Dear Tracy Clark-Flory,
In the years before reading your book Want Me, I struggled with an ineffable confusion around the role sex has played in my life and its influences. As a teenager and college student, I was inclined towards black and white thinking and to the unequivocal assumption that sex positivity connoted liberation. Only in recent years have I found the language to re-examine these stories I once gobbled unquestioningly, these stories propagated by feminist leaders I adore but also by a patriarchal mass media body. Like you, this journey has necessitated consulting the loves and lays of years past, although said consultation has seldom resulted in any tangible conclusion. On many points, I still don’t know where I stand, but Want Me has done much of the leg work for me by synthesizing with unflinching directness the nuanced reservations I couldn’t articulate. In one particularly apt case, you write:
“In my early twenties, I felt it was enough to simply be sexual as a woman, to tumble freely into bed with a relative stranger. However, acting as if traditional gendered expectations have evaporated doesn’t make it so. My hookups were thrilling and enjoyable to various degrees, but my partner’s pleasure was typically prioritized––by me, by him, and by the popular directives of hetero sex” (162).
This is perhaps one of the less controversial assertions. Second-wave and intersectional feminists can agree that gender roles prevail in hetero bedrooms, whether or not the penis-haver’s nails are painted and his wardrobe complete with a “this is what a feminist looks like” shirt. Such a man might wax romantic on the beauty of a woman’s climax, but her performed orgasm and pleasure are requisites for his due largely to a sexual script codified by decades of imitations in porn.
Equally valid but harder to swallow is your implication that some of our “empowering” sexual experiences as women may not be as empowering as we had once thought. I look back at my high school years during which I prided myself on eschewing the all-too-ubiquitous Madonna-whore complex I saw plaguing the decisions of my less-enlightened female counterparts. As they debated the propriety of giving a blow job to someone they weren’t dating, I was sleeping with a guy six years my senior whose cliched claims like “your pussy is mine” made me giggle while affirming a notion that I was a part of something “real” that my peers weren’t. If their every romantic move was informed by a socially manufactured fear of being labeled a “slut,” or perhaps worse a “prude,” I had symbolically subverted the binary completely––I had out-gamed the game itself.
Of the various relationships you chronicle, one that struck me the most was yours with Ian, the 38-year old wolf tooth’s necklace-wearer whose affinity for rough sex satisfied your need to be wanted and allowed you to sublimate your grief over your mother’s cancer diagnosis (104). You navigate this dangerous territory of near-cliché with great dexterity, and offer context for the phenomenon of those in turmoil to seek deliverance in the form of physical punishment:
“The following afternoon I pulled down my jeans to show Elissa the palm-size purple bruise left from Ian smacking my ass. ‘Look at this,’ I insisted, as breathlessly as Ian had regarded my enthusiasm the night before. ‘Look at this.’ I found it beautiful, this abstract watercolor painting just under the surface of my skin. It was proof of life and proof of pain” (105).
While reading this, I saw myself pulling down my high-waisted BDG jeans in the mirror and regarding with pride the indigo blossom on my ass as proof of my liberation. It was liberation from expectations of what I should do with my body and liberation from the unpleasant notion that most heterosexual encounters were necessarily informed by a power imbalance favoring the man. Unlike the release you experienced through this encounter, my own “liberation” spoke less to a societal renunciation of bygone sexual ideals and more to a cultural obfuscation of sexual ethics.
You explore this terrain of sexual ambiguity with unrelenting curiosity and open-mindedness, without falling into the journalistic trap of reducing people to mere anthropological subjects. When describing the surreal tryst with your favorite porn star, your reader is invited on the mystical journey from screen to real life, and experiences alongside you the dissolution of the boundary between the real and simulated. Of the fantastical sight of the porn star’s penis, you write:
“We worship the almighty phallus as a symbol of potency and power, but what a crock, what a compensatory ploy. A hard cock is weakness announced. It is desperate need. It is the soft underbelly gone hard…Contrary to Freud, I don’t envy the phallus; I feel sorry for it. And yet I love it all the same” (141).
In addition to being an absolutely iconic rebuttal of Freud’s “penis envy” and a testament to your literary prowess, the above encapsulates the web of contradictions women face in an era of ostensible sexual liberation. Why, in the face of a penis do we feel omnipotent and, at the same time, like we’re following a script? And how, when inundated by woke repurposings of the Madonna-whore complex, can we make sense of our desire? How, when our desire is defined for us and presented as our own?
Thank you for welcoming us into the most intimate moments of your life, and I’m not talking about the kinky midnight rendezvous or porn conventions. Thank you for engaging us readers in this dialogue and offering us the prompts with which to question the stories we are fed as women about our own desire.
Yours warmly,
Katrina
