I was recently at a house party for Halloween; I incidentally had not gotten the memo from the friend who invited me that it was a space-magick theme or some such nonsense and I showed up as…Ursula; my dear friend was dressed as Bill Lumbergh, his center-part glistening beneath ’80s power-glasses.

We were not on theme; in fact we were sorely out of place. “Adventure Time” princesses sashayed; steam-punk cowboys swaggered about in velvet, leather, and goggles. We knew one person between us and after smiling and waving hello at our entrance that rivaled some of my more traumatic school dances — I had caught a tentacle in my spoke, tripping and dropping my bike when I walked into their yard — we found ourselves talking to each other in the corner of their porch.

I was nervously smoking spliff after spliff and sipping champagne from a solo cup. “We gotta get in there,” I said. “We gotta mingle.”

He winced, looking around. “Yeah, I mean, everyone is cool,” he said. “We should just go in and do a lap.”

“I just want to talk to you,” I moaned. “But we’re at a party right? We gotta…party?”

So we wandered in. We did our lap. And before I knew it I was happily drunk, drinking whiskey, and chatting with the human equivalent of a pitbull-meatball — a hulking, thick man with a Bic-ed head. He was dressed as, perhaps, an intergalactic monk?

In truth, I don’t know how we got onto the topic. No one believes me, but I really don’t. But we started talking about butt stuff. Straight cis men butt stuff.

And suddenly I heard myself say, “Oh man, my dear friend is a straight guy and he’s very intrigued by his asshole, but he can’t just, like, set himself free. He is so hung up on it. I feel like he’s got all this….” I waved my arm around, “maybe, homophobic shit around his own ass? And it’s just so sad because, like, ass stuff is the best!”

My new companion’s face lit up. Like Christmas.

The glorious prostate is a walnut-sized gland; you’ll find it between the bladder and the penis, just in front of the rectum.

The urethra, which carries urine and semen alike, runs through the center of this flesh-nugget. The prostate secretes a fluid that nourishes and protects sperm — father’s milk amiright?! — in addition to squeezing this fluid into the urethra when ejaculating.

It weighs about 20 grams.

The word “prostate” is taken from the Greek expression meaning “one who stands before,” describing the position of the prostate gland.

Most importantly, perhaps, you can also “milk” the prostate, massaging it with your finger until the man’s mind explodes in the most dizzying orgasms of his life. Or so I hear.

My dear pal, let’s call him Bernard (which incidentally was the name of my feral orange cat in Brooklyn), is conflicted. He’s a tender man; he’s not afraid to cry, and is eager to talk about his feelings. To process. He is generous of heart and spirit…

and he’s got a girlfriend very keen to explore his butthole.

“You gotta get your friend onboard,” my new friend half-yells, his eyes glittering. “The prostate is amazing, man, just amazing.”

“Yeah!” I said laughing. “I’m with you. I tell him all the time he should try and examine why he can’t just accept the physical pleasure of his own body…especially as his lady is butt-drunk in love.” I took a sip of whiskey and shrugged. “But yeah. You can bring a horse to water, but ya can’t make him drink. It’s pretty complicated I think.”

I thought we had covered it. I thought we had sufficiently shared a mutual sadness around the fraught-ness of straight cis men’s buttholes. But no.

Like a bad sitcom, I see Bernard’s head peek over the crowd. “Hi!” he yells and weaves his way over to me.

“This him?” this meatball asks.

I feel my face growing very very hot. But I’m also drunk and thinking to myself, maybe this will be good. I also don’t want to lie and pretend I wasn’t just talking about this. Just be cool. Be casual. We’re fine. This is all fine.

In her Guernica essay, Rebecca Solnit writes:

“Feminism needs men. For one thing, the men who hate and despise women will be changed, if they change, by a culture in which doing horrible things to, or saying horrible things about, women will undermine rather than enhance a man’s standing with other men. There are infinite varieties of men or at least about 3.5 billion different ones living on Earth now, Klansmen and human rights activists, drag queens and duck hunters…

[So much masculinity] is predicated on the idea that violating the rights, dignity, and body of another human being is a cool thing to do. Such group acts are based on a predatory-monster notion of what masculinity is, one to which many men don’t subscribe but that affects us all. It’s also a problem that men are capable of rectifying in ways women are not.”

