bee's rat words

By analyzing our fantasies as though they are dreams, we can learn about ourselves and what we desire to control in ourselves. Forbidden levels of assertion surface in me as a particular kidnap-rape fantasy. A captive small woman is being slowly, rather patiently fucked by a man with a penis "too large" for her. He is a sincere, determined, sometimes angry, huge man; other kidnappers who are medium-sized men and Lesbians perform other and multiple sex actions on her while the large one is telling her she can take him all the way in if she'll just concentrate on stretching. A little ashamed of this fantasy even to my private self, I decided to try analyzing it as though it were a dream. Since the fantasy occurs in my mind, not in real life, aspects of myself are each of the characters, including some that I do not like, some I respect or find amusing, some I fear or pity. All are "me" in dialogue and confrontation with myself, with something happening to me in my own life. I decided the fantasy says that I am trying to take on things that I believe are "too big" or too much for me. My little "female" energy pot is being abused by my enormous "masculine" ambition; or perhaps my svelte, slender ambition and success is being assaulted by my great hulking masculine work force. It happens the situation in my life is that I have taken on projects requiring decades of effort, and I am trying to do them all in a short time. My fantasy precisely describes my anxiety over pressure I have put on myself and helps me understand it. Moreover, the kidnap victim's tight little vagina has stretched considerably since the first of these episodes, and she is beginning to have massive orgasms along with the kidnappers.

My fantasy sex usually uses modern settings, a pizza parlor (?), a motorboat crowded with revelers, a fertility rite of old women frigging an essential central figure (myself), one woman fucking three or four men, people both straight and Gay having sex in public or in a great hurry. The fantasy is a pressure chamber for intensifying sexual feelings and for directing orgasm. If I am particularly tense and frustrated with my life, I notice that more of the fantasies include bondage or forced circumstances; for instance, my favorite under duress in my life is the fantasy of a line of nude, horny men tied to an overhead pole who are anxious to have sex and are not allowed and cannot touch each other, while a naked woman dances a sex dance directly in front of them, sometimes with a chosen male partner. It is a fantasy of thwarted desire and pretend revenge on forces I perceive as ranged against me. But all the characters in my fantasy are me.

My lover, Paula, who spent years being afraid to come out as a Lesbian, tells me she sometimes fantasizes being forced to have sex with women. The deliberate illusion of "no choice" and therefore "no fault" releases her from internal social controls and allows her sexual feelings to build intensely.

The bimbo can be very helpful inspiration for playing with gender, whether it’s erotically, artistically, or as a way to affirm the fundamentals of who you really are: she’s a reminder that divisions between masculinity and femininity are made up in the first place. As evidenced by “Bimbo Picks Up a Book,” a bimbo is defined by her lack of intelligence. Her ditziness is directly correlated to her sex appeal, and her sex appeal is directly related to her hypergirliness. She’s dumb cuz she’s hot, and she’s hot cuz she’s dumb. She’s just a girl. This notion is based, of course, on a misogynistic disrespect of attractiveness. The bimbo knows that people love to look at her, that her clothes are fun. She is confident in her worth and she’s having a good time being herself.

If your sexual fantasy is to wipe your mind clean of distractions so you can be a creature of pure sensation, then the bimbo is a handy archetype to embody. Sometimes, you don’t want to be a fully integrated self during sex. You don’t always want to think about your bills or trauma or the book you’ve been reading when you’re trying to please and be pleased.

Bimbofication offers a clear delineation between the moaning, cumming, uninhibited sex object you dream of being and the mild-mannered alter ego you have to be the rest of the time. You might not want to literally look and act like a dumb blond in bed, but the dumb blond can be a marvelous symbol of something many of us do want to be: someone whose simple existence is dedicated only to being admired and enjoying herself. No thoughts, just vibes. A crucial part of bimbofication is that eventually, when the party’s over, you will need to put on some sensible shoes and pick up your book again. But the bimbo is always inside you, ready to swell out of proportion whenever you need her; she’s a part of who you really were all along.”]

Like, in Evangelical Purity Culture, male desire was basically poison. It was a threat. It was this constant temptation that would destroy everything. And even after leaving, in the sort of queer, feminist spaces i spend most of my time in that wasn't something that pretty much anyone was spending time actively dissuading me from feeling.

