My ex sent me a message out of the blue last week. Messages from exes are always surprising to me even if we have continued to correspond semi-regularly post-breakup. He was just saying hello and that he was glad to see I’d been doing well (became a wife, becoming an author) but some of my friends seemed to think he had an ulterior motive. As the conversation progressed slowly and asynchronously, the way digital missives often seem to in the globally traumatic coronavirus era, I’d report to my friends what he was saying and they’d ask “When is he going to get to the point?” Presumably they thought he’d eventually admit to wanting me back, or ask me on a Zoom date, or at least inquire about whether I’m still non-monogamous. But he didn’t. The conversation simply fizzled, as they do. Having known this person briefly but intensely in the summer of 2016, I figured all along that he was truly just reaching out to say hi. This is a lonely time; people are doing lonely things. I don’t think it’s so odd that he was reaching back to an old connection in this age when making new connections is so hard. I might not miss him, exactly, but I miss trekking across the city for a date, hanging out in diners, smiling moonily at someone cute in a public place without our masks on. I don’t know if my ex really missed me so much as the naïve stretch of time we spent together, before everyone knew the definitions of words like “pandemic” and “superspreader” and “N95.”
I am writing an article about the A-spot today for a publication and am once again thinking about Dr. Chua Chee Ann. He’s the Malaysian gynecologist who “discovered” the A-spot. He suggested his female clients stimulate their own A-spots before sex with their husbands, which he taught them how to do in his office, since those husbands were not providing enough (or any) foreplay. Doing so, he said, would help with arousal and lubrication, making sex easier and more pleasurable. I think the work he did was admirable, and it has definitely helped many people, but I still find it odd that a cis man “found” a pleasurable spot within these cis women’s bodies and suggested they use that spot to circumvent their husbands’ sexual incompetence, rather than to pursue their own independent pleasure. I know he’s a gynecologist treating people who perceive their sexual relationships to be dysfunctional so he can’t very well say “Here’s a long dildo and some information about your erogenous zones so you can stop fucking your intolerable husband until he figures out his pleasure isn’t the sole point of sex,” but come on, dude. If these women’s best-ever sexual experiences were in their gyno’s office and not their marital bed, that might be a cause for concern. Maybe you should be teaching the husbands this stuff, too.
Yesterday I finished reading the excellent novel The Humans by Matt Haig. It’s about an alien who gets sent to Earth to go undercover as a human for nefarious reasons, and Haig says he thought of the idea because he went through a period of frequent panic attacks that made the world seem terrifying, unnavigable, alien. There is a scene in the book where this extraterrestrial-in-a-human’s-body has sex for the first time, and is enthralled. “I wondered why [humans] weren’t prouder of it. Of this magic,” he muses. “I wondered why, if they had to have flags, why they didn’t just opt for one with a picture of sex.” It made me think about one of the central tensions in the field of sexuality, the tug-of-war between boundless pleasure and deep shame. Much has been written about the function of sexual shame in our society, and how it ultimately serves as a way to control people, especially women and queer people and people of color. We put up barriers of shame, one after another, so that even if you work through the one that says you should be ashamed just to have sex, you have more messages to contend with that say you should be ashamed of the way you have sex, or the frequency of the sex you have, or the desires and fantasies you entertain. I think Matt Haig’s alien is onto something when he describes sex as “a physical and psychological merging that conjured a kind of inner light, a bio-emotional phosphorescence, that was overwhelming in its gorgeousness,” and says we should put it on a flag. Although maybe it should be more of an abstract representation, since, y’know, they fly those things outside schools sometimes.