It’s a long, complicated, and nuanced essay, as is Solnit’s way, but in short, I agree that feminism needs men. One cannot identify a Problem, remove responsibility from the Problem, strip it from the Solution entirely, and believe change will occur. If men don’t believe they’re part of the problem — by deed or mere privilege — then they remain a potent obstacle to equality. The key, for me, is getting everyone on board to recognize the widespread fuckery of all shapes, sizes, and creeds, and swinging a hammer at the piece you’re occupying.

What gets slippery and exponentially more confusing for me is when men, identifying as feminists, are in actuality perpetuating the same dangerous shit — often unbeknownst to them — all wrapped up in the “right” rhetoric and bright smiles.

“This, indeed, is him!” I smile into Bernard’s face and give him a Christian-style side hug. Act like you’ve done nothing wrong. You’ve done nothing wrong!

“You were talking about me?” he says, all innocent curiosity.

“Oh yeah man. We’re talking about the prostate man. Male anal!” the meatball says, turning to face Bernard squarely in the face.

I choke-laugh on my whiskey. I’m trying to stuff my entire head in the cup. Maybe he can’t see my face in here.

“Dude you gotta let your shit go man,” yells meatball. “I let my girl get in there and I’m hands-free man. I’m coming and coming like a firehose — I’m flaccid but it’s pouring out of me. Hands free! It’s the most intense shit of my life.”

I am delighted. I am horrified. It’s better and worse than I could have ever imagined.

“Did you pay this gentleman for this rant?” Bernard laughs, incredulous. “You should trademark that phrase man, ‘hands-free coming.’ It’s good.”

“You laugh dude, but do you know the kind of vulnerability it takes to take it in the ass from a woman? Do you understand the inverse of the power-play that happens?”

“I think I do … yes.” Bernard stutters.

“It’s intense. Now she’s in control. You think your girl likes it when you’re just pounding away” — he slams his fist into his palm again and again and again — “no she doesn’t! You’re just BAM BAM BAM and she’s lying there like…”

I raise my hand. “I like being pounded. It’s really not that simple. One doesn’t really have much to do with the other necessarily. Rough sex can be consensual and amazing! I hear you that …”

He interrupts me to slap a friend’s arm who’s at the makeshift bar to get his attention.

“Yo, Miles! You feel me right? You know the pleasures of the ass, right? Tell this guy!”

“I mean, I really do like it,” Bernard insists. “I do! And I do it. It’s just a little hard for me and I don’t really like being pegged.”

“Pssssh. C’mon man,” the meatball scoffs. “You can be a man and wanna get pegged.”

“I…didn’t say you couldn’t…I just, don’t like it myself,” says Bernard.

“Ya gotta get over it; you’re depriving yourself man!” Meatball grips Bernard’s shoulders like a father sending his son to war. “Let her get in there man, you won’t regret it.”

“…I…have…and I don’t regret it. I wear it like a badge of honor! And I’m thankful because I think it did make me vulnerable — it’s really different when your partner is looking down at you and realize how little control you have…and I get it. Some people get off on that lack of control …but I don’t?”

Meatball snickers and swaggers away shaking his head.

I stood there—stunned. It was a complicated treatise on the strange and far-reaching tentacles of toxic masculinity.

Here I was, maybe betraying my dear friend’s confidences because, fuck it. Women never get to talk about fucking; they never get to take aim at men’s hangups around sex or discuss their own pleasure without being accused of being “too much,” self-destructive, promiscuous, craving attention, falling prey to the very trappings they’re trying to escape.

Maybe I thought this anal sex banter was giving me some kind of social collateral — I’m a girl who “gets it,” ya know?!

But there was also genuine confusion and sadness for Bernard. There was a real desire, a genuine belief that I might be able to use this stranger-man to get through to my friend-man. As Solnit says, I realized I wanted to enhance Bernard’s standing through the exposure to another man’s supposed feminism.

I thought another man could get through in a way I never could.

I thought that Bernard’s ass-pleasure was suffering at the hands of toxic masculinity. Being vulnerable is important to being human! Being penetrated is a potent symbol of that vulnerability! Let your body conquer the shitty steepings of your mind! Set yourself free!

But instead I exposed him to an even stranger brand of toxic masculinity. A man who thought himself enlightened because he had embraced the physicality of being penetrated—because he had had a singular thought about what that meant in terms of his own vulnerability.

