dear h,
right now my sex life is made up of only dreams, both waking and dreaming. i see m, and occasionally f, quite often while sleeping. you don’t know them and don’t really need to know them or our backstory in order to hear about this dream.
in it, m and i travel by train to f & n’s, as is the case in real life when we visit them. the train ride is uneventful, so uneventful, in fact, that m and i don’t even speak during our journey, nor do we look at each other. we gaze out the window to see hills thick with trees flashing by and blurring into undecipherable green masses. we arrive at the station in the dark. it is summer, the air thick and hot and lit up by fireflies, stars, moonlight. f is waiting for us. he is enthusiastic in his greeting and m gets in the passenger side, up front by f, while i sit in the back. m and f talk rapidly in the front, about musicians i’ve never heard of, poets who i haven’t yet read, vacations that i couldn’t afford to go on. in this way, the dream mirrors real life – my silence, my lack of knowledge and funds, my gazing out the window but seeing nothing for it is too dark to see the stream, the quaint town, the old ruin of a church.
we arrive, by dirt road, at f & n’s and head inside. k greets us with a cheese plate and a salad. for the first time in the dream, m and i finally look at each other. his eyes, blue green. his hair, disheveled. he raises his eyebrows, a sign of excitement for what is to come. i blush, knowingly.
post dinner, post wine, post art film, we push the couches in the living room together. the agreed upon moment has arrived. f & n start kissing, which seems only natural given their marriage. m and i look at each other, tentative, nervous, tender, wanting. at the same time, we move closer, closer, until our legs touch. his hand moves to my knee, my thigh, he’s warm, he’s long and lanky. looking at each other, we bring our faces closer and i am all blush. i part my lips, kiss him. the kiss grows, our tongues slipping into and out of each other’s mouths, my hand moving through his messy hair, his hand traveling on my leg, from thigh toward ass, and then he begins to rub my cunt. i moan, kiss him more intensely yet still tenderly and through my body language, i cry, emphatically, yes.
f & n part, and n moves toward m. she pulls him away from me and they begin kissing ferociously. f is moving
toward me, but i’m worried that m is enjoying kissing k too much, that he will forget me and only pleasure her. my body tenses as f touches the small of my back, but i kiss him, anyway. n and m move toward us. n touching f and f touching me and m touching me and n. m and f touching my cunt. m letting go of n’s hand so he can snake his fingers into my fingers. in the dream, i want to tell everyone to stop. i want to tell m that it is only him that i want tonight, but mirroring real life, i remain silent. m fingering n and f fingering me. n moaning and me silent. n kissing me and me touching n’s breasts. n rubbing f’s cock and one of my hand’s moving to f’s cock to rub with her. my other hand sneaks away, tenderly touches m’s hair, then slides down and rubs his cock.
that’s the dream, h. no other penetration takes place. the dream has only happened once but it remains clear. my discomfort with kissing anyone but m, my jealousy over anyone else touching m, and that fucking word – tender.
when have i ever wanted in any life – dreaming or waking – to have tender touching, tender sex? this feels so far away from how i have always desired, from what i have always desired.
when i first met m in my waking life, though thinking he was cute, i couldn’t stand him. he seemed, not arrogant necessarily, but certainly very unaware. unaware of his subject position, of his privilege, and so when he spoke, he lacked a sort of understanding of those he spoke with. he didn’t understand that his knowledge was a product of his wealth, of being a white cis-man. for a long while, i tried to get to know m but felt that we were only ever talking about the surface, which as you know, is my least favorite type of relation. i like the kind of openness that allows one’s inner experiences to become outer, the kind of openness that asks both people to share without holding back. this type of sharing is the basis of all of my real friendships and without it, i tend to feel untethered and unsure and often find myself falling silent.