But my desire is good. It's not something that I'm being accepted in spite of. It's a positive thing. It's a bonus. Not even just vanilla stuff, all the stuff I'd convinced myself were these weird terrible desires that were shameful to have.

It honestly took me over a decade to fully accept that. To stop dissociating during sex and confront that I was, in fact, being a massive perv and that was fantastic and preferable and that I could accept that into my self-image without shame or self hatred.

@kisstheashes

Oh don't worry, I didn't make it out of Evangelical Purity Culture thinking that girls had it peachy or anything. Our experiences are different, but both bad.

I have seen a lot of content about E.P.C. that very firmly centers the ways that purity culture dovetails with rape culture, the ways that women and women's bodies were held responsible for the actions of men, and the ways that their own sexuality was erased under the burden of being cast as the pure, moral, oppositional force to the depredations of male sexuality. This is in no way meant to diminish that.

It is meant to focus on a part of this dynamic I don't see commented on nearly as much though. In purity culture, men are perpetrators. A good man doesn't radiate goodness, it's more that he's managed to contain the inherently evil toxicity that is his sexuality and hasn't let it harm everyone around him as it naturally will if unchecked. When I look for other stories like mine, I already see stories by and for women, and a lot of them... haven't really challenged those core assumptions about men. Which means that I can't really find comfort and solidarity there.

The narrative I've run into a fair bit is "I was taught women were responsible for managing men's horrible, evil sexuality, but I've learned that we're not. Men are responsible for managing their own horrible, evil sexuality." I very rarely run into specific positivity for masculine sexuality when I'm in circles discussing purity culture, because frankly, there are plenty of people who feel that masculine sexuality isn't stigmatized enough.

So yeah. I was specific about gender for a reason. Not because I don't understand other people's positions, but because while I do, I don't see so much stuff addressing my specific situation. So I figured I'd make some of the positivity I myself need.

It's a difficult thing to talk about, because demonstrably, gender-based violence directed against women by men is a widespread problem! But it doesn't follow that a majority of men are bad by default; rather, it's that many have been trained to entitlement and bad behaviour by patriarchal systems and misogynist ways of thinking, which are both things we have the power to change.

Attemping to affect this change and bring about equality is the core conceit of feminism, and we can see, very demonstrably, that it works. So if you fall into the gender-essentialist trap of believing that men are bad fundamentally, whether because of Evil Biology or Original Sin, then you're not only saying that the long-term goal of feminism is impossible; you're functionally agreeing with every disgusting, sexist rape-apologist who brushes off assault and misogyny as "boys will be boys" and "men are just like that." You cannot hope to hold bad men accountable for their actions without acknowledging the existence of good men; that their misdeeds aren't synonymous with their masculinity, but are rather choices they specifically have made.

and the straight cis men who were ashamed of their own desires haunt me

They bought wholeheartedly into the ideas that their sexual desires were inherently sinful and predatory and destined to doom their lives if they slipped up, in a way that forcibly reminded me of when I was trying to be a good Catholic girl and knew that the soft animal of my body absolutely could not be made to run in the correct direction of the treadmill my faith was yoked to

More than once I had to back up any specific discussion and just ask, "According to your conscience and faith, what would a healthy married relationship look like when it comes to sex? How would this desire factor into it?" Because it's totally an enormous question, but it also often produced the facial equivalent to a computer blue screen of death, because they'd been told so often that male desire was ontologically incompatible with a healthy marriage, except also, they were supposed to want sex so much they'd destroy their own marriages over it???

I have feminism and queer culture and Chappell Roan telling me that my desire is good and okay, and I'm slowly getting less ashamed about it. And I just can't help thinking: What about men? How sad would it be to be told your sexuality is inherently aggressive and predatory and exploitative? How do you feel like you're bringing something valuable to a relationship that way?

When i started as a dishwasher, i was trained by an old career dish pit man named Claudio. He'd spent his whole life washing dishes. It allowed him to move to just about any city in the world that he wanted to and get a job without having to deal with complex hiring processes or strict resumé requirements. Which was the main thing he wanted out of a career. I still think about him.