I thought this anal sex banter was giving me some kind of social collateral.

But all he was doing with his supposed revelations on physical and emotional pleasure was using it as a tool to glean more power. To insist he was more enlightened. A better, stronger, more powerful man than other men. He was using his supposed newfound softness to make another man feel small, ashamed, un-evolved.

It was the same awful, aggressive shit. I’ll show you what a real man is.

I felt I could hear the gears turning in Bernard’s head.

Maybe I am shut-down. Maybe I am a weak man. Maybe I am homophobic and kind of pathetic and caught up in a narrative I thought I was working against.

It was a really twisted piece of alchemy, let me tell you.

We laughed, and I hugged Bernard tight. I told him he was exponentially more evolved than that shitty blowhard — even if he couldn’t come “hands free” and maybe didn’t want to, and maybe never would.

But inside? I felt awful. I thought about the brown and pink puckerings of Bernard’s orifice — that little starburst-ed sphincter that sits at the crux of so much.

I wanted to give it a kiss and say, we’re all in this together. I know you’re trying and it hurts a lot. Take all the time you need. But keep trying. Because we need you.

*This story was published with Bernard’s consent

Last night I was laying beside my very lovely partner human, having a mild if ardent spin-out that revolved around my body generally feeling like it was a taut sack alternatively filled with broken glass or gravel. Which is to say, falling apart.

Currently I have a strained right hip flexor; an achilles tendon “problem”; a torn rotator cuff; a mysterious foot ailment that has been (mis)diagnosed five or six times as “maybe gout,” which leaves my left big toe swollen, and my gait limping; and a lingering jaw problem, which is, admittedly, an old sex injury that has never healed.

I am 33. I drink too much beer and like to smoke spliffs at parties, but all in all? I should feel great. I do all the things. I exercise and eat vegetables and get enough sleep and good god why is this happening?!

And while the feeling of one’s body existing in a near constant state of some kind of pain is a special kind of madness — what on fucking earth will it feel like to get out of bed at 85?! — what I realized is that the hot crux of my fear was losing the joy of my body.

Losing the power that it affords me.

My boyfriend and I have shed a lot of tears around our (maybe) sexual (in)compatibility; to make many painful conversations decidedly shorter with less Sufjan Stevens playing in the background, I’m “ravenous” and he’s “normal.”

I want him obsessed with my flesh; he wants me to trust that love is predicated on so much more than our exchange of fluids and feverish words.

I — maybe in a very self-damaging way (like the tootsie roll pop owls says, “the world may never know”) — have learned to derive so much meaning from my bodily self, I’m loathe to think what is left of me without it.

A husk? A naked stem bereft of its fluff? And all who pass no longer make a wish on me.

There is but a rattling of naked stalks together.

My pussy is like petals. Layer upon layer of pinks, burgundies, fuchsia, beiges; ruffled, it swells with its own rain.

My fingers are stamen—straining outward, beckoning. Or maybe it’s my hair—my glorious tuft of warm rough hair—is the stamen, its filaments waving madly, sending my botanical semen, my vaginal inflorescence, wafting upon the wind. The air is pregnant with possibility.

And good god my stigma, my shining bulb of cloistered bliss. Tiny and gleaming like a wet polished pebble, my clitoris lies dormant—underground, underflesh—patiently throbbing in pink-hued darkness until Spring, the stroke, stroke, stroke of fingers and tongues that let it know it’s time to bloom again.

I’ve always been partial towards thistles. Covered in cruel thorns, they warn you not to touch them, at least not without a tremendous amount of care. But oh my, have you touched the hot purple hairs within their centers? Like florescent silk.

One variety—cirsium vulgare—found throughout North America, Western Asia, and all of Europe (it’s also Scotland’s national flower!) is often considered invasive . . .

But they’re dogged creatures—capable of penetrating even the most compacted, rocky, ill-fated, and barren soils—and get this: Once the plant dies, the big fleshy root decomposes and leaves behind a sizable space for air and water to travel deeper into the soil. Its death makes it possible for other things to grow.

It was with this 400-metaphor treatise rattling around my brain that I stumbled across Heidy Steidlmayer’s poem “Thistles”:

Stand as clocks fully struck
In fields of fading lowers —
When the fires of summer come
They will gather up the hours
Of rains past, frost endured
And famished stalks in full gale
That begin their telling stories once
All forms of telling fail

Thistles as bodies. Plants as bodies.

