Think of the ways you’ve flattened your desire. Stifled, sculpted, narrowed, diluted, thinned its landscapes; how you might’ve convinced yourself that you want something you really don’t, how you may have swallowed your own heart in order to arrange yourself into a desirable form. Think of the ways you undermine your own liberation, maybe inadvertently, by equating liberation with invulnerability. Think of the ways you’ve smushed down your feelings—mucky, ugly, overspilling, garish feelings—to maintain your (ostensible) fuckability.
Let me borrow from Asa Seresin’s viral article from 2018: “On Heteropessimism,” which fails to really engage with the experience of bisexuality, or of queerness that involves being a woman or a femme attracted-to-cis-men-but-not-straight, but nonetheless, I think, expresses some deep insight, and defines heteropessimism as: “performative disidentification . . . regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about the straight experience . . . rarely accompanied by the actual abandonment of heterosexuality.” That “performative disidentification” with one’s own sexuality often accompanies women’s heterosexuality, at least, those who consider themselves feminists: being attracted to cis men is embarrassing. I’m not going to try to explain the whole of patriarchy and heteronormativity here—you know why it’s considered embarrassing, why it’s felt as an unfortunate and often damaging fact by those of us attracted to them. Cis men are often incapable, it seems, of even doing the barest of bare minimums, of treating people they’re fucking like actual people, of being functioning and decent adult humans, especially white cis men. They’re socialized to be this way and made excuses for; infantilized and yet, simultaneously, upheld as The Aspirational Standard of Humanity. Etc, etc. What I want to think about isn’t why cis men are the way they are, but rather, how being attracted to them affects women, and people socialized as girls, such as myself, even though I no longer identify as a girl.
Sexual experiences with cis men often include: disappointment, performance, boredom, traumatization, unreciprocated and abruptly demanded emotional labor, dissociation, validation, and sometimes, sometimes, enjoyment. Though I might feel more able to prioritize my pleasure, might be more able to ask for things, to begin to dismantle and refuse the male gaze’s chokehold on my sexual imagination, I’ve realized, slowly, that this shifting has failed in some ways. Because I’m still playing a part. I’m still trying to be chill. To be cool. To be disaffected, detached, untouchable. I’m still unconsciously embodying a “sex positivity” that actually demands that I deny and stifle most of my feelings and desires. I’m still smothering myself, still writing my wanting into a script men have written.
I’m not even really a girl and yet: I am still trying to be a cool girl.
I want to kill her. To finally escape her. To do something different.
When I think about sex positivity—the mainstream, most widely accepted and codified version, I mean, often gilded in whiteness and thinness and ableism, etc—I think about its irony. To be perceived as aloof, disconnected, alienated from one’s feelings is to be, apparently, empowered, autonomous, shameless. To be able to fuck without vulnerability, as if such an oxymoronic act were ever possible, as if fucking, sex, is not always a gesture of vulnerability whether you like it or not. As if feelings are the antidote to freedom rather than freedom’s heartbeat.
Is it actually liberation if we flatten our desire, empty it, evacuate its landscape of any signs of life or actual human feeling; is it actually liberation if we maim our desire into a lesser-shape in order to express it at all?
To carve and cut up and corner your sexuality into a meal for the male gaze, to wholeheartedly and ritualistically reproduce the imagery you’ve been forcefed your entire life, to come to expect and accept dissociation and absence as sensations intrinsic to sex—to think of, and accept, sex as lack, as lacking infinitely—is this liberation?
I am tired of pretending everything is Good and Okay and I’m So Chill and Above It All. I’m tired of performing indifference.
Most of the women I know aren’t actually seeking romance, aren’t even looking for it. What they want, from their sex lives, is basic human decency, is to be treated like a person. Intimacy doesn’t require love in whatever constrained formulation we’ve internalized it as; intimacy needn’t be singular, monogamous, heterosexual, normative or forever-and-ever to be real, and vital, and even incandescent. To want intimacy, emotional connection, is not necessarily to want a committed monogamous relationship, but it seems that most cis men cannot quite begin to imagine what an intimacy outside of a heteronormative, gendered union can be. I think that this lack of imagination might explain, in part, why this demographic seems to be so emotionally emptied-out, so terrified of treating women they’re having sex with like actual people or connecting on any level at all: they cannot fathom a scenario in which they’re not ‘cornered’ into a commitment they don’t want, as if, as patriarchy has manipulated them into thinking, women exist to scheme them into such things. As if they do not still almost always ask their ‘casual’ sex partners for all of the equivalencies of a relationship—free and unconditional emotional labor, reservoirs of affection and attention—and simultaneously expect that these partners ask nothing in return, not even to be treated like people.
