I keep meaning to write a post on sex and another on what I’ve published this year, but life keeps thickening around me. So here, on the eve of my 35th birthday, I give you a quickly dashed-off post about some things I feel about sex, love, writing, and my body.
Tonight, I’m bummed about my writing, but in general I feel good about what I’ve been able to write and publish. I published 13 pieces within the past couple of years and also see tangible progress in my newer (unpublished writing). I’m especially proud of this creative nonfiction piece I wrote about How To Make Friends After Leaving Your Cult and the handful of poems I wrote that will be part of my queer and fem voices of the Bible collection. I wrote about the love of David & Jonathan, the witch of Endor, and the prophet Ezekiel’s unnamed wife. I was also able to write a second (even better) poem about Jonathan and David that I’m still trying to find a home for, and a story about Mary trying to get an abortion.
In the coming year, I hope to write about Jephthah’s daughter, whose mysterious two month journey into the mountains with her friends to mourn that she’ll never have sexual relations with a man is (to me) a fantastic space to explore her sexuality. I have a feeling she’ll fall in love with one of the young women she’s journeying with, but who knows? I also want to write about Esther’s relationship with the Haggai, the eunuch in charge of King Ahasuerus’ harem. Maybe Esther and Haggai will turn out to be queerplatonic lovers.
I am also still working on my novel (for my MFA thesis), but that’s sort of a super secret project right now. The things I’m writing about are very raw, and it’s hard to write (fictionalized versions) of some things that are happening in real time. More later.
So, there’s the writing update. On to the body.
The sex post was supposed to be a little survey of how I moved out of evangelical purity culture and got a bit of a sex education, with links to resources about sex. Spoiler: I feel like I’m still at the beginning of my sex education. In terms of sexual logistics and mechanics, Lindsay Doe’s Sexplanations series on YouTube is a great resource. For processing the trauma of evangelical purity culture, Jamie Lee Finch’s book and other work has been invaluable. The Ethical Slut is a little outdated in terms of language, but it’s a good introduction not just to polyamory, but on how to communicate about sexual desires, set boundaries, and operate from a consent-based ethic.
And yet, so much of my sex and love education has been through movies and fiction, and it has been very piecemeal. That probably sounds strange (and perhaps a little bit sad) coming from an almost-35-year-old who has been sexually active in the context of a monogamous relationship for over a decade, and there is much I’ve learned in that relationship that I haven’t shared on social media for various reasons (including respect for my spouse’s privacy). But if I’ve learned anything about my body in the past couple of years, it’s that I’ve been pretty passive about cultivating my sexuality. I think I’m just now getting acquainted with myself in that way.
You know that line from T.S. Eliot that went something like We had the experience but missed the meaning? I sometimes wonder if I’ve had the meaning but missed the experience. Or missed something crucial about the experience because the disparate bodies involved in the experience were vesting it with two different (perhaps divergent) meanings. Of course, that’s life—no one has the exact same experience. But what happens when you’re under the illusion that you’ve been having generally the same experience, and then that illusion dissolves?
That’s coming out of evangelicalism for you (in many realms, not just sex). You’re taught to think that if you’re not having the same experience, beliefs, theology, etc., then you really ought to. So, you try as hard as you can to experience everything the same way—god, sex, relationships, love. But as fundamentalism unravels, so does the illusion of sameness.
But I digress on this, the eve of my 35th birthday.
I intended to start the sex post with a scene from the TV series Rectify, one of the most gorgeous cinematic examples of what Jamie Lee Finch referred to in a podcast as “cordial sex.” If I remember correctly, Jamie preferred it to the term “casual sex” because the latter makes it sound like sex that isn’t part of a committed, long-term relationship can’t be meaningful, or that it’s necessarily unthoughtful or unintimate.
Daniel Holden, the protagonist of Rectify, has just been released after 15 years on death row. As he returns to his hometown and tries to adjust to life outside of death row, Daniel is offered a free haircut by one of his old high school classmates, who is now a hair stylist. Both she and Daniel are now adults in their mid 30s. While they awkwardly catch up during the haircut, she mentions that she always thought that if he got off death row, she might offer herself to him sexually. “Don’t get me wrong,” she says. “I’m a happily married woman. But I thought it might be something you might need.”
Daniel accepts her offer with gratitude. The scene is such a beautiful, tender moment—one of many in Rectify where people lean into moments of intimacy with Daniel—and the two do end up having sex. Here’s how far I got writing about this in the sex post:
The scene from Rectify presented me with a quandary. Here was a beautiful human moment involving sex that transgressed the bounds of conservative Christian teaching on sex. It was extra-marital. And unless the hair stylist had a non-monogamous arrangement with her spouse, it fell into the “affair” category. It was also a one-off, and not within the context of a lifelong monogamous relationship. And yet it was deeply meaningful. Evangelical purity culture insisted that sex with more than one person meant you were giving away parts of yourself that couldn’t be gotten back. And maybe in one sense that was true—maybe you did lose parts of you, but maybe they also grew back, replenished, and gained other things.
Anyway, there’s lots more to say about that. That was just one of the first threads that started to unravel the monogamy thread even while I was still a conservative Christian bound by an abstract relationless set of morals. I believe one-off sexual encounters can be meaningful. I believe people have different sexual vibes and that sex doesn’t even necessarily have to be deeply intimate to be enjoyable, good, powerful, and/or healing. Again, there’s a lot more I need to write, but I was beautifully stunned by this episode of Where Should We Begin, “My Orgasm is Not Just for Me,” where one woman’s pleasure and polyamorous desire is framed as a quest for reclamation not just for herself but for her ancestors, too.