Do our bodies not tell our tales long before our mouths ever need to open?

The girl rubbing her neck incessantly, fingers grinding into an invisible knot that send waves of sharp pain behind her eyes. She is anxious. Lost in her own discomfort.

The man is limping, wincing, his sock filling with blood. He is struck by how warm his own insides feel against his ankle.

The erection pressing, pressing, pressing against its cloth confines; he has but heard her keys in the door, her shoes slap slap slapping on the linoleum, but his blood is already rushing to meet her.

The sweat on the lip of a girl well-fucked. When she smiles, it runs into the corners of her mouth and she can taste her too; her mouth is slick with pleasure.

The yellowed eyes of sickness, the pallid face of exhaustion, the bucking hips of desire, the cracking knuckles of worry; the body tells tales innumerable.

When words fail, the body knows.

Perhaps what the body knows best is its own limitations; give or take, you get about three decades before things begin to deteriorate, to slow down, to fade like a blossom bleached in the sun—and rot. (I say these these things as an able-bodied human with no disabilities; I am in possession of a corporeal self that grants me tremendous privilege, but even so, the tick-tick-ticking of the Body’s expiration is a harrowing sound.)

The body knows it’s a burden; it’s designed to fail.

Iris Marion Young writes in her book of essays:

The body is the first locus of intentionality, as pure presence to the world and openness upon its possibilities…there is a world for a subject just insofar as the body has capacities by which it can approach grasp, and appropriate its surroundings in the direction of its intentions…

Rather than simply beginning in immanence [self-pervading and sustaining], feminine bodily existence remains in immanence, or, better, is overlaid with immanence, even as it moves out toward the world in motions of grasping, manipulating, and so on.

Consequently she lives her body as a burden, which must be dragged and prodded along at the same time protected…it is an inhibited intentionality…

Young argues that women are trapped between the soaring possibility of their own bodies—the incredible power (literally and metaphysically) of their actual anatomy—and the crushing limitations that society puts on feminine bodies.

Be small. Smell sweet. Be graceful. Be lighter! Brighter! Be quiet. Be smiling! Be consumable. (But don’t satiate any hunger of your own.) Be clean. Be shiny. Be patient. Be thankful.

And do not—my mind bellows at my body—become sexually inconsequential.

Do not relinquish this power like a wilting flower.

I want to talk about the silence of plants. And the joy of my sounds.
When you snap a branch, when you cut a rose, when you trample a bush or scatter a dandelion with a laughing breath, don’t you pity their silence? Don’t you wish they could bellow back at you?

My body is like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins; it’s a preposterous cacophony rumbling down the street and into your arms. It will tell you I’ll be there soon—you’ll hear me singing a block away.

It sighs, delighted at what’s in store. It lows like a hungry calf and moans like an amorous cat; it whimpers, it wetly whistles, it screams and howls and growls; it makes incredible sounds.

And he holds his knuckly hand over my mouth so the neighbors don’t hear my noises—our spectacularly strange and perfect noises—because “Forever — is composed of Nows,” Emily Dickinson wrote, and right now is just ours.

And right now? My body is singing its sex into oblivion.

Simone de Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex:

The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice … In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice.

The younger our body, the more Natural it is, the less it “needs” blush or Spanx or a satin stiletto to achieve desirability. But in order to maintain that semblance of Naturalness, the more blush It needs—what ruddy cheeks she has!—the further the feminine body falls from actual Naturnalness.

For what is more natural than the body failing? Grow gentle. Fail, it whispers. Let your leaves drop and head grow heavy; do not live to be touched, for your petals were just the beginning—do not be so selfish. Your roots and rot will feed countless others and surely that is the most a body could ever ask for.

I find our duplicity — our ability to lie, even to ourselves — deeply unnerving.

I realized recently that I hadn’t quite been lying — for lying seems to be accompanied by more premeditation or cognizance than I truly had around it all — but for all intents and purposes, I had been waylaying shall we say, a larger truth.

About my body. About my desire. About my relationship with other naked humans.

Truthfulness is a slippery thing. It is one thing to say, “I’d like this,” in your mind. It is quite another to say, “I’d like this” to someone else, and exponentially more “truthful” to do said thing.

