Sex

“Been thinking about how my history of attraction to men may have conditioned me to be tolerant of “poor soils,” so to speak. Men are lacking in certain features of beauty due to their tenuous biological value; they are fundamentally expendable. How rare it is to find a man dressed to perfection, made into a thing to be looked upon, a signifier of aesthetic value. A society can move forward with just one man and a crowd of women. Women don’t even need to have sex with him to reproduce. He could be kept in his place, milked for his seed, employed as a beast of burden, an ox, a plough, a cart, a backpack. Reverse the situation and you have a society composed of one woman and many men. This would be unspeakably violent. She would be raped constantly, and since her pregnancy would get in the way of the mens' sexual exploits, they would kill off each newborn. Even if they did allow her to raise a child, the men might murder each other in jealousy, unable to confirm paternity. It couldn’t take very long for the species to die out, unless these men decided to care for the woman and her children, but only just enough so that they could be kept as livestock, at their service, or at the service of just one man. Perhaps that’s the world we live in now. Men are hardly necessary, hardly attractive. When you’re attracted to man, you’re not attracted to his color or shape in any explicable way. It’s not that he has a chiseled jawline or beautiful black eyes or brilliant orange hair. It’s not that he has especially broad shoulders or developed forearms, none of that is strictly necessary in a world where craft and intelligence and agility and aerobic power are most helpful. There are hundreds of boys with those features, and every woman recognizes this. A man endowed with generic features of strength and hormonal difference appears imbalanced, exists in a hypertrophy which belies a sense of insecurity. If the man is split into his parts, he is no longer beautiful. If he attempts to qualify his life with sexual difference, then he is weak. I believe this is true of women as well, though many men insist on speaking of her “fat ass” or “huge tits.” A beautiful woman is most beautiful when she is entire, and when she seems to exist apart from convention—women know this, and they hold men to the same standard.”

“Recognizably handsome men are often slightly fat or have rough, uneven patches of hair or discolored skin. A man can be old and wrinkled, his skin may be imperfect, even blotched with mutations, and still be the paragon of beauty. Outside of a small genre of sweet cherubs and chiseled movie stars, men are either extremely mediocre or wildly strange. When you see a beautiful young woman married to a man quite weathered and twenty years her senior, don’t assume she has chosen him purely for his money or prestige. She must see something truly beautiful in him. Sometimes it is enough to observe his absorption in something else. But when I think of such a man, I fundamentally think of my blood surging, into the asshole, the perineum, the outer labia, the base of the clitoris, the hood, the chest, the breasts, the ribs, the back, but above all, the nervous energy of my fingers and arms as I type this. I think of him touching me but not him desiring me. This touch is an exquisite armazón, like hard and well-planed mahogany, or a maplewood floor with a curling grain. He delights in his beautiful solidity as I lean against it, fairly disinterested in whatever I offer and far more interested in his ability to provide. I think of the roughness of the aspirated, fricative /h/ that rushes through my mouth every time I say the pronoun. It’s in my throat—he, him, his. Nearly velar, nearly uvular, I know the musculature from my own musculature, as I haven’t been physically intimate with another man in years—I know, I imagine sitting on his thigh between my thighs, pressing against my genitals, my genitals which resemble the electrical animal named after a blanket. I think of his semen as an accidental gift, not as the product of some longitudinal striving towards the female goal. A man doesn’t want to impregnate, but he does it out of duty. The ideal man wants nothing.”

“He’s so pure, he’s so virginal, he’s a standoffish but gracious hero. He doesn’t speak of sexuality, he doesn’t draw attention towards himself. He seems basically unaroused, unmoved by the traffic of people around him. His appreciation of a female’s charm hardly exists. Indeed, it’s easier to imagine a beautiful man infatuated with another man than a beautiful man infatuated with a woman. A beautiful man is more sexless and pure than a beautiful maiden, whose beauty may be enhanced by her sexuality and her intention to celebrate her ability to seduce. No man ever wanted to be a father, but this man obliged, as the only thing that seduced him, that truly sucked away his breath, was the image of the child born from the woman who had successfully obtained his sperm. The man who loves his child is the man everyone desires in his narcissistic beauty. He wants to see himself anew in a rippling wave while I am the vessel for becoming—the pool, the eddy in a mountain stream. Otherwise, man, indistinguishable from a brood of tadpoles, is a lamb bleating, a dog panting and looking up at its owner, always attentive and in search of affection, hoping for proof that he’s part of me. I would domesticate him for his soft fur, coming down in ringlets, killing each copy of his breed along the way.

