Ography

This is, I think, my most personal essay yet. I can't really write anything else until I let this go, though. Read on for my attempt at addressing our basest and simultaneously most elevated need.

Aug 08, 2023

(Inspired by, and owing a great debt to, everyone is beautiful and no one is horny)

A particular undercurrent keeps tugging on my leg as I attempt to move on from or move past my last dalliance with devotion; the mind wants to slip by, but quarrels and quandaries around sex grip my toes and wrap around my chest nevertheless. The subject bears enough continuous weight, that the only way out is through; these thoughts are the first to escape to surface and gasp for air.

I find myself immensely curious as to one aspect of the sexual revolution; seemingly a liberation, its ultimate effect of reducing the amount of (shared) sexual intimacy we experience constructs a paradox of freedoms less exercised once granted. (Shared) is a key intervention here; our experiences of sex in the day-to-day have been heightened greatly, but these are often solitary, or mediated digitally and commercially. We consume sexuality many times a week; via advertising, voyeurism, fashion aesthetics, and that p-word, we’re immersed in a world that is constantly selling us on horned-up visual and audio content, or trying to sell us via such wares.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the proliferation of online pornography and sexual, or sexually explicit, content, presides over an extreme dearth of genuine sensuality and intimacy in our media. The disillusionment we feel towards one another drives the lack of sex, and is driven in turn by the salability of sex without effort or personal involvement. Just as Marx illuminated our eventual alienation from the products of our labor, so we now see this detachment in our sexually reproductive lives.

We can form parasocial relationships with online figures, dive into blackholes on x-rated sites, even conduct relations via text or video share; none of this requires vulnerability, disappointment, failure, taking a good long hard look at ourselves in the mirror, facing our fears around desirability, performance anxiety, impotence. Instead, we have the out of accepting the simulacra and taking a low risk, low reward, dopamine-hacked route to satisfaction. Addiction naturally attends; we can only fuck our brains up so much before they acquiesce to our paucity of discipline and scarcity of love.

This feels part and parcel to our general struggle towards relating to each other as human beings; we’re mostly lost in the wilderness of gender performance, of common decency, of behavior. New (and resurrected, or newly respected) formulations, structures, and strictures around how we exist as masculine, feminine, and non-binary or trans individuals are not always easily navigable; moreover, there are market incentives that pressure us to reveal ourselves and be vulnerable, while simultaneously critiquing how we show up. I struggled for years with how to be ‘masculine’ and how to relate to ego, confidence, and presence in this context; I still do wrestle with it, honestly. My man-ness (or relegation to the position of Man-Not) may limit my perspective here, but we aren’t particularly invested in truly unpacking what black male-ness is, either. There aren’t many spaces to be fully honest with each other; to be completely open about how we’re struggling with what gender means, what aspects of the prevailing gender orthodoxy we wish to challenge (and what aspects we can’t afford to let go of just yet), or where we wish to end up.

Moreover, we haven’t arrived at conclusions on how we want to show up together in shared spaces. We go to the gym and fear surveillance, fear perception, fear harassment; the gym TikTok moment reflects a decline in our belief and participation in common spaces, in communal sexiness, and in looking good for other people. Working out, as proposed by social media practitioners, functions as self-improvement before anything else; seeking aesthetic perfection (as produced by monthly memberships, ‘clean eating’, smoothies, protein powders, pre-workout, and smelling salts) takes precedence over wanting to be seen. Self-objectification and self-beautification may find themselves subsections of the latest iteration to Maslow’s pyramid; we reach for actualization before establishing first our basic, and common, needs. The creepers and horndogs who make us uncomfortable or threaten our safety face something else entirely; the voyeurism that feeds our digital spaces disconnects us from humanity, and disenchants us from respecting those basic needs and wishes of our compatriots in gains. We’re social beings; but we just can’t figure out how to mediate that sociability.

Our premier publications are now weighing in on the issue of etiquette as well; proffering situational advice and guidance on how to comport ourselves, pondering the breakdown of manners into the maintenance of individualized boundaries…but they’re just as lost as we are. We’re grasping at straws trying to figure out what our social rules are for how to be with one another.

So it’s no wonder that sex and sexuality are welcome only to the extent that they can be made comfortable, to the extent that they can be removed from real love and emotion, to the extent that their presentation is legible (and not ugly, or unfamiliar, or truthful), to the extent that they are commodities; we haven’t figured out any of this co-existing thing. If I don’t know how to say hi to you, or look respectfully, or hit on you, how on earth will we know what to do in bed together? Withdrawing into online spaces and pulling away from close, visceral, heart-breaking relationships could make unfortunate sense as avoidant response to this confused reality. We’ll never get to a point where anything is sorted and uncomplicated; but I do think we should wade into the depths of this shit and get dirty sitting with it for a while.

I’d like to share a related poem with this essay; it’s been sitting in my drafts for a month and a half, but I think this is the most opportune time for it to come forth.