In many ways reconciling desire with action is perhaps the most truthful manifestation we have in this tangled morass of heartstrings and nerves and twisted neural pathways of pain and pleasure and possibility.

This is all to say, I’m struggling—given how I’ve chosen to walk this earth for three decades—with wanting kinkier sex. But I am also doggedly—if red-faced and not-a-little-bashfully—determined to find it.

Truthfulness is a slippery thing.
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Now, this word—kinky—is so broad and so like a throbbing rainbow encompassing all colors and possibilities it’s also—almost—meaningless. Unless I trace my tongue around some of its boundaries…

I’m a serial monogamist—I am intense in my loyalty and my love and affection, sometimes spookily so—and somehow I’ve made this intensity synonymous with a very delineated, no-sharing! policy on my body when I’m with someone.

But I’d like to be more truthful; I’d like to tell you a secret. I want to fling myself into some shadowy places for a while. I want to grab your sweaty hand and leap together. Sex parties! A dungeon?! A Slip n’ Slide?! Satin? Saliva-slick steel? A Sunday morning flanked by the strange warmth of body beside body beside body?

In short, my desire is nebulous, but ravenous. It has no particular shape, but wails about in my mind like a banshee. It doesn’t make any sense, but desire is like that. And I’m terrified to look it in the face; I’m terrified I’ll tear asunder a very tender love I’ve fostered with someone, my partner.

But to deny it—isn’t that a kind of madness? Isn’t that a lie?

Will you let me complicate the angles of your body with rope and twine and tiny silver clasps? Will you let me taste and bite the small squares of flesh struck pink with my palms?

Will you let me frighten you?

I’m reading H is for Hawk right by now by Helen MacDonald; it’s a fascinating memoir that couples together the grief over her father’s death, and the archaic art of falconry. While wrestling with her crushing sorrow and depression, she raises a young goshawk; in her increasingly isolated and manic consumption of how to train a predatory bird, she rediscovers the memoir by author T.H. White (who wrote The One and Future King) about his own hawk-raising and miserable wrestlings with his clandestine homosexuality, the trauma around his parents, and his desire to subjugate others sexually.

It’s a fucking heartbreaking and beautifully rendered story. But it’s also become a kind of psychological thorn for me, leaving my mind a feathered and festering nest of thoughts.

“The Hawk was a salutary thing, for he believed that war came from society’s repression of innate human urges. Because the hawk could not dissemble he was a ‘tonic for the less forth-right savagery of the human heart’…White rushed to the scene, took his hunting knife and pinned the rabbit’s skull to the ground. Desires that had never flowered in his courting of the nurse were unleashed in a wave of darkness. ‘Think of Lust,’ he wrote, of killing the rabbit. ‘Real blood-lust is like that.’”

White was inexorably drawn to the hawk because he had to both subdue its vicious nature—he had to tame him, teach him to take food from his own hand—all while encouraging the hawk to slaughter creatures smaller than itself to feed upon. It’s a complex treatise on power, but the crystalline simplicity of the hawk’s inability to hide its nature — its desire — is just chillingly right. Chillingly far from how human animals comport themselves.

Animals are unable to be false. This must, in part, why we’re so drawn to them. How do you emulate that kind of truth?

I want to be wanted with the ferality of a tiny toothed beast — smelled and licked and held down not because I’m charming or good or smart or familiar but because the strange waters of our collective unconscious are thrumming with the siren song of touch. I want to touch you — all of you — because it’s the closest thing I have to faith. It feels like my body knows it was designed for exploration. I want to remember the fear of not knowing what something will feel like. I don’t know what to do, will you show me?

Touch me because you think you might die if you don’t.

Monogamy in many ways — and it’s certainly how I’ve often conceived of it during certain parts of my life — is predicated on the vague notion that physical love is a finite resource. I have this thing and I share it with you and I’m frightened/threatened/sad by the idea of you sharing this thing with someone other than me because you’ll realize that my thing doesn’t feel/smell/turn your gears like this other thing and you’ll leave me and my smelly ratty boring thing and traipse into the sunset with an exponentially nicer thing and I’ll d-i-e of humiliation and sorrow.

But lately, I’ve been trying to conceive of physical love like a pizza where every ingredient (pepperoni! pineapple!) — like every human and physical sensation — brings something different to the table. We do not ask the pineapple to taste like meat so why do we ask our partners to be every taste we crave?

