The baggage in that fake dick

I will fuck you with it but I don’t want you to suck it. I will turn you over and fuck you with it any way you want but I can’t call it my dick, talk about how hard it is or how big it is.

When I open my mouth to say I’m coming inside you, the words get caught. I swallow the sound and it tastes like shame. It’s not really what I’m doing, and I know that, but it’s the kind of phrase that comes to mind as I am slipping up against you in the middle of the night. This is my body and your body and gentle, honest love but there are still rules between us. There are limits of language, limits to what I will allow my body to do and describe. Who put them there? I want to blame the world but it seems too easy and so very unproductive.

I often struggle with the semantics of sex, a set of words in a language based on straight people from which it seems I cannot escape, even in lesbian erotica. We are still queer in an age where there are relatively few images of women having sex with each other.

If you could extract all the sex scenes I’ve seen and sort them into piles, the overwhelming majority of them would be straight, even though I’ve been out and actively looking for queer images since I was in high school. How could it not affect how I think about sex, how I speak about sex, how I have sex?

The first time I bore conscious witness to sexual imagery was in Dirty Dancing with the volume down low and my face three inches away from the screen because the converter was broken and I was afraid of getting caught. No one looked like me, no one acted like me, but it was sex and the appeal was instant. There was sweating and moaning and it turned me on even though it wasn’t technically what I wanted. It feels like maybe I’ve spent time since then superimposing myself over Dirty Dancing, trying to make mine something that the world apparently doesn’t want me to have.

When we first got this dildo you asked me if I wanted you to suck it. Do you remember my face? You described it as insulted, which was probably accurate. I’m not a snob or a prude but a good, queer feminist who of course wouldn’t want you to suck it! I thought of your mouth around this dildo at the time as a sorry simulation of the straight sex I resented, the same straight sex I’ve been seeing in the media since forever like everyone else.

Realistically, though, if I limited myself to sex acts that didn’t “simulate” or remind me in any way of straight sex, I’d be left masturbating beside you for the rest of my life.

Reminding is an association of thoughts. It happens in my head so it can, theoretically, be adjusted. For example, I’ve never liked being fucked — it makes me nauseous even in the most beautiful and careful of contexts. I’ve always assumed and asserted that my body doesn’t like it. But I know how aggressively thoughts can play out in my body (can you tell I’ve been reading cognitive therapy?). One could suggest that I really have no idea if my body enjoys being fucked or not because my mind is closed to the idea of enjoying it.

Is this one of those “get over it” scenarios?

Her mouth looks good around anything — candy, coffee mugs, mangoes and my fingers. It looks good around a smooth, swirly dildo, too, but my eyes have a hard time seeing that past the mental pictures of a hundred women being forced to their knees for a man. Still, in my head I get wet thinking about it, and I am scared to admit that, because I have this idea shoved up inside me that says good, queer feminists don’t get turned on by “straight” sex.

Of course it’s not the sex acts themselves that are straight because it’s impossible for my partner and I, who are both women, to perform a single “straight” act. It is my associations with certain sex acts that make them straight.

I wish that every time I closed my eyes and touched myself I pictured two women having sex. It’s like how I wish I pictured two women every time I saw the word “family.” Immersed as I am in queer life, I’ve got a hell of a lot to see before the scales of my exposure start to tip in queer favour.

My mind is full of things I didn’t put there, things I didn’t see until you threw me off guard with, “Do you want me to suck it?” Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. The question is where does the answer come from and what can I do today to make it mine.