The Naked Truth

The Naked Truth

Why Sex

I question my motives all the time, and end up colluding with the answer that most fits in with my lofty sense of self, although sometimes I’m brought up short by the things that can’t be answered. My lofty sense of self, although crammed with arrogance a go-go, is also tempered with a permanent feeling of being the outsider, and a sometimes needlessly defiant attitude, or automatic assumption that I’m never coming from the same direction as everyone else.

Years ago, as part of the process of getting to know a man, I mentioned something about my past, describing it as living in a tribe, and he casually asked me to tell him about it. It took me all weekend to write two pages, instead of the throwaway paragraph in an email he probably imagined he would receive. It turned out to be a lot about sex, and writing it was a catharsis that made me feel turned inside out and laid bare, and shocked him.

I didn’t reread it for years, until, one summer, I decided to, and found it affected me less, and intrigued me more. As part of my habitual summer task of writing every day for the same man, I started writing isolated characters and incidents from my past, feeling as though I was vomiting them out, and that I could write nothing else until they were out. It was a summer in which I grew skinny and wan, lying on my bed in the heat, writing for hours, forgetting to eat, and realizing with a sense of shock how much that period in my life, more than any other, had formed my sexuality, and my approach to relationships. I realized as well how powerful writing about the sexual relationships was in terms of explaining the whole relationship.

And in the time in-between that writing, I had been writing about sex in the present. I wrote for myself, the way I always did, a journalistic record, and I wrote for him: the usual accounts of everyday life, and sometimes something for him to read when he got to work that would endure he’d be stuck sitting at his desk for a while. And every so often one of us would pass on a link to a blog that we liked: almost invariably a sex blog. During all of this, as well, I wrote online, and had an audience, and discovered that what I wrote could make people love or hate or desire me, and that I could meet those people, and have friends and lovers and enemies and the requisite stalker, who unfortunately knew where to find me. But I knew I was writing with my armour on, and I needed to know if I could cut it with an anonymous audience, and I needed to write raw, and naked.

When the man didn’t stop suggesting I start a blog, I announced that in that case it would be a sex blog, and I started it. In the beginning I had my one reader, a backlog of writing, and a frenetic kind of writing energy. I did have inhibitions, though, about my one reader: he had read everything I had ever written, with the exception of what I had written about the sex I had with him. But this was all about taking risks, and I was used to doing that with him, so I wrote, and pressed publish, and didn’t look back.

I don’t write stories, and I don’t write a fuckdiary. I don’t write chronologically, and unless there is some aspect of sex that inspires me to write, much of it I don’t write about at all. Sometimes I feel as though I just write compulsively around the same thing, often I feel as though I’ve misrepresented myself.

I write about sex because sex is so much more than putting tab A into slot B. It’s about the way our bodies talk when we circumvent language, it’s about how what happens outside the bedroom affects what happens inside, and viceversa. It’s about how we see ourselves when we’re stripped barer than naked, and how we’re seen. It’s intimacy, and sometimes a false intimacy that can be equally fascinating. And it all ties in, endlessly enthralling, with my own self-obsession, as what I write, or think, or hear from others about my sexual response gives me another little piece of self-knowledge.

I write about sex, but not to specifically to arouse. If there is arousal, I think it’s more of the mindfuck kind, and that suits me. I find it more and more difficult to describe a fuck from beginning to end anyway – I have a tendency to wait until I can sidle in sideways, and that often requires some outside stimulus to set off a train of thought. And anyway, I think it is more intimacy, what is inside the fuck, that I am interested in writing about, rather than the hot sex I’m having, have had, or wish I had. I write about the sex I’ve experienced, but not about my sex life.

I write knowing there is an audience, knowing a small amount of information about some, nothing at all about the majority, and the sexual technique of others. I have written posts specifically with one person in mind, or aimed at someone in particular, but it’s not the norm. Generally I make a conscious effort to absent myself from the thought that what I write will be read, because otherwise the armour goes back on, and then I betray myself.

I write for me. I’d write anyway, and I like to know that others read what I write, so this is the perfect medium. I want people to like what I write, but I’m indifferent as to whether they like me, the person. I’m even indifferent at a certain point to whether people who like me, the person, like what I write. And that, for me, is my motivation, really: to be able to let what I write stand separate from me, the person.