Maybe it’s the change in seasons. As northern Minnesota cold starts to strut its cocky self around, I find myself using fire metaphors to understand my sexuality. I’ve been curious over the last year about how the pandemic would affect this part of myself after so many months of lock down and physical+ emotional isolation. I continue to watch the colors of my sexual cravings, drive, attraction, identity roll like heat waves across hot flat pavement. Which ones are real? Which are only mirage?
At moments, I’m filled with paramagnetic desires. “I want to fuck. Now. No, not fuck. Want to get to know. Explore. No I want to be solo. Have as much alone time as humanly possible. No, I want to spend the whole day drenching the bed with sweat and sex juices alongside someone. No, that takes a whole gaggle of precious hours. I want to write for weeks on end in my Ballroom apartment overlooking Lake Superior.”
My life is big right now. As in full and gayly fragrant. Deep breath in. Grad school, reproductive justice and pleasure activism career, writing, polySolo/saturated love, trashE, risky creative and spiritual practice. I’m a fancy as fuck six burner gas stove, the entire range on medium to high heat, these flames used to cook half a dozen delicious dishes.
Hmmm, a Love painted this contrast in a recent letter- “What is your relationship with urges compared to URGENCY?” I found myself musing, thinking of urge as fire and Urgency as forest fire. A controlled burn, stacked fire pit, shared warmth and beauty outside with circle of friends versus out of control, all consuming, hot, searing, deadly destruction.
Their question left me with another. How has sex changed/how is sex changing for me? Over the last two years. Over last five months. Over the last day. I’m reading the brilliant and extensive Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen. The precision of language, says Chen, allows us to have unambiguous discussions about our desires. Some of this precision involves parsing out romantic, sexual, emotional, sensual, intellectual and physical attraction (page 29.) “The separation of attraction into smaller and smaller components challenges us to think about the building blocks of desire. The specificity of language can force us to look more closely at what we want and what leaves us cold.”
Precision of language. Romantic and sexual and polyamorous spectrums. Who am I? How do I describe my urges, my urgency, my attractions? In a conversation with a college friend this weekend, I admitted I can be driving or walking down the street and feel sexual attraction to random folx. I hear a voice on the radio or behind me at a café and experience instant queer, curious lust in my body. Voicing this aloud I realized I’m turned on physically by sensation and sensuality and sexuality- to people I don’t even know!
Chen talks about never feeling the above. Aesthetic attraction is something that strongly drives her relationships. Emotional connection is the kindling for her romances.
Precision and desire and language. I’m reminded how last summer my close friend’s teenager, a wildly talented young trans artist, taught me about fraysexuality on the beach. Expanded ideas of desire offered in cross generational conversation equals fabulous summer, waterside fun.
“Fraysexual,” he said next to the bigLake, “is feeling the initial sexual urges, attraction and not wanting the relationship.” I later learned fraysexuality, on the asexual spectrum, means that the sexual attraction for someone fades after initially meeting with them (opposite of demisexual – where sexual attraction grows as you get closer emotionally).
Yes I love, love this contemporary queering of sexuality! And want to try it all on. Am full of curiosity and wonder how do polySolo and fraysexuality and… intersect? I’m into enjoying just a sprinkle here and there of the folx I’m loving right now. Foreplay and sex and emotional connection can take up so much time. I want easy, hot, wild, animalistic attraction. My multi-burner self welcomes wildly queer, free, kinky folx for this reason!
With question asking and truth telling, I’m drawn back to why Chen invites us to get particular. She wants us to intimately know our desires so we can slide beyond the compulsory sexuality of our culture. This resonates. Recently, I was reminded of the pressure placed on folx to have good sex and Lots of it- especially after coming out of a stretch of ‘singlehood’. Urgency (in ourselves and others) around sexual satisfaction leaves little room for finding pleasure in the exploration of sexualities -and freely placing oneself on the allo-asexual spectrum -while strengthening our practices of queering attraction, connection, identity. Furthermore, sexual urgency normalizes all the sexual expectations slammed on us culturally.
Chen writes, “So called ‘healthy, open sexuality’ can translate to labeling anyone who isn’t sexual enough or sexual in the right way. 'The association is that for truly ‘passionate people’, sex- the pursuit, the experience- is always better than a book, movie, game, [bigLake]. It is always implied that sex, and lots of it, is normal and wonderful and the main source of adventure, connection, and commitment. The result is that anyone or any relationship that isn’t sexual enough or sexual in the right way becomes lesser” (36).
Chen asserts the label of asexual should be value neutral. However, due to the commodification of sex and the complete infusion of similar ideas in mainstream, heteronormative, baby making society, “having and flaunting sex becomes a form of conspicuous consumption, used to signal that we are not passionless, uptight, boring, but instead have the financial and social capital to be hip and fun and high status and multi-orgasmic.”
Chen’s powerful, transgressive, and brilliant writing invites me to queerly counter the high season of shopping, consumption, and capitalism-flavored Urgency. I’m just midway through this gem of a book. I promise more in my next post about exploring our sexual identities while adventuring through the wildest of polyVerses.