#ntbtsm

Even if we try to escape it, sex is always rearing its head around every corner. Have you too been denied all the best Ultrasex?

Societally, we are obsessed with sex. It is the driving force behind many of our movies, our TV shows and music, our daily interactions, the apps we use and the way we make ourselves look in the mirror every morning. Not to say that everybody is dressing with the intention to fuck every day (though I certainly do), but more that the presence of sex and sexuality in our society is so pervasive that it creeps into every little corner of our lives. If someone is stretchy or flexible, you joke to them about what kind of sex positions they might be able to do, because that is what bodies are for. If someone has a smooth or low speaking voice, you say they should consider reading audiobooks so that more people can experience the shivers you get when you hear them, because that is what voices are for. Obviously this is a generalization, but one that holds fairly true for many aspects of life. But…

I’m not here to talk about any of that.

No, rather, what I want to talk about today is something slightly different. I want to talk about all the things in the world, the interpersonal dynamics, the innocuous actions, that are in fact sex.

In one of the most popular songs with a slur as its name by Mindless Self Indulgence, noted awful person Jimmy Urine sings: “I’ve been denied all the best Ultrasex”. This term does not have a standardized dictionary definition, but does combine "ultra" (beyond) with "sex," implying something that is sexual in nature, yet beyond sex. I posit a definition here; Sex without sex. Actions and dynamics that could be considered metaphors for sex if you were not allowed to depict actual sex in a piece of media. I have long felt (and still feel) a yearning in my soul for a term like this. Since our society is so entrenched in sex, it becomes this behemoth, this monolith that means everything psychologically. And because of this, I think that to a degree, sex often does not deliver the same transcendence that it is promised to be through the culture. I yearn for something that provides the promised satisfaction of sex. The body is too weak, too poor a facsimile of the soul to provide this. And look, obviously sex is fun. It’s often rewarding, connecting, intimate and erotic, and is part of many intricate rituals of romance. But this is a different feeling than that. It’s not a matter of having good or bad sex. I’ve had incredible sex, and I’ve also had abysmal sex, and the metric by which those experiences are judged is a fundamentally different one than the metric that you must judge Ultrasex on. It’s the cloth mother and wire mother- the wire mother is real sex, something tangible and animalistic and physical, a fact of life that we carry with us. The cloth mother is Ultrasex, a floating point in the sky, an understood yet not experienced sublimation that is impossible to achieve through the rusted corpse of the wire mother. When I say “I want to have sex with you”, rarely do I just mean “I want to take our clothes off and touch each other’s genitals”. What I really mean is “I want to feel what was promised to me by the world and I want to see it reflected in your eyes.”

So how does Ultrasex approach simulating this feeling? How does removing the actual sex from the equation allow it to approximate this unattainable high? I believe it’s because you have to strive harder for the release- you have to engage on a psychologically dense level in relation to not just the other person, but your own sexuality as well. Often this will ride on the back of a power dynamic, or a ritual of physical interaction. Voluntary and unspoken choreographies that speak louder than the words they might be described with, all innocuous enough that if the other party were to call out the premise, it would pull the Ultra-sexual into the Physio-sexual, at which point you must contend with the new and far less psychosexually satisfying implications that this brings.

I assume you’d like some examples. This is a little bit difficult, seeing as what constitutes Ultrasex is going to be different for everyone, just as what constitutes real sex is different for everyone, but I will list some things that I at least consider to be acts of Ultrasex (peer reviewed by at least one peer- thanks @kaschronicle ). Forcing someone to stay home when they’re sick. Wrestling/grappling in a non-sport context. Breathing hard together after a physical exertion. Taking a request/order too literally and adhering to it past the point of reason. Telling someone something true about themself that they have been trying to ignore. Forgetting how to do something because someone else always does it for you. Winning an argument. Losing an argument. Agreeing to do something that scares you just because you were asked to. Knowing you’re being tricked/manipulated into doing something and doing it anyway. Holding a palm to someone’s back and slowly feeling it get warmer. Pushing someone towards something. Pulling someone away from something. Turning back around to see someone one last time as you’re leaving. Cleaning a speck of food from someone’s face without speaking. Cleaning someone’s wound and watching them wince when you put the antiseptic on. Being too honest about something. Being too honest about something and then getting embarrassed about how honest you were. Accidentally revealing that someone is deeply important to you. Being unsure of when they became so important.

The list goes on. Trust me, it really does. You might have read that and thought that none of that sounded particularly Ultra-sexual, which is fair. Examples of Ultrasex are like the Supreme Court’s definition of pornography. As Justice Stewart wrote (and Matthew Johnson loves to quote): "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"]... But I know it when I see it.” It’s the same deal. You can’t always define it, but you’ll know it when you feel it. One of those base human gut feelings that you can’t mistake.

I would be remiss to not mention the obvious bias in this article- this is written by someone who is both transgender and on the asexual spectrum (oh I bet). A perfect storm that both alienates one from the body and dampens the enjoyment of participating in sex. I would not dare to claim that everybody in the world shares my fervor and yearning for Ultrasex, both as an action and as a term. However, I believe it is this perfect storm of disconnect from the typical avenues of sexual sublimation that allows me to put into words a feeling that I suspect many people have and go their whole lives ignoring. And in any case- even if this were a term that only had any use as a term within the transgender and/or asexual community, does that not hold an importance as well? If we are to map the human experience, it would be foolish to ignore parts of it simply because they are not all-encompassing. But… I don’t think this term is only utile in those specific communities. I think this speaks to a wider phenomenon in the Western world, one that goes unnoticed and unrepresented. It has a similar sister in BDSM, as the dynamics present in dom/sub relationships can often overlap with many of the power dynamics present in Ultrasexual situations, but they are, at the end of the day, sisters not twins. The formality of BDSM makes it, in a way, antithetical to Ultrasex. An element of Ultrasex is “getting away with it”, so to speak. Engaging in something that both parties are aware is something beyond normal interaction, yet will not acknowledge it. I considered drawing a parallel to consensual non-consent, but I don’t think there’s really any comparison. Consent to engage in the innocuous is an oxymoron- it is that grey area that makes it. If one party does not feel the Ultrasex in the interaction, then they are simply having a normal interaction. It’s completely a practice that takes place within one’s mind, and as we all know, thought crime is not real.

I’m unsure how much sense this will make to a wider public, and honestly if this belongs here on this blog at all. But I’ve written stupider stuff on this website, so I hope this’ll find its audience. Maybe it’s just the ntbts fans that I’ve accumulated, but that’s okay too. I hope you find what you’re looking for, and I hope it’s cloaked in plausible deniability.