Touch me because you think you might die if you don’t.
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One of my dearest lady-friends is a dogged monogamist — but delights in sex like I do — and I was expressing (again) my lifelong conflicts with monogamy. (I do it, but goddamn it confounds me.)

And she was like, “Katie! You drink coffee every morning and it’s delicious . . . you don’t get sick of it because it’s delicious — you know the way you like it and you always change the context of where and how you consume it.” She paused in the preposterously sweet way she does and smiled up at the ceiling. “So it’s the same, but it’s also always different.”

Now. I think her logic is sound, but I think if you wanted a cup of tea instead of coffee — holy shit do you want that cup of tea — and you can’t have that tea or you “shouldn’t” have that tea . . .

That tea becomes a preposterously large slice of your psyche. Suddenly that warm cup of tea filling your palm and sliding down your throat is just about all you can think about.

Also, let’s be honest. Certainly some of my shame that I want—I think?!—to go romp around in a room of kinky strangers laden with latex and rope and the wafting moans of delight and degradation is partially my white WASP-y upbringing, my own personal shit—but it’s also societal.

Let’s be clear. Women are not supposed to love sex. This is where my own perceived deviance lies; I keep all this desire somewhere. Behind my eyes. In my bureau drawer with my dusty backup vibrator and sparkly belts. I keep it in the back of the vegetable drawer with the memory of using an ice-cold cucumber in the blistering hot bedroom of my high school youth.

I keep it everywhere, but out in the open.

In Sexual Visions, Ludmilla Jordanova writes:

“Veiling implies secrecy. Women’s bodies, and, by extension, female attributes, cannot be treated as fully public, something dangerous might happen, secrets be let out, if they were open to view. Yet in presenting something as inaccessible and dangerous, an invitation to know and to possess is extended.”

We are left with the sensation that our cravings should be rendered in shadow, but because we’re creeping along the wall (our desire is just beyond your peripheral vision) you feel compelled to not only “discover” it—come into the light, beast!—but claim it and tame it and fuck you very much.

I want to taste a woman. I want all of her softness against my softness. I want to make her sigh and I want to brush all the hairs on her neck—good god it feels like the down of the peach—with my slack-jawed mouth.

I want him to know his beauty—the snarling beasty, the slavering hunger he can inspire in me. How I like to pretend we’re still strangers—I court those butterflies in my gut as his face comes closer, his mouth round like a split plump apricot.

Maurice Blanchot in The Writing of the Disaster has a tangled if amazing study of secrets:

“To keep the secret is evidently to tell it as a nonsecret…To keep a secret — to refrain from saying some particular thing — presupposes that one could say it…The stratagem of the secret is either to show itself, to make itself so visible that it isn’t seen…”

I lay this nonsecret at your feet. I lay it at your feet in the unforgiving slices of sunlight that summer brings.

Will you kiss my eyes wet with wincing tears as my body bucks with the blows of another? Will you delight in the warmth of another body and when I look at your face will you be so dissolved in pleasure as to be radiating? Will it break my heart?

Are you enough? Am I enough?

Will you tell me your secrets?

The vagina! If it’s dank and dark; if it’s a gap, a space, a vent, a chink in my armor, a damp rupture, a drip drip dripping leak, a pink rupture, a perforation; if it’s a joyful gash, a ruffled crevice, an angry bellowing fissure . . .

Then what is a penis?

A long bump? A preposterous outcrop, a slender jutting ledge? A cylindrical shelf perhaps. A beige ridge, a swelling protuberance, a warm-blooded obtrusion.

Is it always a weapon?

When talking about sex, it is nearly impossible not to talk about power. And when you are talking about heterosexual penetrative sex, it’s impossible not to talk about the penis. And when you talk about the penis, it’s impossible not to wonder if it’s our enemy, the very nexus of The Patriarchy at which we all rage.

And while this algebra — the phallus serving as a symbol of women’s oppression, predicated on the axiom that women are “the lesser sex” — feels like a logical way to add things up, I want no part of these calculations.

Such equations are reductive at best, dangerous at worse. Making a particular genital synonymous with a particular gender—which in turn places said human at the center at The Problem—doesn’t add up, as it were. The simple fact that some people in possession of a penis don’t benefit from the patriarchy at all—or suffer even more horribly than your average cishet white gal like me—undermines the central premise of this math.