A beautiful man is as hydraulic as an erect flower—proud and hermaphroditic and passively in control. His sweet scents and ingenious mimicry attract me, the bee, to spread his pollen into the womb which already exists within him. He asks of me to become his, his womb, and seahorses off into the distance, never to see me again. Those who love men have a taste for the avant-garde through their appreciation of the unfair sex. Yet it should be noted that men who love men all too often impose onto man the analogue of what they would have required of women. We should be careful to preserve all that is nonsensical in the love of men. In the history of words there are stories of women who cry and shout at the imaginary of a beautiful man, sometimes melting into a puddle or turning into stone. I wonder if the men they loved were really so beautiful or if the men who wrote down their stories exaggerated their perfection.

The more I think of such a man, the less I desire him. I never said that beauty translated into desire, anyhow, only that it translated into a certain cardiac rhythm, an enflushment of the erogenous zones, but this was, at its core, a masturbatory scene. I confess that I have portrayed myself as a woman when I am in fact a man who seeks to negate his masculinity. I am narcissistically attracted to myself and to the image of a man desiring me, though I can’t seem to find him in a state that isn’t procrustean. I am merely curious about the men who take by force an absent thing. Who are they? Why does this force engender such troubled admiration? Must we choose between a Narcissus, whom we may only Echo, or the rapture of Zeus, as he ruins and silences us with his animal force? And doesn’t this writing sound increasingly like cheap metaphysical smut? I am waiting for you, my interlocutor, to respond, to criticize what I have written with incredulity—”

My beautiful person could be both caring and lithe; these terms need not contradict if we understand his care as coming from some place else than the capaciousness of a body which pretends to be capable of protecting something weaker. Care spins itself from a fine woolen thread, from the thin wire of a thrum of strings, from sonority itself, vocalized in a creaky or sibilant space between glottis and teeth. He could be on the edge of collapse, head burrowed into a mound of hay, needing to revivify itself with the starch of potatoes, he could be dressed in the softest newest leather, the eucalyptus of tencel draped upon his insubstantial but living neck, I’d associate him less with turgidity than with silk, lanugo, merino, the thin film of dry blood which coats a newborn babe. I could call him pure, but it is my feeling for him which takes on the lucid quality of the surface tension of water, it is the desire to preserve him and endure him which makes him beautiful, or should I say that beauty is a condition we live in, both of us together, as in an egg or a bathtub, awaiting the eschaton, or rather like Adam and Eve working very hard to make our Eden a livable place. And you might be asking me now what I think about sex, if what I have been writing about all this time is simply beauty or love, with the man being there for the polemic, for argument, but not there for the core heat of truth. But I would argue against you, and say that sex is central, because it is simple, and pure, the simplest and purest of acts and sensations. It is better than love in that it cares not for happiness, not for emotion.

The answer to this question is simple. Yes. But I weep thinking of this answer, because I know that I cannot know his desires and cannot answer to them. And yet there is nothing else that I would rather do, than recover the feeling that I once had, the feeling of peace when we held each other, when I held his head and enveloped it into me, I wanted to give birth to him in that moment. And yet even if he were of me, I would know less than I know about the stranger passing by in the hallway. He has said to me that he wants me to be happy, and I smiled. I smiled at the deflection of his desire onto a wish for me. The only thing I want is to wrench myself out of this in a long bout of sleep, and to wake up and find that I have been embalmed with no other hands than his. Perhaps we will meet again at a distance, and I will learn for the first time to witness his desire.