Sex Writing: the Good, the Bad, and the Assault by Sam Herschel Wein

1.

You are 30 and driving through Florida; a long, long state. In Orlando, you pull into a cul-de-sac where they are living, briefly, with their mother. You put water to boil to make tea but hours pass while it gurgles, thrashes. You are thrashing too. Your bodies, less clothed with every twenty minutes, the time it takes you to feel, squeeze, lick, smell, get lost in the smell. Every step forward, you both get a little more nervous. You feel their body mildly, almost invisibly, shaking. 

But you know shaking. You have been/still are a sex shaker. You drop their legs, lay on top of them, make a joke. The two of you giggle, and kiss, roll around laughing. You can feel relaxation spread through them, like the color returning to a body that’s been holding its breath. You wait for them to reinitiate the sexy out of the laughter. You squeeze their body against yours and remind them they feel so, so good. And, after a short break, they kiss longer, more ferocious, start gripping with hands, and the bodies get sweatier.

2.

You realize as you drive away from their house how much growing you’ve done. How you’ve waited your entire life for someone to notice you are shaking. How, instead of that, you have just learned to notice it for someone else. But never for you. You’ve been flipped over and over, like you’re basting. Like someone is preparing you for a feast.

3.

A body can feel far away. A body can bend with its legs in the air but the mind is traveling to the kitchen, trying to turn the burner off. A body can slouch on the couch while a slimy boy dances on your lap, pulls off jockstraps to thongs, but your brain is back on the street, thinking how he said, ew, you have anxiety about sex? Sex is so fun. Don’t you just like, have fun?

4.

For a year, your body was in the swim team locker room, naked high school boys jaunting around, peeing on each other, making butt jokes, and then they all went home, and it was you and the football star. From there, a habit developed.

Except, like all habits, you couldn’t decide if you wanted it. You couldn’t decide if you enjoyed how his soap tasted in the back of your throat, if you liked how he’d cum on the floor or on your face, then tell you if you ever told anyone, he’d ruin your life. And he’d leave you, naked on the bench, the showers still running on the yellow, tetris floors.

5.

You kept a Super Secret Binder as a kid, where you wrote thoughts that were even more secretive than your regular diary. And the main thought, one of the few things you wrote in there, was that you liked to “SPB,” an acronym that you somehow came up with at age nine. 

But your sisters found the Super Secret Binder, and one of them sat on you while the other read its contents aloud for your entire bedroom to hear. “SPB?” She asked the room, looking at you. Which followed a monthlong onslaught of different possibilities. “See People’s Boobs!” “Sex Porn Basement!” “Suck Pubic Bush!” “Sticky Peanut Butter?”

And the game went until one day she said, “Smell People’s Butts?” which is, in fact, what it stood for. That, at nine, you loved to shove your face in other boy’s butts, and inhale, and smell, and smell, and smell.

6.

In your early internet years, on the dial-up, most of the porn websites were blocked, so you would read erotica on various “children-safe” forums. You learned to sexy chat with strangers at fourteen, your friend signing you up for a website with little sims that get taken by older men to private rooms. You learned to get naked on Skype for people you never heard from again after they finished, called you a good boy, clicked the video chat closed. 

7.

It is fun to write sex scenes. The horny, young person inside you smiles wider with every line. Every tug, the nipples. Every tongue, the toes. Have you ever described the way you can get lost in the huff of an armpit, shoving your entire face there, inhaling like you’ll never breathe oxygen in this life, ever again? 

8.

In Brokeback Mountain, famously, the cowboys eat beans and then use nothing but spit to shove it in before the camera cuts. But in real life, the camera doesn’t cut. In real life, your insides feel on fire while he holds his hand over your mouth, grunts that you are being too loud, slamming an entire world inside of you. He whispers you know you love it into your ear, which he begins to nibble. No, it isn’t a nibble. He begins to bite. And he leaves marks.

9.

The marks on your brain, for weeks after. You end up at stop signs you’ve never seen before. You don’t remember what you ate for lunch. You can’t recall if you paid your rent, and it is already the 11^th, even though yesterday was the 3^rd. 

You turned to writing when you got like this: your best poems written in crisis, in emotional havoc. In altered mental states. The feelings bursting out from you. You didn’t know how to outlet. You didn’t talk to a soul about it. But the poems saved you. They’re saving your life, you would think, in your room. Alone.

10.

You have normalized this, your longtime therapist finally says, after five years of working with you. You are twenty-eight years old and about to move into your third Chicago apartment. This being the anxiety that swallows you whenever you tried to have sex. This, being the four-way stops, your dinners with parents, the stressful work meetings; all the places you would freeze, couldn’t speak, couldn’t think.

It isn’t normal, you said back. So why would I normalize it? And that question hung in the air for minutes of silence, no, for months after, no, for the rest of your time working together, patterned onto pillows, blocking light from windows, suffocating the air.

