Somewhere along the way, I lost my sexuality. I’m not sure when it happened. Was it the last time I actually had sex? If so, that’s…what? Four and a half years ago? Was it when I stopped looking at myself in the mirror, and gained pound after pound after pound? Was it when I first thought I was unworthy, when I first called myself fat – ugly – monster – pig? Was it when I realized that I was single, and had been single for many years, and would likely be single for many more years?
Not sure. Doesn’t really matter.
What matters is I have forgotten what it means to be female. To be a woman, a woman who is worthy of love and sex and desire. A woman who not only desires, but is desirable. A woman who inspires poetry and passion in a man, not to mention a hard-on. A woman who is worthy of the loaded, voluptuous, ravenous label ‘woman’.
A few years ago I was visiting my parents and decided to dye my hair. I borrowed some old clothes from my mom. My mother is not the snappiest dresser, and she’s much thinner and a bit taller than me, so her clothes were not exactly flattering. The brown linen shorts were tight, and to make them more comfortable I pulled them up over my hips. The blue cotton shirt was high-collared, with lacy edging at the arms. I was shapeless and sexless in my middle-aged outfit. It felt wrong at first; I felt old and lumpy and colorless. Something changed, though, and I felt my sexuality leaving me. I felt like I was shedding my pupal skin and emerging as something new, something different and free and light. I felt like I could walk the streets and never worry what people thought of me. I wasn’t trying anymore. I was no longer a woman, I was faceless and bodiless and sexless. I wondered if this was what every woman feels, when she stops being desired, when she stops desiring desire.
I felt free, for those thirty minutes. Something was missing, though, and when I stepped back into my own clothes, with my shiny new hair, I felt like a woman again – heavy with hips and breasts and expectations. Heavy with a desire for desire.
I have lost myself again, and this time it does not feel like freedom. It does not feel like a divine choice. This time it feels like a prison. I’m locked in a body I hate and mistrust; a body that is designed to bring me pleasure and has the potential to bring me to ecstasy, but I have lost the trick of it. I have forgotten the shiver and sweat of sex, and I have lost the sway in my hips.
I wrote a piece to accompany one of Kazha’s drawings of her character Lilith. I surprised myself by writing a lusty piece that was all sex, all swagger and sway. Lilith – after describing her first positive sexual experience in detail, says ‘That's when I knew what I wanted – something raw, something real. Pure fucking sex.’ The words found themselves – I felt like nothing more than a conduit, a thing of heat, and for twenty minutes I translated all the wild energy hidden somewhere inside me into words. So perhaps not all is lost. I’ve retained some of the ecstasy, or I remember it well enough to write about it.
According to biology, I’m supposed to hit my sexual prime in a few years. By then, I hope to have found again the way to my body, and the way to desire. I want to be heavy with it again – heavy with the desire for desire.
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