Dysphoria, Sex, and Silicone Dicks.

[brideoffrankenstein]

I'm sorry for how disjointed this is. I wanted something better, but this is what I got.

Every time I think about it, I feel this impotent rage. It’s very Stryker. It’s funny because I don’t really get dysphoria, most of the time. Sure, social dysphoria, but body dysphoria tends to pass me by most of the time. Except this. I think of it and I feel scared, and panicky, and like I’ll cry or burst – and it quietly transmutes into this bubbling, festering rage. Against my body, against its wrongness, against touch and sex and clothes and other people’s presence. Right now I feel like I’m exaggerating this, because I’m having to convince myself I’m writing from a character just to make myself write it. But I’m trying as best I can to be true to the feeling.

The thing is, it fades very quickly, once I’m not thinking about it. I remember pretty clearly becoming aware of it. It’s that sense of discomfort and disgust when a man in a piece of romance fiction goes down on a woman. A vague sense of crawly ugh when the writer describes what he’s doing, how it feels. It’s good writing. I can largely handle the making out, the touching, the penetrative sex. I can handle reading about oral when it’s folks with dicks it’s happening to. At the time, way back when – it must have been six or seven years back now – I thought it was just a function of general discomfort with sex, because sometimes other parts of sex scenes would feel the same way. I thought it was just a function of being ace.

[sidenote: I thought of myself as ace for a very long time, and the reasons for that are still present in my life, but I just don’t feel it an especially relevant part of my identity. I’m not making any claims about anyone else’s relationship to asexuality and what it should be, but for me, it’s present but not a big deal. It’s also not super relevant to this post.]

Gradually, it started to stand out. Reading about it would make me feel uncomfortable. I could talk easily about going down on my partner, but when they talked about it to me I would freeze. Sometimes the idea feels hot, so long as there’s a shared reality in play where we act like, talk like I have a cock. I can’t imagine being okay with it, without that. I’m okay with touch on what I do have but I have to have other things, either in my head or other kinds of touch, to displace it a little. It feels good, but I can’t think about it too hard. And thinking about receiving oral – I paused for ten seconds to try and figure out what I could type without feeling like I would scream – well. Sometimes it feels like picking a hangnail. The pain is good for a second and then so, so raw.

Once, I was wearing a packer in bed. We were experimenting. We’re both trying to understand how to affirm each other in bed, and we’ve made a lot of progress, but it’s not easy when you’re long distance and only get to have sex a few times a year. Anyway, they did this thing where they blew my packer. And it was hot, until it wasn’t. They stopped then; I can’t remember if I stopped them or if it just sort of, coincided. And in the moment – in the moment I couldn’t really talk about it. I can’t remember if I ever managed to. I hope I did, because I don’t like the idea of this being the first time I mentioned it, but the idea of talking about it hurts and is really upsetting and scary.

Yesterday we were talking a bit about this book my partner was reading, and a quote from it that wasn’t about oral but sounded like oral out of context. And it was about displacement, and having to frame something as something else just so it could happen. I described it as hitting my dysphoria like a funny bone. When I tried to express how I felt, I was filled with that rage, that Strykerian rage. Rage against the conditions in which I must exist. I was angry; I was upset, I was shaken. I was disgusted with my body for not being what it was supposed to be. I felt raw and untouchable all over. My existence, especially my sexual existence, felt like it wasn’t mine. Like there was this black hole in my body that wasn’t mine, didn’t belong to me, and if I let myself my whole body could vanish into it. I don’t want the complication. I’m scared that if I pack more I’ll be more aware of it. If my partner touches my silicone dick and I have to watch else I won’t feel it…what happens to me then.