11.

You try group therapy—queer group therapy specifically for trauma involving sexual assault. Once a week, you and six others meet in a room with markers, colored pencils, two facilitators, essential oils, lit candles, and a giant tray of snacks. You had been writing about sexual assault for years, but you had not yet learned the power of your voice in a room. You say out loud that you didn’t realize how bad it was, how everything in your life was just what other people wanted, in every avenue. Your career. Your sex. Your relationships. You made yourself have sex with so many people, for so many years, because you thought you had to. Because you didn’t realize you were allowed to want something different.

But you want to change. You want to be something that is only for you. Something that can only be shared when you decide to share it. You name this want, out loud in that room. And briefly, it feels possible.

12.

But the group therapy shuts down early. After five weeks out of the intended ten, the pandemic arrives in the US like a burning truck through a factory of mines, setting off explosives everywhere around you. You had just started to understand what healing could be. You had just begun to name it, speak it out. You had the best sex of your life in the three weeks before you were shut in. But, as life goes, there is little time to process a trauma before the next trauma comes rumbling through, barreling, bringing down every house.

13.

Two years pass, slowly. You are on your computer, on Zoom, in your little bedroom. An interviewer calls you a sexy writer. You work up a nervous laugh. You are always charming. You are always charming even when you are so uncomfortable you want to die. Your poems are sexy, sure, but they are also deeply traumatic. You try to reason with yourself; the trauma doesn’t detract from the sexiness, but is it fair to mention the sexiness without the trauma? 

You swirl in your head about this for days. Justin Torres says, “To comment is not necessarily to compliment,” which feels like it relates to this and every part of you, all this unturned skin, all those gums above teeth. You feel like an internet comment section. You feel like you’ve heard it all. Everyone puts their fingers in your mouth, placing comments down your throat.

14.

You had one person, right before the pandemic. He saw in your eyes that you had vanished while he was inside you. He called for you, like you were stuck in a forest. All the world, silence. Then, slowly, your name, repeated and repeated. Sam, Sam are you there? Sam, Sam my love. It is just you and me. It is just you and me. It is just you and me as if to say, everything before you doesn’t have to come with you for this. Everything before doesn’t have to be in this penetrative place. Everything before is not in the pressing of his penis into you. And it worked. And it brought you back, back to yourself, a body beneath him. You said, please, you need to stop. The first time you had said that out loud, during sex.

15.

You cried during the second season of Fleabag, when the priest looked into the camera. Asked, who are you talking to? Like, for the first time, you watched something that happened in your life happen on a screen. You didn’t realize you’d been turning to the camera your entire life. You’d kept everyone, everything away from you. At least you tried to, until someone understood you well enough to look at your fourth wall, to break into your audience. To tell all the people in your mind, hey, I’m going to save this person. I’m going to stop them from being so fucked up.

16.

But he couldn’t save you from being fucked up. He helped you trust him enough, helped you feel safe enough to start unfurling. He pulled out forks that were stabbing in arteries. All those sacred, scary thoughts, bubbling out. 

But the problem was, once they came out, he didn’t know what to do with them. It was too, too much for him. Which is ok. He didn’t have to be everything. He just wanted to be.

17.

Eve Sedgwick writes about her constant anxiety about childhood spanking and relates it to her obsession with enjambments. Your fiction class friend said every therapist she met with didn’t believe her, that she couldn’t remember her entire childhood. You spent your childhood keeping every part of yourself a secret. Your sexuality. Your sadness. 

You take a purple crayon and you draw the line; as an adult, you could not tell men no. You could not talk about your assaults. But you could write about them, somehow. It was your only avenue out. But still, people would read your poems and they wouldn’t bring them up. How could they? “Hey, that poem about getting raped! Pretty cool, right!” 

You realize you had spent all your twenties waiting for this. Instead, you had to say it out loud. You had to say, “I am really not ok, about any of this.”

18.

Right before you road-tripped through Florida, you spend two nights with a cutie you met at a karaoke queer baby fundraiser. They are up front with their preferences: They simply want to jack you off, but take their time, and get as many loads from you as they can. They spend nearly an hour smelling the small patch of hair between your balls and your asshole, the magical taint, they huff between inhaling. You feel immediately safe with them, and you realize, it’s because the limits were clear from the beginning. 

You want to think of yourself as someone who can set limits like this. Like sex can be measured, a formula. You try it with a chunky babe who talks in a thick southern accent. You say, we aren’t having anal sex. And you feel calm, while you undress him, while you lick his belly up to his nipple, to his lips, kissing him. But when he feels your bulge pressed between his legs, he keeps guiding it to his ass, keeps begging, every five or so minutes, please, just push it in. And even though you don’t, you still feel like you lost something. You still feel like you were trying something new and he threw it out the window.