m and i spent a lot of time together since we’ve met, but so many of our early conversations were about poetry, art, and theory. i tried to slip in some of the openness that i desired, but for a time, it felt hopeless that m would ever open up to me. luckily, after much work and one-sided over-sharing, he finally began to talk with me like a close
friend, telling me secrets and offering little parts of himself that i imagined had been kept, for a long time, under lock and key.
before he began opening up, i had a few sex dreams about him. these dreams often involved angry sex, in which, after he spoke too long about some shitty musician i had never heard of and had no interest in hearing about, i would push him against a wall and start kissing him, in anger. i would whisper in his ear, m, i fucking hate you. and then we would have delicious, frustrated sex in which he would fuck me hard while he fingered my ass, bit my neck, and pulled my hair, while i would claw and scratch at his back like a feral cat.
and now, this tenderness.
do you know what it reminds me of, actually? you don’t yet know this because we hadn’t met yet, but in high school, among my many flings and short-lived relationships, there was a boy named j. i dated him in freshman year for two days, then he kissed me, and i freaked out and dumped him. but j was close friends with one of my best friends, q, so we continued to hang out, the three of us together. j wasn’t very open with us until his suicide attempt toward the end of freshman year.
the day they let him out of the hospital, we went to q’s house. it was raining, a thunderstorm. we went outside and ran around in the rain, exhausting ourselves, overjoyed to be soaked and together. we lay down in the middle of the street, the smell of rain wafting up from the warm asphalt, our heads touching and triangled together. j told us about his attempt, explained where he learned to cut up, not across.
we cried together, then q and i bounced up. i pulled j up, forgetting the bandages on his wrists and accidently pressed my thumbs into his wounds. he shouted at me in pain, but immediately calmed down and tenderly, chased me down the street so he could catch me and embrace me in a long, lanky hug. we headed inside to watch donnie darko and eat nutella on toast.
after this, j and i remained open with each other. q moved to texas and j, who had unreturned feelings for q, began to hang out with me more often. we developed a beautiful friendship that lasted, in this close way, for only another year. we began to make out often. j’s parents were rarely home in the afternoon after school, so we would go to his bedroom, cozy up on his bed, holding each other tenderly. we would talk about how much we missed q and our mutual missing somehow led us to this tender kissing. the first time this happened, he told me to kiss less aggressively and showed me a more gentle way to kiss that still expressed desire.
i have never wanted to kiss anyone else in this way. it’s not like i’m a cold-hearted person who doesn’t understand that sex can be fantastic and still sweet. it’s more that i don’t tend to enjoy this kind of sex. it feels too intimate, it distracts me from the bodily sensations, it becomes too much about lovey feelings, feelings that often don’t, for me, in the moments of sex, feel relevant.
but now, this tenderness. this desire for tenderness with m, who i really shouldn’t pursue, but who i want to kiss, both while waking and dreaming.
i never used to second guess my bodily desires for people. in the past, i would just act, regardless of the potential consequences. i think it’s that desire for tender kissing that’s throwing me off, that’s causing me to not only fall silent, but to not move at all.
a desire that paralyzes, l
dear e,
i’ve been thinking more about nymphomaniac. do you remember the scene in which joe discusses her sexual education and before seligman replies, he imagines her in a schoolgirl outfit, much like one might see in porn.
i just pictured what an education would look like in your storytelling, he says to joe. but in actuality, he is picturing it for his own arousal and through that arousal. it has nothing to do with her aside from envisioning her as sexual, as only a sexually appealing body. what’s worse is how cheesy his idea of her sexual education is.
by mirroring the campiness of porn, seligman creates a sexual image of joe that he finds erotic, but in fact, his eroticism is not only expected and boring, it is also at odds with what joe truly finds erotic.
though joe is not always honest with her sexual partners, sometimes lying to them that they have given her her first orgasm, she still meets each encounter and each telling of the encounter without campy or forced or cliché details. when she tells her own stories, there are no schoolgirl outfits, no overused tiny plots. joe is honest in her representation of her sexual encounters even when they make her look monstrous, heartless. and while many of the scenes are sexy, they do not feel overacted, cliché or campy in the way that seligman’s vision of joe as a schoolgirl does.