He'd seen a lot of people come through that station who either didn't consider it a real job or thought it was beneath them, on their way to "better" or "more important" things. And, in retrospect, those first two days he was sort of doing the minimum with me that he could do and still respect himself when he told the manager he'd trained me.

But, maybe it was because i was really interested in learning all the positions there were in a restaurant because i knew they were ALL important, or because i was a hard worker, or maybe it was because i tried to have real conversations with him in my broken spanish and did my best to not make him speak any english unless he wanted to, but after a couple days there was a big shift in the way he and i worked together, and he started to really teach me.

That place ran the dish pit with one dishwasher, so when he was done training me I was going to be doing the job on my own.

The thing that stuck with me the most, for the rest of my restaurant career, was this... and it wasn't just the actual things he was saying, but a completely new way of looking at what i was doing within the context of how the restaurant ran. I came in for my 3rd day and he said

"When you work alone, you want to go home by midnight?"

we clocked on at 3:30 and took a half hour lunch break and usually skipped our tens, so, yeah i absolutely did want to get off work by midnight

Then, even tho i already knew where most of everything was by that time, he took me around and showed me all the dishes, cups, pots and pans, spatulas, silverware, had me look at all of it. Then he told me to remember that almost every one of the dishes I was looking at would be used more than once by the end of our shift- we were clocking on to wash the entire building full of dishes multiple times.

Then he led me back over to the industrial dishwasher most restaurants have, which looks like this:

and then this 60 year old career dishwasher from Mexico City said the thing that changed how I looked at restaurant jobs forever

"This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.

If you don't have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it's done every single time? You can't do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you'll do 160 loads.

[like, literally, he had done this math, he had these exact figures]

160 loads instead of 240 loads means you are doing 20 loads in an hour instead of 30 loads. That means the dishes are going to pile up. The cooks will run out of pots and pans and will have to stop and wait for you, the servers will run out of plates and cups and have to stop and wait for you, and your night is going to SUCK. Every part of how this restaurant works can grind to a halt because of that idle minute between dish loads, and if it does you'll have an entire building of people in a hurry and all waiting on you.

And it means you're going to be here until 2 am doing the 200+ loads of dishes this restaurant goes through every night.

For this to work, you MUST have this dishwasher on and running every minute of the shift. As soon as you turn it on you have two minutes to have the next load ready. See these large items i put to the side down here? One or two of them takes up all the space in the machine. I keep them here so that if the machine finishes and shuts off before i'm ready for it i can stick one of these in there and turn it on again immediately. You have to think like that to do this job without stress."

The way he was looking at how the whole restaurant ran, the way he was looking at how he'd spend each minute of the entire shift, the way he broke down what the physical limits were and how to max them out so he could do his job and go home on time without stressing out... The way this 60 year old guy, who had never had professional ambitions beyond being a dishwasher, was still such a competent and brilliant expert in his field.

It was all such an important lesson, and one that stayed with me through every position i went on to work in restaurants, dish pit, busser, server, cook, all the way up through manager before I finally got out of my restaurant career

Claudio never wanted to be anything but a dishwasher who didn't stay any later than he had to.

But he knew how that restaurant ran better than most of the other people in it. I never had a chance to truly thank him for the specific lesson he taught me, because while it had an immediate impact, I didn't really understand how valuable a lesson it was until much later.

Passion and desire and shame and sadness don’t signal that you have to change everything immediately, though. These are sensations that don’t require solutions. Your primary job, in the face of renewed lust for life, is to tolerate the shame of joy.

Because embarrassment is sometimes just a sign that you’ve never lived out in the open before, you’ve never cared more about a feeling than you care about how you’re coming across, you’ve never prioritized happiness over control.

This is why it’s good to take risks that might embarrass you regularly. Because every time you dare to embarrass yourself for the sake of who you are, you’re teaching your body to prioritize joy. You’re teaching yourself to let go of seeming better than the things you love. You’re showing yourself how to feel where you are — to soak in the cool fall air, to breathe in the moon, to love every lopsided moment of your glorious, flawed life.

