the erotic, and you, and me

ive got a lot of thoughts rolling around. theyre not as sophisticated as id like, but i think i need to start hedging my bets on that front and let whatever spills out take precedent.

months ago, and really, probably longer than that, i read a delightful article by kate wagner. it's called Bringing Sexy Back, and you can check it out here. you'll probably want to before you read the rest of this.

wagner makes a concise, compassionate, and incisive argument about the nature of the sex drive in the era of Surveillance and "Accountability" (for us, of course, not billionaires). i would sum it up this way: we have utterly abandoned the closed dialogue innate to bodily experience, and for nothing.

she does you an excellent service by hitting you with the whammy so early. the following still makes my skin crawl as intolerably as when i first read it:

“They had no idea you felt something sexual about them,” she said. “What if they found out? Lowkey, I hate to say this but: you took advantage of them.” I was shocked. I tried to explain — and it felt extremely absurd to explain — that this had happened in my body and in my thoughts, which were private to me and which nobody had the right to know about. But they did have the right, my friend argued. She demanded that I apologize to the women for sexualizing them."

for privately finding pleasure in a physical experience, wagner's friend not only insists that she has taken advantage of two women, an accusation which hinges on material offense, but WORSE -- the overgrown kid she's unfortunate enough to know asks her to APOLOGIZE. to these two strangers. for something they were not aware of in the first place, and which could only serve to sour social and business relations afterwards. they posited, firstly, that the way wagner felt was immoral. it was wrong and predatory to feel this pleasure from physical contact, and worse still to not come clean about the sin so clearly bubbling up inside her.

demented. the closed loop of the body's own dialogue, treated as an open network.

what are thoughts and sensations anyway, but tiny Tweets and Posts? it's enough to make you puke!

there is a fear, distrust, disgust with the body that permeates every facet of culture right now. i look down on it. i don't respect it. i don't respect people who abide by it, not as peers and equals. it wouldn't be in the interest of my body's health.

well, let me clarify-- i think i DO respect FEAR of the body. it would be deeply hypocritical for me not to. i understand these fears as theyre based in an utter lack of control-- as long as something in our bodies can suddenly "fail", can permanently give ontowards a new and irreversible state, i concede that there may always be something to fear. to be cautious of, bare minimum.

it is disgust and disdain for what houses us that gets me on my haunches. you can try to argue that theyre of differing severities, hating your own body versus hating others-- but i dont buy it these days. we are creatures of comparison. if i hate how "disabled i look" on a given day, it is impossible to divorce that from the wider implication: "i hate that i look like THOSE guys". should i neglect to leave that horseshit at the door, where it belongs, it is not just at my own peril. i carry that attitude to my disabled peers if i keep it with me. likewise, if someone cant stand what theyre feeling, of course it may hit them as offensive if they recognize it in me. now they hate both of us.

of course they do! disgust and disdain for the body look like a lot more than hating how we look and act. it looks like hating the things we desire, and hating that we desire them. getting mad at a stomach for being hungry. getting mad at tearducts for crying. getting mad with a brain and reproductive organs for recognizing that something felt good. getting mad at other people, for not setting a better example for you. didnt they learn how to turn those OFF already? someone better, so YOU dont get in trouble first...

it's scary as hell that expectations of self- and peer-policing for expressing even the most baseline of erotic sentiments as they pertain to daily life seem to have only increased. it certainly isnt makin anyone happy.

but, i didn't always feel this way. i can even call on the memories of the times i didn't. as a teenager, i struggled very reasonably with the political dangers of being perceived. when men gave me The Look, i knew it was not a safe look. i used to tell my older sibling that i wished i had the power to take a tire iron to the knees of every man that undressed me with his eyes. we would trade adjacent desires back and forth in this manner until the rage left both of our bodies.

it is not shocking to imagine why two children trying to defend their bodily autonomy under patriarchy would have such a reaction. i was not in the position of relative power i now have-- a nominal upgrade, to be certain, but legal adulthood is a big deal here. never let yourself forget that the united states is the only country in the UN to never ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

even as a younger adult, i struggled with the notion that someone could Desire anything i bring to the table-- not because i didnt think it could be true, but because i abhorred it when it was. i had known desire as a precursor to a threat, and i responded with a preliminary sort of disgust. unfortunately, and reliably, this turned inward. i felt disgusting every time the touch of someone else made my heartrate go up. and, as a forever-patient who wouldnt be allowed to clock out any time soon, it made all my doc appointments a self-flagellating nightmare.