much like seligman’s vision of joe’s education, the fly fishing in nymphomaniac seems like men’s attempt to make sense of women: to put joe’s sexuality into a context which is less terrifying, less wild, less feral – which makes the borderless, bordered. and joe always tries to explain that seligman is never quite right, saying: i don’t know about that but.
it stays with me: her refusal to allow her nymphomania to be made rational, bordered, logical; her refusal to let him take over her story, and his persistence in relating it to fly fishing. all of his comments, not just fly fishing, are an attempt to make her nymphomania acceptable and understandable to him (to men).
but it can’t be contained, l
dear h,
they never hit me except for during sex. they hit open handed, usually with the palm, very rarely with the backside. occasionally, they punch. actually, it was only one that punched – the same one who anally raped me – gg who is not to be confused with g.
most of them prefer to choke though. the dangerous ones are the ones who keep their hands around my throat, squeezing tight, refusing to let go until my eyes have welled up, teared, as if my eyes are gasping for the air my lungs so badly need.
there is a difference between rough sex and abuse, but this is a distinction that has been blurry not just for the men i’ve fucked, but also for me. maybe this is true for you too.
how old were you the first time you had rough sex?
it wasn’t until i met gg that sex got rough. the boys in high school were never rough though they sometimes were intense, fast, and over-eager which resulted in slightly painful fingering or fucking. but gg was the first one to leave the realm of accidental roughness and to enter purposeful, sadistic abuse.
the first thing was his foot fetish, which was only strange because he wouldn’t back down. he wanted his cock to be touched by my feet and he refused to stop asking until i gave in. that’s not rough, physically, but that’s a breach in consent. it’s ignoring boundaries and using coercion. it’s trampling down boundaries by force until the desired outcome is obtained.
no one fucking teaches us about consent.
it wasn’t until after he had choked me, hit me, spat on me, face-fucked me to the point of puking, anally raped me, repeat, repeat, repeat that i finally realized something was wrong in our sexual relations. how many times did i say no only to have my boundaries forcefully trampled?
it sickens me that i stayed, even after he fucked me while i was weeping, after he held my hand to his rigid cock and forced me to give him a hand job while i was weeping. when i left him, i could barely articulate to him the ways in which our sex was not okay.
i’ll never forget the first time i spoke it. i was with g. everything was fun and fine and then suddenly, i was weeping next to him, telling him how i finally felt free, telling him about the repeated sexual abuse when i was a child, and then it finally clicked – gg had raped me, he had abused me – and until that moment, i couldn’t even see it.
there’s this tiny line, i think, between rough sex and abuse and i don’t even see the line sometimes. we talked about this once, when you visited me, about a year after you had left for california. you were getting ready to move to the east coast to be with your boyfriend and we were talking about your exploration of bdsm with him. when i talked about my recent experience with accidentally crossing the line between rough sex and abuse, you understood but also seemed to think i was overthinking it, making it more complicated than it needed to be.
i wonder what you think about that line now – if, like it has for me, the line has become not just smaller but also clearer.
when rough sex is fun, it’s really fun, but when it crosses the line, it’s catastrophic.
i wonder what makes us crave rough sex. is it as simple as being culturally conditioned to both accept and desire gendered violence, to crave gendered humiliation and submission?
if this were the case, then wouldn’t we be able to shut off our want for rough sex as soon as we became aware of that conditioning?
--l
lauren samblanet is a poet and hybrid writer who cross-pollinates with other forms of making & other makers of forms. some of her poems have been published in a shadow map: an anthology by survivors of sexual assault, dreginald, entropy, bedfellows, the tiny, crab fat magazine, and aglimpseof. you can find more of her work here: https://www.laurensamblanet.com/
