Tag: sex

Unclogged

~ Qiaochu Yuan ~ Leave a comment

(crossposted from Facebook, very lightly edited)

I spent the last six days at the Emergent Leadership Training in Austin, and it did exactly what I was praying it would do: it got me “unclogged.”

This is what being unclogged is like for me, compared to being clogged up, in no particular order:

  • I can feel my chest and my stomach, and they’re relaxed. There’s less tension in my body overall.
  • My speaking voice resonates in my chest more. My singing voice is richer and sweeter.
  • I can do pull-ups.
  • I really want to talk to people and invite them to things.
  • It’s easier for me to be turned on and have sexual fantasies. My orgasms are more pleasurable, last longer, and have a more pleasant afterglow.
  • I feel much less tempted to aimlessly browse the internet, play video games, or watch TV.
  • Difficulties in my life are easier to think about. I flinch away from them less and have more productive and creative thoughts about what to do about them.
  • I tear up much more easily. Love feels more accessible, both giving and receiving.
  • I laugh more easily and more loudly. I make funnier jokes.
  • Dancing feels more natural.
  • My bodily needs – hunger, thirst, lack of exercise – are easier to notice and take care of. I feel more in my body generally.
  • My values – what I care about and stand up for in the world – are easier to access and act from.
  • I can write poetry.

I spent most of 2018 unclogged, and it was life-changing, but then I got clogged up again in September. Could you tell? That’s when I stopped writing these statuses. That’s when I stopped writing poetry.

The big warning sign was towards the end of November, when I noticed that I had stopped caring about anything. That meant I had gone numb to avoid feeling everything that was clogging me up. So I sat down to feel everything, and –

Pain. Fear. Grief. Shame. More pain. But it was stuck. I couldn’t move it. It just stayed there, hurting.

I noticed I hadn’t seen most of my friends in awhile. It felt scary to reach out. I reached out. I spent time with them. It helped. But there was still this ocean of emotion I couldn’t move.

Then I went to Austin for this training, and a lot of things happened. I screamed, loudly. I cried, loudly. I was held beautifully, in my screaming and crying, by everyone else there. (Thank you all for that.) Then we danced. And we sang. And we loved each other.

Halfway through a poem that had been half-formed in me finally finished coming out, and I felt comfortable posting it; that was a good sign. The ocean was finally moving.

And now I’m back. Hi, everyone. I missed you. More to come.

Who will sing for him?

~ Qiaochu Yuan ~ 2 Comments

He sits, alone, alone, alone,
afraid and angry, lashing out in pain.
(But no one gives a shit about him.)
Who will sing for him?

He’s ugly, gangly, short, or fat
or anxious, cold, resentful, bitter –
what a man’s afraid to be
and what a woman cannot stand to see.
In short, unfuckable.
(Unlovable.)
So who will sing for him?

Will anybody ever touch him?
Gently hold his hand and kiss him sweetly,
run their fingers through his hair?
Or gaze at him with longing,
tell him that he’s beautiful?
(Could he be beautiful? Or only
more
or less
a monster?)
All his million secret yearnings –
who will sing for him?

Will someone write his song in fire?
Could they understand?
That underneath the spit and ire
lies a broken man?

I sing for him.

Performing desire

~ Qiaochu Yuan ~ Leave a comment

(crossposted from Facebook)

I started seeing a sex therapist last April, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. I have a lot to say about that whole experience, but one thing that’s particularly come up for me lately in conversations is a session we did where we were cuddling and she asked me, playfully, “so what do you want to do?” and I had a clear experience of

  1. knowing the answer, which was “I actually just want to keep cuddling,”
  2. feeling embarrassed and a little ashamed of it, and
  3. noticing this and promoting it fully to conscious attention.

The narrative I absorbed growing up of what it meant to be a sexual man was that I was supposed to constantly want all these sexual things with women, and was supposed to just be waiting for yeses to immediately dive into doing all of them with gusto. But that has basically never been my experience. I also absorbed a narrative that men who expressed sexual desire were monsters, so I never felt safe even feeling sexual desire around women (as opposed to porn), let alone expressing it. My first clear experience of feeling sexual desire for a woman in front of me was a few months ago.

Before sex therapy, what I sometimes (often? I have no idea, honestly) did with partners was perform desire; touching them in ways that I thought would make them feel desired, because if I didn’t then they’d feel bad and I would have failed in my role as a loving partner. And it’s not that I didn’t know that this dynamic existed, but I only knew it as a thing that happened to women; I had never heard a man describe it happening to them. (Actually growing up I never heard a male friend describe any sexual problems whatsoever. It was just not something any of us ever talked about.)

Closely related, for me, is performing dominance. I have a history of being attracted to submissive women but having no idea how to dominate them because I had absorbed all these narratives around male dominance being toxic. The result, as far as I can tell, was that I faked it and I didn’t make it. I experimented with choking and hair pulling and none of it really felt like it was coming from a real place in me; I was doing it to make my partners happy and that’s about it. And based on conversations I’ve been having recently I’m not alone in this.

Anyway, I hereby consign all of this to the flames. I release performance and the narratives that give rise to it. There’s so much more richness and vulnerability and beauty available in the moment-to-moment dance of physical connection with another human being.

My sex therapist and I ended up cuddling for another 10 minutes or so and it felt great.