I mean that cis straight men are the ones incapable of acting decent enough to make “casual” sex good. Because, for me, casual doesn’t mean dehumanized, or nothing. Casual feels like a shitty word, too, because it enforces a certain coolness, mandates a disaffectedness, that ultimately perpetuates all of the psychic miseries and emotional black holes of heteronormativity and patriarchy, and usually affords men women’s emotional labor whilst asking nothing in return. Because: we, growing up, are socialized to understand that women accommodate and comfort and provide and nurture naturally, always, organically, and thus that emotional labor is recognized as an elemental part of us and not something men demand and rely upon. Even in casual relationships, I mean, women are expected to do a shit ton of emotional labor without any recognition or reciprocation.
An ethics of sex is complicated, and ever-evolving, of course, but one feature we might rethink is the word casual itself. What is it, exactly? How casual should we be about an act as vulnerable and messy as sex? I don’t mean it in a puritanical, shame-incensed way—we are not precious vessels to be unsealed or torn—but rather, as a call for people, particularly cis men who have sex with women and femmes (because femininity, as it is constructed and enforced, always has different meanings for different people but our socialization usually involves self-betrayal and self-shrinking/putting others’ needs before our own), to evaluate whether casual is just a term they use to justify their treating their sexual partners like shit.
Look to Amia Srinivasan in her (brilliant) book The Right to Sex, in which she discusses Adrienne Rich’s theory of compulsory heterosexuality: “Rich’s point is that heterosexuality is a political institution that compels even ‘straight’ women – through its psychic internalisation, yes, but also through its violent enforcement – to regulate their intimacies, affinities and relations in ways that often betray what it is they really want.”
What does feeling entitled to pleasure mean, exactly, if we don’t also feel entitled to being treated like human beings, like actual people, if we don’t also feel like we’re able to be seen and not discarded for feeling anything at all? We do “regulate our intimacies, affinities and relations in ways that often betray what it is we really want,” and when I say we I do not mean straight women specifically—I’m not straight or a woman—but rather, most of us socialized as girls in some way or another, those of us who experience being perceived and read as femme, us who do find ourselves attracted to cis men, even if we wish otherwise.
You want so badly to be a cool girl. To unlatch yourself from your own mangy, unrefined heart. To amputate your own need, cut off the roots of your own longing in order to regrow yourself into something desirable, touchable, acceptable. You’re constantly engaging in a self-fission, in desecrating and dissecting yourself to your smallest parts and trying to toss most of the pieces into the trash. You want so badly to become a surface, a mirror, a whatever-you-want-me-to-be. You convince yourself of your own untouchability, of your own un-wanting, your own un-needing. You deride your every flush of desire for intimacy or connection, dismiss each sensation as sentimentalism, gooey and overdone. You know how to talk yourself out of wanting anything. You know how to hold a pillow over the face of each exhale of yearning and smother its breaths, crush its windpipe. You want to be a cool girl, and this is the way you’ve been taught.
You don’t ask: what are we. You don’t try to beg for little shards of affection, attention; you try, hard, to take what you get, from men, which is often very little. You try not to expect much of anything, even from Good Guys, who often identify adamantly as feminists and yet gaslight you with a voracity unmatched by any other person you’ve ever met, will shame you for wanting to be treated with basic human decency, who may get their egos bruised at your suggestion of using a vibrator during sex, etc, etc. You allow them to pour out their every thought and epiphany into you whilst they still, still, freak out at the merest suggestion of you having any feelings at all, any woundedness at all, any wants beyond their fantasy-world of just-sex. Because they believe themselves to be uniquely interesting, and important, and original, they also often overestimate your feelings for them, thinking that your life revolves around attempting to ensnare them into an intimacy they’ve been taught to fear and reject instinctively, to equate with constriction.
Again: the lack of imagination. The incapacity to fathom a closeness that doesn’t suffocate or reaffirm old binary gender roles. I understand that fear, I feel it too. And yet I want to believe that there is a possibility of something else, more radical and tender and interesting, something more invested in vulnerability and equity rather than this contest of who can care less.
