
Source unknown – Title unknown (201X)
This has catalyzed an intense chain reaction of thoughts in my brain.
As I’ve mentioned like a bazillion times: I grew up in an Xtian doomsday cult. The sex education I received basically entailed two pieces: masturbation is a sin & the unscientific concluding post-script condoms don’t reliable prevent pregnancy of the transmission of STDs.
I mean my mom did buy me a book (James Dobson’s Preparing for Adolescence–if you’re ever irresponsibly bored and have an afternoon to dedicate to fomenting outrage, I’d recommend it).
What I learned about sex arrived initially through my friends, depictions of sex in Hollywood movies and a little bit later on: porn.
It was all about volume and voids–a volume introduced to a void and, in so doing, both realize their latent purpose.
…
As much as Xtian folks liked to talk shit about Freud’s ideas, their objections were less with his framework than with his insistence about openly discussing sex and sexuality.
In fact, there was a good bit of overlap between Freud’s conceptualization and their own. His notion that the presence of a penis and the conjoined realization that it was possible to be without a penis introduced castration anxiety, while the realization that not having a penis introduced penis envy.
…
Framing things in terms of volumes and voids creates this tension between giving and taking. It’s a tension that I’ve never really understood and is something which is so heavily tied up in my personal experience of cis-heteronormative politics that I have trouble seeing my way around any of it.
I have never really related to wanting to fill or be filled. I want to be emptied out.
I think to me this is just about the best way I’ve stumbled upon to express my sense of myself as queer.
…
In my late teens, I somehow stumbled onto Dan Savage’s Savage Love column when it was still in The Village Voice.
If Dan Savage was my first real honest-to-goodness provider of sex education, it was Tristan Taormino’s superb companion column Pucker Up which served as my crash course in how to stop being a kink shaming prude and learn to embrace new/different experiences and expand your horizons.
I specifically remember reading one of her columns where she talked about anal fisting. One of the persons interviewed talked about the feeling of having someone fist deep in your colon was a borderline transcendent experience.
The look on this dude’s face while he’s the meat in an MMM sandwich makes me think that there might be some merit to the notion that certain acts of sexual extremity can–in fact–bring about transcendent states.
Beyond that though this is really the first time I’ve experienced a desire to be a void waiting to be filled.
It reminds me of an interview Stoya did for Jezebel in conjunction with her new book Philosophy, Pussycats & Porn where while decrying the lack of substantive sex ed in the US, she also points out that:
[Porn] can be used to get a window into things that you might not want to
participate in yourself, like, for instance, with the more intense BDSM
stuff it can be a really good idea to experience some pornography about
it first, and imagine yourself in those shoes, before you do something
that risks being too intense. It can be a way of feeling out desires
instead of just diving straight in.
I would go a step further and say that as long as their is a rigorously fact based sex education component in place, pornography when consumed with a modicum of mindfulness can introduce you to things you never knew interested you but suddenly you are curious about.