I think that this is a symptom of that other habit of treating whole classes of human beings as though their stories do not have the stakes, narrative depth, and complexity typically assigned to dominant protagonists. It is a craft quandary indeed to write yet another sex scene in which a white male protagonist exercises his archetypal masculinity on a secondary, two-dimensional character functioning as a prop in his hero’s journey without any narrative awareness of this exhausted trope.

But to write a sex scene in which that marginalized character is treated with some reverence and depth? To write it from their perspective? Or to write a scene in which a white male character experiences, even in an inchoate way, the deep discomfort that occurs when we act out our erotic story on another body without recognizing its humanity? I’ll repeat the unrule: you can use any words you want.

Here is Eileen Myles, from Inferno, in case you thought comparing a pussy to soup, or using the word crotch, was out of bounds or unsexy:

But after kissing her mouth a little chapped which seemed familiar then feeling her breasts not so large, but nice round and beautiful, familiar breasts, ones I already knew in some way I tugged down her pants. She said Oh. Like a soft amount of light, a small gust of wind. And luckily she had some sweatpants on or something, a stretchy waist. Easy getting them down and there were her lemony legs. Not big not strong, but smooth soft hair like peaches everything that way. Pink rose warm. I just dived down. It couldn’t have been too fast. Time was being so slow and warm. And there it was. A pussy, the singular place on a girl, it’s where I’m going. Wiggly thing, like soup, like a bowl. Another mouth. Like lips between her legs and the taste of it. Piss and fruit. I pressed my face against its bone and it moved. She was letting me. All this was happening. I smelled the future right there, a present and a past. All that went through her, known through the soft sweet flesh of her lips and clit. It was like my face felt loved temporarily […] I felt plunged into a tropical movie in which light was bathing my head and her pussy, her cunt, her crotch was a warm smile and for a moment I lived in her sun.

The revelation here is not that these words can be used in a sex scene, but that a pussy, a cunt, a crotch can be transformed by a sex scene. “Language is never innocent,” Roland Barthes once wrote, and I agree. Here, in the sense that the words pussy, cunt, and crotch all carry the connotative luggage of all their previous contexts—the violence, disgust, and pornographic theater of all the scenes and mouths I’ve heard them in and from. Experience, however, is innocent. This narrator’s sexual reality is so powerful a phenomenon that it washes these words of their previous connotations. Now they mean not a wimp or a bitch or the place on a woman that belongs to a man, but something magnificent and weird, pure and exotic, deeply familiar and erotic—a warm smile, a cosmic body. Just as sweatpants become perfect attire for such a scene, smooth soft hair like peaches, and the actual smell of sex a good one. When they enter this revelatory scene, these degraded words are suddenly imbued with the same reverence as their speaker. To use them is an incontrovertible act of (re)creation.”]

That’s one of the many advantages of fisting for people who enjoy being penetrated: unlike a cylindrical phallus, it requires patience and finesse to get the considerably bumpier shape of a hand inside. It’s easier for most penises to slip into most vaginas or rectums, but “easy” doesn’t necessarily translate to “more pleasurable” for anyone involved. Fisting emphasizes what the fistee wants and needs in order to relax and open, which changes the act of penetration from “let’s get this done” to “let’s take our time.” It’s not that it always requires hours of tantric foreplay: I’ve seen people swallow hands in a matter of minutes. But fisting tops and bottoms do need to be attuned to each other more than in any other kind of intercourse.

Adamczak mentions fisting several times in her piece (“a closed hand around a dildo, of lips around a foot, of a vagina stretched over a fist”). To my mind, getting fisted is the ultimate act of circlusion, even if the term itself refers to the penetrating body part. Fisting necessitates communication, patience, finesse, embodied listening, and active breathwork. This may go some way toward explaining why fisters tend to enter a meditative, trance-like state. Fisting requires intentional engagement from the bottom, because in order to take a fist you really have to breathe deeply, to communicate about slowing down or wanting more, to reach for the poppers, to ask for the lube. And these are all things bottoms could be doing all the time, but fisting takes us out of our assumptions that the bottom is there to satisfy the top’s lust, to simply take it. A fistee must be a size queen, someone who loves to be filled up with something massive. Opening to a fist is a trust fall for everyone involved. When your hand is deep inside someone, you can feel their heart beating back against you. Sometimes when I’m up to my wrist in an aroused, engorged bottom, watching and feeling and listening to and smelling a partner so aroused they’re thrashing and bearing down and grasping back and contracting over and over, I think: Why would you fuck a hole that isn’t turned on? Sure, I take pride in turning people on and driving them insane with ecstasy, but fucking an engorged hole is just more fun, like bouncing on a trampoline or being tossed into the air by a taut parachute, with all the verve that inspires.