Moreover, I don’t want my power predicated on someone else’s subjugation or humiliation. I don’t want the re-appropriation of power — don’t misunderstand me, I am coming for my rightful share — to come at the cost of degrading others. Or their genitals.

I get the impetus. I have violent urges to exact revenge — sexual and otherwise — a lot. I want to patronize, demean, infantilize, hyper-sexualize, and underpay the cis men I meet all the goddamn time. I want to make them feel small. Scared. I want them to shirk and try to cover themselves.

But amid that reptilian muck, I am wrestling with a belief that rings truer and better (in line with who I am and strive to be) and that’s the notion that violence — metaphysical or otherwise — begets more violence.

If I am deriving — in part — my feminine power from my (utter) delight in sex and said delight comes from the penis, I am forced to acknowledge that I adore the penis, as I adore the person to whom it’s attached.

I cannot hold all penises accountable for the wretched men that have used them to intimidate and violate, those who’ve gleaned delusional — and literal — power from a world that worships the phallus.

Can one worship the icon and loathe its creators?

The penis’ softness, its pliability — like warm clay or dough — when flaccid, is so, so lovely.

I love its roundness, its plumpness. I love stroking it until it’s throbbing against my palm. I love its purple-pink-brown veins, I love the blood coursing through them; I can almost hear my heartbeat in time with the rush of their crimson thrummings.

I love the coupling of power and subjugation when I take him in my mouth. I’m kneeling and his hand presses my head forward — not hard, but not without force — and I can’t quite breath enough, but just for a moment.

We’re eliciting small, joyish sounds from one another — mine are muffled with his flesh; his are breathy, growling. He’s poised between my teeth and I am keenly aware of the tiny beast inside of me who won’t bite — but could — and the tiny brute inside him who won’t use my vulnerability against me — but could.

We’re suspended, mutually sacrificing and taking power.

bell hooks has a really wonderful essay called “Penis Passion” in which she briefly traces the evolution of feminism in relation to the penis and how her own power is no longer predicated on denigrating the phallus — or fearing it.

She says that throughout the ’60s and ‘70s:

“in feminist consciousness-raising groups, we…talked about how women had to become more comfortable with words like pussy and cunt. So that men could not terrify or shame us by wielding these words as weapons, we also had to be able to talk about cock and dick with the same ease. Sexual liberation had already told us that if we wanted to please a man we had to become comfortable with blow jobs, with going down, with the dick in our throat so far down it hurt. Surrendering our sexual agency, we had to swallow the pain and pretend it was really pleasure.”

There is a use of violence against the violator in an attempt to negate the original violence. But again, this algebra feels wrong to me, if natural. hooks too explains her own movement away from this urge to sacrifice oneself on the altar of patriarchal sex to prove we’re just as powerful — that the altar is now ours too — when perhaps, we should be dismantling that altar entirely.

“Naming how we sexually engage male bodies, and most particularly the penis, in ways that affirm gender equality and further feminist liberation of males and females is the essential act of sexual freedom. When women and men can celebrate the beauty and power of the phallus in ways that do not uphold male domination, our erotic lives are enhanced.”

I want to name it. I want to sing a slippery ode to the sliding sensation of the penis, gliding between my legs slick as an otter; its damp fur makes a scratching sound against mine. I like it when his penis is the first thing inside me. I can feel my body give way around him — I wince with pleasure. It feels like stretching after a long run.

I like the way it moves and rises to meet me. I like the way it flexes and reacts to my breath, my glance, my tongue running its length. I like its proudness, its boat-like prow-ness; it’s leading its tired captain to the sandy shores of my sheets.

I like its strength; I like the way it can slap my mound like a slender branch against a rain-streaked window.

In short? I refuse to let my pleasure be synonymous with subjugation; in my adoration of the penis I do not make myself smaller or forgo my agency.

“To identify the penis always and only with force, with being a tool of power, a weapon first and foremost, is to participate in the worship and perpetuation of patriarchy,” hook says. “It is a celebration of male domination.”

And so I will worship at an altar of my own making, devoted to neither pussy nor penis, but mutual pleasure. We’ve fashioned it from plywood and together we’re tracing the splinters in our fingers and spine as we writhe on the shrine we’ve built for one another.