then, one day, it kinda just hit. "wait, i grew up with severe tourettes. i cant always use my legs. i respect the interiority of my thoughts in other areas, and see them where they converge and delineate from my actions. i know the body is a mass of reflexes and involuntary sensation. why is 'oh wow, pretty woman' where that buck stops? and why would i be so cruel as to expect this needless misery from anyone?"

not a sustainable chip to keep on your shoulder, is it? so i chucked it.

so there was the baggage HALF-conquered -- but with a lot of work left to do. "it's fine because we can't help it" is pathologizing and infantilizing and INSUFFERABLE. we don't need to be saved from our boners, so "the poor thing cant help it" won't get us too far.

if something "can't be helped", the underlying implication remains: a necessary evil sits here. an indignity we will ALLOW rests in this idea.

but the erotic, as a bundle of bodily sensations, is mundane. it is honest, often unflattering to the ego, and nourishing for the spirit, in the way that only something indifferent to the ego can be. eroticism is as deeply rooted in the body as hunger and sleepiness and fear, as inseparable from our autonomous systems as all of these things are, and a dangerously large, dangerously naive throng of people would refer to this cluster of experiences as "base."

and the erotic, with all the power it contains and everything it speaks to, is of course the basest of them all. power demands it, so necessity demands it. this is not an interchangeable series of events. institutions of power decide what is "necessary".)

if youre a relaxed enough guy and respect the privacy of people as it ought to be respected, you learn a lot about what goes on inside of people and the bodies they call home. one thing ive learned, alongside my wider discoveries about the many mundane applications of erotic and homosocial activity, is that sadomasochism is very common and very normal stuff. it kinda figures, when you zoom out a bit-- think about all the ways friends love hazing each other! we LOVE pushing pain limits as a social bonding thing. one of the funniest things about us. i love it.

now, ive never talked to a nurse one-on-one about this-- id love to, someday, outside a clinical setting, where that discussion would be appropriate-- but here's something i can tell you for certain: theres a lot of nurses in medfet. a lot of medical professionals in general-- but, given the hierarchy of authority present in the field, it doesn't surprise me that the largest number of on-the-inside posters are nurses, EMTs and other med techs. put another way, no doctor would get too comfortable airing the ways their sexuality might overlap with their work and interests, at risk of more considerably high-profile lawsuits.

i realize i'm saying this in a very "sources: dude trust me" type of way, but 1) i would hope my body of work gives you an inkling as to my horse in this race, and 2) i would much prefer to respect the privacy of the folks ive seen, because i understand the risks theyre taking in a world where having a boner online is dangerous for a paycheck.

i think nurses are one of the most apt examples i have on hand, just because i have depended on them frequently. a good deal of needles have had to go in and out of me from one chunk of time to the next, and that means a lot of people, and a lot of hands. i've had great nurses, awful ones, and everything in between. i consider myself very lucky that most of them, these days, are great.

and it might help somewhat that i'm a "good patient"-- i know how this stuff works, i know how hard theyre working, and whether im there for a visit or there for a stay, i know that all they need from me is kindness. it'll start to break your heart just how relieved and overjoyed they get-- i dont fault the patient that requires more instruction, is angry about their circumstances, is taking it out in the ward, but you learn that face of "oh thank CHRIST you're not going to cuss at me too" from the young women coming in, and it reminds you to keep doin what youre doin. as long as what youre doin is being nice.

and like i said before -- sadomasochism is so, so, so god damned common. i understand a lot of people will really clutch at their collarbones while wrestling with the idea, and i get it. but it's true, and knowing it won't be what kills you.

and, i think there's something to be said about the professions that beget caring for the vulnerable in the first place, for the types of people it will attract. whether nursing school or med school, medical training chews people up and spits em out-- the people who make it through are either very determined to help people, or very determined to have control over someone. ive had plenty of both. i have certainly had cruel and sadistic nurses, even moreso when i lived in a rural area. i know why i have been angry, and i know why i've been scared.

but these days, when i think about the hundreds of med professionals ive had over my lifetime, and the hundreds of nurses alone, i find myself entertaining an idea with a great deal of humor: statistically, im sure at least a SMALL handful of these lovely people were getting "something" out of it, to an extent wholly private to their own bodies, and in ways that never once interfered with their ability to give me compassionate care. in the best of cases, they are trained for those scenarios.

so, what does it "mean" if an IV hurts going in, and my next nurse feels something in her own body while she is tending to mine?

that she's done her job! nothing more.

what does it "mean" if she reassures me, and it feels "better" than it is "supposed to"?

well, it means she's GOOD at her job, and my body knows this is a safe place to be.

scandalous!