It’s not just penises that enjoy being circluded either. Clit heads respond to pressing and smashing and mashing, especially once they’ve been teased into arousal. The suction of a mouth or pump toy vacuum sealed around the vulva can create the feeling that your junk is swollen enough to put inside of something or someone. “What matters is not what parts a body possesses, but rather, which parts are put into action,” concludes Adamczak, and this is a queer manifesto bigger than circlusion, bigger even than fisting. When we reinvent and remap our anatomy for the purpose of pleasure, we leave behind inherited anxiety and shame around what our bodies are capable of, opening wide to engulf the future.”]

i see it now, too, in the girls around me. i'll ask if they want care – a home-cooked meal, relaxed company, sex without the expectation of reciprocation – and they say no, no, thank you, i don't need it; what would you like, what do you want, because in their head they're still doing that awful calculus, still training themselves to disappear in the eyes of the people around them.

i don't think i'd have died without transition – not in the conventional sense, at least – but to take that leap, i had to stop thinking of myself as a human experiment in fuel-efficient living and start nurturing the anemic, atrophied flame of desire in my heart. i had to learn to eat well, to exercise, to style myself beautiful, but harder than that, i had to learn to ask the people around me to work on my behalf in order to enrich my life and give me the things i wanted.

and i did it; i learned. and it was agony, but courage is a muscle you can train, and every day i get better at accepting gifts with the hungry gratitude i never learned in my years and years as a sad, scared, lonely boy.

so be patient with the trans girls in your life. better than that: be proactive, attentive, generous; be forceful, if you have to, and learn to distinguish real discomfort from the terrified reflex of self-denial that so many of us once learned to rely on.

so many of my siblings, especially those who are awaiting or beginning transition, step into transgender life as fragile, apathetic beings who have spent their lives being coerced, beaten, and tricked into winnowing themselves to nothing, doing the work of the murderers for them, because they have been taught to believe that trans people deserve to live suspended, half-dead lives as punishment for their abhorrence.

they do not. you do not.

One of my service learning classes involved work at a local homeless community center, helping people write resumes and cleaning bathrooms.

Our instructor told us to expect to see the bathrooms trashed a lot–like you will clean the bathroom and immediately someone will wreck it.

And it’s not because they disrespect your work or don’t value having access to clean bathrooms or whatever, but because of control.

When you feel like you have no control over your life or your environment, your brain is going to want to assert control however it can.

Which results in trashed bathrooms.  It’s control exercised over the one small part of your environment that you still have the power to affect.

I see kids on tumblr using the language of social justice as cudgels on people who actually do care about and listen to them

or holding the creators within their communities to an impossibly high standard that they never apply to mainstream media properties.

I just see trashed bathrooms. ‘These are the people my voice will reach,’ they rationalize, ‘so these are the people I’ll hurt.’

Here are some things that people have said when exploring their pleasure: “Whenever I feel pleasure, I feel guilty.” “It’s okay to experience a little pleasure, sure, if it happens by accident. You know, while I’m giving to someone else.” “It’s not okay to feel this good myself, but it’s okay to make my partner feel good, and that feels good to me too.” “Yeah, that’s sort of pleasant, I guess, but I don’t let myself really enjoy it very much.” “Wow! That feels phenomenal! I didn’t know I could feel that! So why do I feel like crying?”

