#queer sex
We had always been hot-blooded, but cool to the touch
protecting each other from the heat that would surely have been us
the sweat, the pulse of our bodies, intertwined and trembling
the vulnerability that comes with knowing each other’s pleasure.
For too long we tried desperately
to mitigate the damage,
you and I (a forest fire) encroaching on a tiny village of restraint.
Slow burning (at first), but burning steadily still,
and moving inward
until we had burned that village down and began dancing
in the flames.
Your body,
no longer cool to the touch, but red hot and wide open.
you know what I lowkey hate? that entire fandoms just up and decide who the bottom/ top is, almost unilaterally, in their big ships and about half the time they’re DEAD WRONG.
I’ve been thinking about this and the issue is definitely that cishet people/ cishet women in fandom think that top and bottom are personalities.
and that top and bottom are stand-ins for gender.
and that top=dominant and bottom=submissive and that top=masc and bottom=femme.
so let me be the submissive butch vers who tells you that no, actually, top and bottom are not distinct personalities.
and not all tops are dominant, not all bottoms are submissive.
many, many tops are fem or femme.
and many, many masc and butch people love to bottom with all their hearts
and vers switches do exist.
also vers people can be dominant. or submissive.
and tops and bottoms can switch when it comes to kink and BDSM.
these things are very complex and the *whole* point of a queer relationship or ship is a that *no one is the man or the woman and the ship defies gender roles entirely*
so no. there’s never a cut and dried “this is the kind of person who bottoms” or “this is the kind of person who tops”
and if you think you can tell who tops and who bottoms just by getting to know them—let me tell you as a queer who fucks a lot of queers that you’re dead wrong.
I try to guess who tops, who bottoms among my friends a lot, and I get it right more than most, and I still get it wrong at least 40% of the time.
because people can and do surprise you.
anyways this is why I’m kind of done on cishet fic writers like I don’t really think y’all *get* queerness and queer sex and I think if you don’t understand the way that we love and have relationships then you should try to at least start to understand us before you write about our love and our sex lives.
“Getting to know our desires (or acting on them) doesn’t necessarily mean that we will discover their essential goodness (or that of others’). It may, in fact, entail contending with the fact that we sometimes desire (or partially desire, or desire in fantasy) that which is dangerous, if not outright destructive. Since acting on such desires can bring shame or pain (why did I do that to myself, or why did that happen to me, again?), it can be easier to disavow or displace the desire altogether, rather than to say (as many queers have helped people say), Sometimes I desire sex that feels self-shattering, self-obliterating. Sometimes I desire unsafe sex, up to and including courting HIV infection. Sometimes I desire sex that replicates my worst traumas. Sometimes I desire sex with someone who repulses, even frightens, me. Sometimes I desire sex with someone who is clearly, for a million reasons, the wrong person to have sex with. Sometimes I desire to cause another pain. Sometimes I desire pain. Sometimes I desire sex until I have it, then feel disgusted by it. Sometimes I want to relinquish the burden of my agency, come what may.”
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
“‘There seems to be no urgent need [in cultural feminism] to understand women’s version of what Leo Bersani, writing on behalf of gay men, has called ’[gay male] love of the cock.’…It’s just missing.’ I too, have noted this omission. On the level of literature, it’s not that writing of this nature doesn’t exist. It’s more that it rarely finds an easy home in a feminist canon, especially a white feminist canon, wherein it tends to get treated as 'brainwashing or poisoning by the patriarchy.’ Listen, for example, to legal scholar Mary Anne Frank’s outraged response to Halley’s comments: 'What Halley seems to be after is not mere reinstatement of patriarchy, but patriarchy with a smile–with a stamp of (erotic) approval from women.’ Frank’s collapse of 'love of cock’ into 'reinstatement of patriarchy’ is a classic deprivation, one that elides the fact that millions of women presumably negotiate every day a world in which they desire and enjoy cock and masculinity–both in cis men and untethered from them–while working against patriarchy’s grip.”
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
“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
“That day, in the same room as Karen and Raff’s, we screw naked for the first time. Her pelvis is glued to mine, her vulva connected to mine, our organs gnawing each other like the muzzles of two dogs that recognize each other. As we screw, I feel as if my entire political history, all my years of feminism, are moving directly toward the center of her body and flowing into it, as if her skin provided their only real niche. When I come, Wittig and Davis, Woolf and Solanas, La Pasionaria, Kate Bornstein, and Annie Sprinkle bubble up with me. She is covered with my feminism as if with a diaphonous ejaculation, a sea of political sparkles.”
-Paul Preciado, from Testo Junkie
