those. And thank heavens for the anus because, you know, really a lot of gratitude, ladies and gentlemen, to the human anus.” To which Gross replied: “Let’s take a short break here, then we’ll talk some more. This is Fresh Air .”
A few months after Florida: you always wanting to fuck, raging with new hormones and new comfort in your skin; me vaulting fast into the unfuckable, not wanting to dislodge the hard-won baby seed, falling through the bed with dizziness whenever I turned my head— falling forever —all touch starting to sicken, as if the cells of my skin were individually nauseated.
That hormones can make the feel of wind, or the feel of fingers on one’s skin, change from arousing to nauseating is a mystery deeper than I can track or fathom. The mysteries of psychology pale in comparison, just as evolution strikes me as infinitely more spiritually profound than Genesis.
Our bodies grew stranger, to ourselves, to each other. You sprouted coarse hair in new places; new muscles fanned out across your hip bones. My breasts were sore for over a year, and while they don’t hurt anymore, they still feel like they belong to someone else (and in a sense, since I’m still nursing, they do). For years you were stone; now you strip your shirt off whenever you feel like it, emerge muscular, shirtless, into public spaces, go running—swimming, even.
Via T, you’ve experienced surges of heat, an adolescent
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