Pleasure is a powerful change agent. Pleasure lets you make friends with your body, and that changes your sense of who you are in the world, and your sense of self-worth, value, and compassion. Many fears and inner conflicts resolve. This is why it is often said that pleasure heals. Indeed, for many of us, as professionals, pleasure is our primary healing modality. We’re back to pleasure being a change in physiology. Change your physiology, and you change what you are able to perceive. Change what you can perceive, and you change what you are able to imagine. Change what you can imagine, and you change what you are able to choose in your life.”]

it doesn't feel good to be right about it, but i am at least a little relieved i decided to stop working toward a legal name/gender change.

people kept asking something to the effect of "why do you use your 'deadname' at school" or "are you ever gonna get it legally changed?"

i recognized that legal recognition of my transition was not something i "wanted" but something i "thought i needed."

the once-discoursed question of "do trans people need to be dysphoric?" seems to have left the brains of everyone who argued "no."

i would shudder at the sound of my "deadname." i would become pensive after a misgendering. i would glimpse my "masculine" features and perceive them as "wrong." i would shave my body and undergo facial lasering because i felt like i was "supposed to." i would regard razor burn and ingrown hairs as "proof" of something i wasn't supposed to "be," something i should stop "trying to be."

a lot of these seeds were planted by queer and trans people before i transitioned. my first trans consideration was not "i want to be a girl," rather, "i want to take estrogen." i thought if i wanted estrogen more than being "being a girl," that i would be met with resistance.

it took me five years to move from "i want to be a part of the 'trans community,'" to "i want to transition." i did not feel particularly welcome, as i was accused of "fetishizing" or "being a chaser" at 16 for simply saying on tumblr: "i want to date a trans girl."

i dated tme people before that. it didn't work out, and they said "i don't think you're trans." eventually i dated a trans girl. it didn't work out, and she said: "i don't think you're trans." they said this because i didn't want to lose function of or replace my penis.

i was cast out from what i considered at the time to be "the trans community" because i had the audacity to use my penis to pleasure people who asked me to use my penis only to fear what my penis "meant." i was called a rapist because i had a penis, and they were afraid, so it must have been me and my rapist penis that did this, because to them, rape is when it doesn't stop once you become uncomfortable, or: rape is when you wish it didn't happen.

so much of it boiled down to this, and here is "the point":

sickening tenants of transmisogyny include: "please convince me you abhor 'your masculinity.'" obviously: "please prove you are 'born in the wrong body' and not 'a wolf in sheep's clothing'"

most importantly: "please reassure me your penis will not rape me. please convince me you don't want it - or at the very least, that you are are not proud of it like a man is. please convince me it is powerless, that you are harmless."

i grew tired of playing this game. one afternoon, i topped so well and enjoyed it so thoroughly i understood: "i don't need to maximally posture feminine to offset my lack of phallic dysmorphia."

i am an any pronouns, long-haired, many-voiced, breast-implanted, hairy, boyish, motherly, 'bisexual', vers/switch, gender non-conforming androgyne. even now, right now, i come to the epiphany:

i am not "indecisive;" i have decided i want everything

"everything" being: whatever my body and its organs deem worth or capable of being, worth or capable of experiencing. my body and its organs decide what these are; outside parties do not.

i do not use the mens restroom when i "feel like a man". i use the mens restroom when i feel like standing up. i do not use the women's restroom when i "feel like a woman." i use the women's restroom when i feel like sitting down.

the sign on the door means nothing to me, because it is not a part of me. the names my professor, mother, or pharmacist call me mean nothing to me because they are not any of my organs, or any of my thoughts.

this all started with learning: "i do not care what my driver's license calls me. i do not care what the government calls me. they are not me. they're not even my friends."

i feel like adding that i never felt as though i "needed" estrogen. i "wanted" estrogen. at this point, i "want" estrogen just about as much as i "want" to eat salad. it's something i give my body when i can tell it "wants something" and i consider giving it what i believe to be "healthier," because sometimes i feel "better" on estrogen

i went a couple months without estrogen just to prove to myself that i didn't "need" it, that all along it was not merely "lack of estrogen" that had me feeling so "not what i want to be," but rather it was "concern" over what others EXPECTED or HOPED me to "be." when i stopped caring about what others thought of me, i didn't really care what my majority sex hormone was. this has me, similarly, glad i never got an orchiectomy like i "thought i should."

so many times i was made to believe testosterone is a virus i should wholly "ban" from my body, like i should treat it as "illegal" or "destructive" inside me.

similarly, i expressed: "i have fewer reasons to desist my body from ever synthesizing testosterone than i have reasons to keep my testicles as a backup hormone supply."