Even with other women, even in queer relationships: the cool girl lingers, grasps the cliff’s edge, fights to stay alive and writhing. You can carry the male gaze, carry that psychic alienation, into a situation where no men are present. You can and sometimes do. Heterosexual, gendered scripts do not magically dissolve in the boundaries of a queer encounter, is the thing that no one tells you. Things can loosen, can heal, can unravel and bloom, yes, but, also—things can fester and reproduce themselves in slightly altered forms. You can find yourself playing a role you never signed up for, even if no one is asking you to.
To be weightless, and unknowable. To be an empty room for men to fill. It is easy to sell this nothingness as agency, as a thing you are choosing and so it must be good, must be freeing. I must admit, to be a cool girl does sound tempting—to be so paper-thin, so insubstantial and yearning for nothing, no one, ever. It sounds tempting, and also, utterly lifeless.
me asking you to get food does not mean i am in love with you, is what I want to say, when a guy raises his eyebrows in response to me, yes, asking him to get food after a hookup—the horror! A hookup that would’ve been infinitely better, I think, if he’d not been so careful not to feel anything even resembling Actual Feelings. I just want to be a real person to you, a friend, whatever, not just a thing to fuck and dismiss. I don’t know why that wanting is such a taboo; why men act as if you’re obsessed with them, demanding love and attention and sentiment, as if they’re not the ones perpetually demanding those very qualities from you all the time. The fantasy is, of course, that they’re not. The fantasy is that we are needy for having needs, for having feelings, for being people. The fantasy is that emotional openness and vulnerability are grotesque, are the antitheses of sexiness, rather than its glue.
In an iconic Medium article from 2015, “Against Chill,” Alana Massey writes: “Chill asks us to remove the language of courtship and desire lest we appear invested somehow in other human beings. To even acknowledge that there might be an emotional dimension to talking or dating or hanging out or coming over or fucking or whatever the kids are calling it all these days feels forbidden. It is a game of chicken where the first person to confess their frustration or confusion loses.”
Yes, I am tired of being chill. Of dismembering my own capacity for emotion and closeness in order to stay wanted, stay desired (by men, by the fantasy), stay unreal and estranged from myself. I am tired of shoving myself into a delusion of sexuality and sexual interaction that demands anyone who’s not a cis white man contort their desire into a brick wall. What if we don’t have normatively desirable bodies, or gender expressions? What if desire is a terrain we are usually excluded from, or fetishized within?
Sexual trauma, too, can render the word ‘agency’ a hollow concept, a phantom of a feeling. Reclaiming my sexuality, after/amidst trauma, involves, I think, also reclaiming my right to not be the cool girl, to not be chill, to admit that I am a person and I am not a mirror.
Asking cis men to start displaying basic emotional intelligence, to stop fearing any mere sighting of feelings, to stop withholding and dangling and wielding the language of sex positivity and feminism in order to stay emotionally vacant, is that too much to ask? Is that not, actually, the thing that might be an actual resistance to heteropessimism, to bipessimism, even; might that be a resistance to patriarchy’s consolidation of masculinity as an unloving, unfeeling, impenetrable force?
If cis, straight men have defined freedom as feeling-nothing/showing-nothing, why do we feel the need to follow that model, to place ourselves neatly into it even if we don’t always want it? Why is that format of desire—detached from a person, existing purely in a faceless nameless body, as if such a desire were ever remotely possible—our model for liberation? Isn’t it a mirage, when you get to the core of it? Isn’t it such an easily toppled-over ideal?
To end on a thought from Jane Ward’s (really, really good book) The Tragedy of Heterosexuality: “Deep heterosexuality proclaims: if straight women and men are actually attracted to each other, that is excellent. Now let’s expand the notion of heterosexual attraction to include such a powerful longing for the full humanity of women, and for the sexual vulnerability of men, that anything less becomes suspect as authentic heterosexual desire.”
*Amending that quote to bi attraction to cis men, to attraction to cis men on behalf of non-men—specifically any/all women and femme people, anyone raised to prioritize men’s pleasure above their own feelings and needs—yes. Let’s expand the notion of desire to include a powerful longing for the full humanity of each other, all the time, and not have that longing be perceived as such a needy, ‘feminine,’ overbearing, absurd thing.