19.

You keep trying. Back to the Florida babe. You take so many breaks in the sex: to laugh, and check in, and make sure everything is at a place that feels comfortable for both of you. You start to recognize that the communication helps you stay level, helps you stay in your body, instead of flying away.

20.

What do you want to write about? a lover asks you. You had just said you’ve been writing the wrong poems. All the poems you write escape from you like they’re allergic to your skin. They are wild and untamable. You don’t necessarily want to write something controlled. But you want to write something you’ve decided on. You want to think over what to say for weeks and then sit down to orchestrate its shape.

In your graduate class, a peer asks how you decided on your line breaks, whether it was based on some rule or just intuitive genius, which feels like the kindest thing anyone has ever asked. The class has already made it clear: this poem is a knockout. This poem is a first draft. You say intuition, that you were trying to focus on where the lines felt finished as you wrote. That you listened to the sound of their endings. 

You get quiet. You realize, though you didn’t say it to the room, that you were conscious while writing the poem. That you had decided what the poem would say, and you wanted to assist it getting there, with every winding line.

21.

The boy who taught you how to open, the first one you asked to stop, during sex, wants to fly to Tennessee to visit you. He says, we need this, to have sex freely again. But sex with him wasn’t free, it was just wild and passionate, which are feelings you don’t want with him anymore. And the breakthrough happens: You want sex that is regimented. Sex that is overly discussed and very clear. You convinced yourself that super emotional sex would save you from your anxiety but actually what saves you is firm, crisp boundaries. Very clear rules. A line so sharp you could file your nails with it, and do, preparing your little toes for a mouth.

22.

In the final episode of I May Destroy You, Michaela Coel as Arabella lives out, in her mind, three alternate endings of a book she is writing, writing and rewriting in her mind what she would do if she found her rapist, returning over and over to the scene of his crime, looking, obsessively, for some kind of ending. The obsession. The looped ending of possibilities. The forever this and that of how you will confront them, of how someone else will respond once you do. You understand this episode because ever since you were raped, all you do is play different scenarios in your mind. You know exactly what you’ll do when you run into him, BIG him with purple curtains, college him, high school football star him, early 20’s him, writing mentor him, and so many other hims at parties, one plan for each of them. What you could’ve said to get each of these hims to go slower on you, or get off you like you wanted. You are sure you tried to give some bodily signal. You wonder if people don’t understand the language of your limbs.

And just like that, you’ve entered the spiral again. You are throwing yourself into spheres. The brain is never quiet like this. Eventually, you have to decide to jump. To become a splat mark on the moon. It takes a mega-engine to break a cycle. You need so much acceleration, you must become a confident moose, smashing your way through an ice bank. You have to believe in the grass that arrives when the snow melts. You have to believe you’ll survive to see it.

23.

You are scared you will freeze under someone’s body, won’t have the voice to say stop, wait a minute, you need a minute. That you’ll disappear into your mind, never come out.

You are scared you will never write the projects you dream of. That you’ll be stuck, forever, in what comes out from within you whenever you ache. Do you actually know how to tell a story? Or are you just trying to gargle your painful bits, spit them up?

You wonder how long you can be scared before you must, simply must live anyways. You wonder and wonder and wonder. And the answer doesn’t fall from a single tree, from a single living thing.

24.

You spend more time with the living, with your body that is a dense little beast. Your poems can’t be the only way out. You must also talk with people about your assaults.

You try to stay in your body when hard things happen: when you confront people and say what you need, when people demand things that you won’t, just won’t do. You practice this in your room. You decide ahead of time what your poems do, try writing in form, ask for little controlled exercises. You write sixty pages of your novel, even create this essay, an idea you wanted to share. Like your voice was always there but it was beyond your reach. Like your fingers are getting closer, ready to grab it.

25.

You wonder if people are at fault for assuming you knew how to stand up for yourself. You try to take accountability that you didn’t tell a lot of people how you felt. How could they know? How could they know they were hurting you? Did they pay enough attention? Or were you so good at hiding, no matter how much they noticed, it would never be enough?

How could the poems know where to break themselves? How does the subconscious know anything? You realize it knows a lot. But still, it’s stronger, that it’s mixed with your consciousness. That you are decisive in how you are portrayed, in how you are treated. You have a role in your own life, which feels completely brand new. Which makes you start to cry, as you type it. And you type it here, as a little boost.

26.

You are ten. You and a boy, your family friend’s son, lay awake at 1 a.m. in his basement, both his parents asleep. “It’s called a blowjob, I think?” he says, explaining what you should do. You put your child mouth around his semi-hard penis, and you blow, and you blow, the air bursting out the bottom, like you’re filling up a beach ball, like blowing strawberries is the world’s fruitiest gift, like you could do this all day, and still, you’re not finished until you are empty.