I’m not sure what made me think I could start jotting off a blog post on two huge topics and finish it before bedtime, but here we are. To continue the resource trail about love and sex: My lifeline right now is James Baldwin’s Another Country. There are so many potent scenes and lines in this book, but the line that keeps running through my head is “Love was a country he knew nothing about.” The book is about love and sex, but also love in the midst of inequitable power dynamics (both in terms of race and gender), and I think about this a lot. I appreciate how the book shows people struggling to love themselves and each other within social systems and power dynamics that are so much bigger than them. It is realistic and upfront about how disparate bodily experiences in the context of inequitable power dynamics can create profound rifts and barriers in romantic and sexual relationships.
Big questions I am still asking revolve around how to take ownership of my sexuality (and my body more generally) and how to cultivate emotional, physical, and sexual intimacy with the people I love. I don’t know the answers to the these questions, but at a minimum I want to make space for talking about these things, and how to negotiate your own personal journey of desire while reckoning the effect this can have on your partner(s)/spouse(s). Your body and sexual journey are never just your own even if you are uncoupled (or unthroupled) because you exist in community. Where/how do you find your own breathing room and safe place where you are empowered to move in the ways that are most authentic to you? And how to you negotiate the things you lose along the way?
Body is more than sex of course. I was telling a friend today that I feel better about my body at almost-35 than I have in a long time. I am rock climbing and running; I feel stronger and more in my body. I still want to improve my style game, but I feel generally good about how I present—hair, clothing, vibes. I upped my hair and clothing game a few years ago because I realized no Tan France was going to waltz into my life and do it for me. I struggled with clothing and body image from a young age (I mean, most of us do, in varying ways and degrees), but conservative Christianity made me believe this wasn’t important. So, I minimized my own desire to engage in intentional body curation. But when you don’t tend to a need and, instead, stuff it down, it will flare up in other ways—raging, ravenous, demanding to be fed. This is why I’m a feminist. I want a world where everyone’s bodies are nourished and nurtured.
I love how existing in queer community has helped me love my body more. When I cut my hair short, I felt like had stopped hiding behind my long hair. My mom always said I had a strong profile, but I was self-conscious about my nose and wanted to be beautiful more than strong. But leaning into my queerness has expanded my conception of physical beauty and I genuinely like the shapes my body takes. Here’s a little excerpt from my novel, a passage where the protagonist struggles with self-love mostly because they’ve been taught to view their own sexual desire as an indictment against them. The fact of their desire exacerbates the guilt they feel for being a body that desires, and they are forced to reckon with the body-loathing that flares up:
You cried in the shower, pounded your fist against the gray tile as warm water washed over the skin you hated for its hungers. Fuck you. Fuck this body. Fuck these callousing hands and muscling forearms. Fuck the traumatized tissue shaking your upper body. Fuck the legs and feet that carried you, and the sockets that bore your tears and tended your sight.
You toweled off and shoved your legs into your pants without bothering to put on lotion. Your skin would rot and shrivel off your bones one day. Did it matter if it dried up sooner rather than later?
As you tugged the zipper on your pants, its metal teeth bit your underwear, forcing you to stop and work the cloth free. You pulled the zipper gently back down, sighed, and let your hands dangle at your sides.
From the full-length mirror on the wall across from the showers, your shirtless double arrested you with its stark shapes. Everything about your body was uneven. Your left breast hung lower than your right, and your right foot was size 11 to your left’s size 10.5. On the right side of your head, the hair thinned ever-so-slightly, and your natural part cut a little to the left. Your nose hooked right a smidge. One side of your blue-rimmed coke bottle glasses dipped lower because you’d stepped on them and were afraid that if you bent the pads back to normal, the metal would break.
You wondered sometimes what your clit would look like, if you shaved down there, opened the lips, and looked in the mirror. Would it, too, be an asymmetrical orchid, unperturbed by its intransigent lines?
You wiped your face, removed your pants, and started to lotion your legs and arms. Fuck nothing. Touch everything. This was your body—the lopsided, sensitive animal that had been with you from the beginning. There was nothing in the world you wouldn’t give to make it feel more like itself.
That passage is more about the movement towards body-love than its actualization, but I have a feeling the protagonist will come to love their uneven body even more.
I feel more attractive and confident as a human than in days of yore—like I have valuable things to offer people, and that they value me. But also that I have a core group of robust humans who just like me and can just be present with me when I feel very broken down and not like my most thriving self. I still feel insecure at times, but I feel rooted and less isolated than in days past. I have always felt more present to myself than anyone else, and although I still exist on an emotional spectrum of oscillation between presence and absence, I feel tangibly more present to people than I did in my early twenties.
I want more of this—more intimacy, more life, more intoxication by the cosmos I’m a part of. I want to live the queerest life I can live—to cultivate intimacy with humans I never expected, in ways I couldn’t have imagined.
Of course, this is a blog post, written in so much abstraction. But my poems are getting detailed. My fiction is getting detailed. My life is getting detailed. And it’s so, so hard. Harder than I could’ve imagined. Here I am—older, more attuned to myself and others—but more bewildered than ever. Who am I? What are all these colors? Where do I even begin?