#female desire

“Beyond assertions of innocence and impotence, beyond passive-aggressive perseveration on what you didn’t like…lies an ocean, the ocean of what you do like, what you do want, what you are able to ask for, what you need help in asking for, what you don’t know you want until you try it, what you thought you wanted but it turns out you don’t (or at least not tonight), and so on. We must learn to swim in this ocean if we don’t want to simmer endlessly in resentment, frustration, and complaint. (I say this as someone who has done plenty of such simmering.) If and when someone’s desires reveal themselves to be incompatible with ours, of course they can seem repulsive or wrongheaded. But repeatedly placing ourselves in the position of rejecting or passing judgment on them can become its own form of exercising shame and power, not to mention of insulating ourselves from the risks that come with naming our own desires, or even admitting that we desire. And there really are risks, insofar as owning our lust, kinks, vulnerabilities, and choices means opening them up to being judged by others–as laden with false consciousness, politically imperfect, unshared or unwelcome, asking for it, self-destructive, weird, vanilla, "TMI,” perhaps even as prosecutable.“

-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint