Loving Eugenides

I say 'I love him' and I wonder if I mean it. I love his words. They do something that effects both my brain and my stomach in a way that reminds me of sex. I want to have sex with the words he has written. I have no way of expressing how wonderful these words are. The only way would be to open my mouth and take them in, eat them and be filled with them as a result. This is how I sometimes feel about my friends. I love them in a way that is inexpressible. I want to devour them and to share this experience with all the world and yet also I am jealous of them, as if I alone should be able to experience the pleasures of their company. No one else loves them in quite the way I love them. The only way to express this effectively would be through sex.

I want to have sex with my friends. I have written a whole book that speaks to this. I read a collection of stories by one of them and I feel myself opening, my chest, my mind, my cunt. Sex would express this, and yet sex is never enough. I have forgotten the disappointment of the morning after, waking, and knowing that the only way I can speak to them again is to fuck again. Knowing that I am the only person who would like to fuck continually without stopping. Knowing that there is then the disappointment of conversation, a time when our skin goes back to what it was, something untouched and clothed.

I want to have sex with Jeffrey Eugenides for all the reasons that I want to fuck my friends, not because I love them in particular, but because I love their work, or the things they say, or their small acts of kindness and it breaks my heart to watch them and not respond with my whole body. When I finish this book the disappointment will be like waking up with a new lover and sitting beside them at breakfast, remembering that we are separate people and that my feelings belong wholly to myself. This writing and reading is the most intimate of things and for the duration of this book I will be the lover of Eugenides. I will stop and wonder at his words and know that we have found some connection. I will kid myself that my reading of his work has everything to do with his intention.

THis morning in the bath I masturbated with a copy of "The Marriage Plot" in my other hand. It was not a sex scene and yet the placement of words was enough to make me come, not the little rise and fall of an orgasm that is the result of my current consumption of pornography, but instead a back-arching tremor that seemed to centre myself in my inner thighs. This is the kind of orgasm that I cannot currently achieve by watching double penetration and yet these words have dug a pit of emotion and my chest has opened and I say 'I love him', meaning perhaps that finally I have found a moment in which I can love myself.

Unspeakably Blue Too (2)

Toby referred to his penis as a Ronnie Scott. She could not be sure if this was the name for his penis specifically or just any penis that looked like his. He had no foreskin. When they were teenagers, playing with it in the linen cupboard, their shoulders crammed in between the blankets and the stiff bristled broom, he would like to joke about it. He used to make her touch his scar. Our parents damaged me emotionally he told her, warped my relationship to my Ronnie Scott. She used to like it when he made it jump for her. She was too old for the sheer delight she felt, watching him wiggle it with the power of his mind and yet she clapped and giggled and made him do the trick where she held her hand over it and made it levitate, growing longer, lifting up out of his lap. Back then she was not to know that it was disproportionately large. Later, when she was more experienced in such matters she measured her new lover's cock against her hand. She liked the small ones better, the ones that hid defensively in their skin coats, frightened or cold or just lazy perhaps, but she liked the effort it took to coax them out of hiding. If the stiff protruberence of flesh stretched from the tip of her fingers and half way down to her elbow she would call it a Ronnie Scott and remember her brother when she settled on to it with some difficulty.

Counting down to a new thing.

He leans over and kisses her, more to break the painful silence than to fill some need. They are here alone together. Everyone else is gathered at a party, huddled around waiting for fireworks. Now it is just the two of them and suddenly he realises what he is supposed to do. The date gives the moment a special significance and although he chooses not to follow this kind of thing she is waiting for the kiss. Has been all evening.

A kiss won't change anything, this is what he is thinking. With his eyes closed she could be any girl. There are a couple he would rather have here with him. He imagines one of them, her short cropped bob swinging around her pretty face. He kisses as if it is her. With his eyes closed it is just a pair of lips, tasting prettily of lipstick, a cheek that smells of powder, a tongue. She has a little bow mouth which opens and inside it i wet and warm and trembly. His hand moves to the back of her head. He has been told he excels at kissing. We must all have one special skill. The kissing makes up for his lack of confidence when his pants are down. The foreplay saves him from his difficulties with the main event.

So this is what he will do. He will kiss her. His hand finds her knee. He strokes her thigh. If she were one of his other friends he would be excited by now, but he is not. He will put his finger inside her, another one of his skills. He will make her happy when he puts his finger into her because that is what she wants.

He moves his hand up her thigh in slow increments. The kissing is the thing to concentrate on. He moves his tongue into her mouth at just the right time. He hears her sigh. His hand is there at the edge of her pants. He wriggles it and his finger slips under the elastic. She shifts. Her hips are encouraging him onward. He is excited by the way a woman responds to him. It is flattering. He wishes it was some other girl, someone he likes more. He will kiss her and he will finger her and then he will tell her they should just be friends. They should just be friends. It is not that he has been forced into this. She has chased him and he has succumbed. One sweet transgression and he will be done with it. He inches his finger forward, feeling the close trimmed patch of hair, the wetness, again flattering, the heat of her radiating out. He kisses her deep as his finger slips inside because this is what she will like. She does. She sighs. He has her hooked on his hand and it is bitter sweet. So much ground to track back over, the winding down.

He can hear the fireworks starting up there on the hill, music, distant, echoing back on itself. Everybody communing to usher in a new day and here he is, alone with a girl he is perhaps fond of. He pushes into her and his finger is wet with her. He can smell that dank musk behind the perfume. He is wondering how long he should finger her for before making his retreat. She has begun to shift her hips forward onto him. She is tipping her pelvis, exciting herself against his thumb. He feels vaguely unsettled by her rising passion. He slips a second finger into her. He will give her this till the calendar changes. At the stroke of midnight he can stop. He kisses her, pushes forward with two fingers, rubs with the flat of his thumb. He waits, not breathing, listening for the beginning of the countdown to echoe off the hollow of the hills.

When it is fun

I am only interested in it when it is fun. At the moment sex seems so difficult. There is always so much thought to be put into it, where to situate it, what lense to use, when really? It should just be take your gear off and leap in. I need to re-find my sponteneity. Theorists have taken my genitals and held them hostage. It was all fun and games till it stopped being fun.

Yesterday I stumbled on a pornographic website. You couldn't get in without emailing them for a password. My interest was piqued. When I gained access it was all dark horror and although I was not aroused (have not been aroused for days) I was still responding to the idea that this material was too dangerous to access without the key. I wondered if it would be terrible, what, exactly I would see. It was stylish, and interesting and yes, a little icky at some points. There was violence which I realised is something you very rarely see in pornography. The response to the violence was well performed and therefore looked like real fear at times. I am glad I saw it but I do not know exactly how I respond to the material.

I am numb. I have lost my desire and yet I can still orgasm, masturbate often. It is my head that has shut off from it. My head has detatched from my body and is thinking of other things even as my body experiences ecstacy. I blame the theorists, the sex books, the texts. I might give myself a break from it all this weekend.

We will see

Not funny

Black, sure, but not a black comedy. I tried to mould it, shape it, and I am sure it could be done. I could make it fit into something that could be vaguely funny, but perhaps it is fine as it is. Not funny. Not at all funny. There is longing and disgust and violence and sorrow and for some reason I just can't find the funny side of any of it. It might just be my mood. Sex is usually a riot.

maybe when I start the next story, the one about the corpse, maybe I will start from a moment of comedy, how to get a flaccid penis inside you. How to make his arm hug you tight. There must be a funny side to all this and sometimes I wonder if it is inherently funny, this running after a dog. Maybe this kind of desire is funny in and of itself despite how I am responding to it right now. Maybe it is just my mood, finding the dark side of everything. I sit through a comic movie and I nod. I understand it is amusing. I know where it is clever and where it has heart and yet I do not crack a smile, not even once.

I wonder what is wrong with me. But of course I know. I won't sink too low because I recognise it when it hits, but still, I am not sure if it is funny.

small light

I can't pretend that this level is bouyant. It is not. I can see the waterline somewhere above me and know I am half drowned. Still I smile and laugh at things and converse. I beg for sex, and feel like dog when I am thrown a bone. I know I am being placated. Still I rise to the surface for long enough to take a breath. But now I am falling. Next weekend there may be more sex. A little light at the end of this tunnel.

In books I read about how sex is central to our humanity. I find that different sexualities can be equally valued, at least in theory, if not when I look up from my book to the real world. Gay marriage is recognised in New York. I smile and celebrate by clinking glasses with someone I vaguely know. I download three books each one tackling sex in a different way, each one recognising, celebrating difference.

He reads 8 pages of the book and tells me that it isn't funny at all but that perhaps that doesn't matter. He says he likes it, but it is about sex so he will probably not read all of it. He doesn't like reading about sex.

I feel like a freak. I have always felt like a freak.

I write in the blog knowing they won't read it anyway. I promised myself I would document this strange journey into the center of the world. Now I am on the path I wonder why I am here at all.

I have a tooth ache. I imagine I have cancer for no good reason. As soon as I have recovered from one orgasm I feel sad that I have to wait till I have another. Just for that moment I was happy, or not happy, but clean. There is no other way to describe it, scrubbed clean of myself, weightless and blinded by a small light shining right in my eyes.

I should not write in the blog while I am at the bottom of things, but then if I did that as a rule I would not have written Affection at all. So I will hit 'publish post' now, before I have a chance to take it back. This is me naked. Here. I will not link to it on twitter or on facebook and maybe, posted early, tomorrow's post will slip by unnoticed and I will begin to feel buoyant once more.

Animal dreams.

You would think that the animals would haunt my dreams.

I read that a dog just keeps coming and coming, gushing sperm to lubricate the act of coitus. I don't know how reliable my source is. He says he is a zoophile but so could anyone. There are no pictures. The book it is in is not a peer reviewed source. I find this difficult to believe when I have seen bestial porn and the dog seems to come quickly, once, and then jump off and move on.

This is the kind of thing that bothers me now. I see a Labrador tied to a post and she is beautiful and I think, how could you not love a Labrador? Why did my editor make me change it to an Alsatian? Labs of this age and fitness are a perfect choice for a sexual partner. But of course I notice that I am now sexualising every dog I see.

I love animals. I feel almost maternal towards them, and you would think that this constant sexualisation would lead to an unhealthy outlook. I would see it in my nightmares, which are constant and violent. But no. I dream of the end of the world and there are no animals in it. My interest is purely for my research and my writing. It seems that it is impossible to change your sexual orientation so easily. After watching bestial porn I am tired and in need of a break and, without even thinking, I click onto some porn. Even this human and human does nothing for me and so I go out searching for something to arouse me. I find it in a series of photographs, a woman with large breasts swimming underwater. How vanilla. Breasts. No genitals. Sometimes I am disturbed by how ordinary my fantasies can be. There are no dogs in my dreams, no big horse penises. Sometimes there are fish or octopus but I suspect this is just symbolic.

Still I continue on with my study and wait to see if there are any animal dreams.

too late

Maybe it is too late to take back what has been between them. It is not the words so much but how they were interpreted. And all the times in bed and out of it, when their timing was off. His reluctance for sex, her over-zealousness for it. His wilting penis, her dry vagina. They know too much about how they do not fit together. They know each others secrets, lack of energy, stretch marks, insecurities about weight and looks and performance. Each of them has held something up to taunt the other. Neither of them play fair.

They will miss the sex. She more than him. But still, some times, he will miss it.

She will miss the kissing.

He will miss being touched.

They would be happier if they did not part, but it is too late now.

He has made her feel like she is just someone to pass time with. She has made him feel like he is clumsy and inattentive in bed.

She shrugs. They never had enough sex anyway.

He shrugs. It's not like they were ever in a relationship.

They move on without knowing that this was the best they would ever be, this tug-o-war with such a sweet place in the middle where they found balance for a while. They walk away and it is all behind them, their best times gone.

But she is not to know. She wonders, briefly why she feels so hollowed out, but doesn't stop to contemplate it, there are things she should be doing and she does them with a strange empty echo in her chest.

plumbing

THey come to fix the plumbing and they are two men. They have tools, a big bag of them. One is cute in the way girls like, charming, compact, muscular. The other has more potential. I am reading 5 different types of porn when they arrive. Nicholson Baker (literary) Suzie Bright (annecdotal) Alan McKee (academic) The Horseman (bestial) and Grosz (queer). The bulk of their maleness fills the room. It is odd how my friends do not command the space like plumbers in uniform with tool bags.

I am not attracted to them, and yet it is impossible when you have five windows of writing about porn open on your laptop not to imagine the machinations. That is indeed a very fine shifting spanner you have there. Do you want the smallest one? asks the partner. Small, not smallest as the French say - he answers and that would be a sexual reference right there.

I am not a fan of men in uniform. I am not a fan of men in particular. Not this kind of man full of testosterone and a faint whiff of excrement. I prefer men and women who spend their lives reading and thinking. That is just the way I bend I suppose.

Still, there are plenty of double entendres that could be made with a dictionary of plumbing. Perhaps I will venture there next time there is a blockage in my pipes.

Oral sex

He enjoys her down on her knees between his legs but he is conflicted. He rarely reciprocates. That once, and that was good. She always goes on about it, replaying the scene, his eyes staring up at her from his place between her legs. His fingers inside her. The way she came, convulsing on his hand, juicing up around it, making him hard to feel so powerfully in charge of her orgasm. That once, and another time but only for a second. One or two licks before moving on to other things.

To tell you the truth he prefers her down between his knees sucking him. She has learned how to use her tongue more effectively. He hopes he has taught her this, but perhaps it was just her overcoming her shyness. At first it was barely passable, a tentative nothing blowjob. But now there is a rhythm to it and when her mouth is on him he can barely contain himself. Does not contain himself. He comes and she swallows. All these things are like a gift to him.

He has grown to expect these gifts over time. Not to take them for granted, because he is always surprised and grateful. He never asks for the gifts, but he accepts them knowing he will never reciprocate. Girls don't expect that kind of thing, although when he does it they are often overwhelmingly happy. He would. If there was time. He would if they didn't slip into the habits they have gouged out for themselves. He would if it wasn't so damp down there, if it didn't smell of wet earth and mushrooms, if he were less meticulous about hygiene.

So she is down on her knees and he comes in her mouth and she swallows it and he is grateful. Maybe if he loved her he would find the time to reciprocate. Maybe if they were a couple. This is a casual thing, has been for years now, on and off. She is sexy and he likes her and when he leaves he feels a slight twinge of guilt but he leaves her anyway.

That is just how it is between them. That, he thinks, is how it will always be.

Orgasm in real time

I want to share with you an orgasm in real time - she said and I am certain that his penis leaped in his shorts if he was wearing shorts. If not he would have easily stroked that swelling thing between his legs in that frantic syncopated rhythm that some men favour.

Are you ready? Well it takes a while and so I would get comfortable if I were you. I have to build up to it. The blood comes to my clitorus slowly. The petals (she would use this kind of flowery metaphor) begin to swell up just a little as if you were sighing ever so slightly into a balloon. He would be thinking of her cunt then, although she would never use the word 'cunt'. Her performance is coy with an edge of brashness, although it is only a fine edge and it only comes out with him because he is so patient with her. He does not push her to think of sex. In fact he avoids it, and it is in his avoidance that she becomes bold.

I am a little bit damp now - and he thinks 'wet', because 'wet' is the word that makes him rock hard. He hates that the simple language of pornography has the power to stir him but he thinks 'wet' and 'cunt' and when he looks down into his lap he thinks 'cock' and he will come long before she does because she has settled into an orgasm in real time and perhaps she is pleasuring herself all the way over there on the other side of the internet, perhaps when she says she is touching it, she really is, or perhaps it is just a display to trap him. Still, he holds his 'cock' and thinks of her delicate little fingers parting the 'petals' of her 'cunt' and he makes sounds that he would not make if she were not all the way over there at her own house and he says:

Yeah?

Because she does all the talking anyway.

And she says - so it feels a little tingly down there in my flower and I can feel how moist it is.

He does not like the word moist.

And it is almost damp enough to put my little finger inside there. She has no word for the place but he has, 'cunt' he thinks, 'hole' 'mouth'. And it is the idea of her cunt as a mouth that sends him. The idea of her lips closing on her delicate little finger and spitting honey out to lubricate it's passage. He catches the jism in his hand which he hates to do but she caught him unprepared with her orgasm in real time conversation.

So he goes into the bathroom and pulls some toilet paper off the roll and cleans himself and washes his hands very carefully and checks his hair in the mirror and when he returns to his computer screen she has only just slipped a second finger inside her virtual cunt and so he clicks over to another screen and reads about some band or another and their album that they have just released and he flicks back to her orgasm every so often, adding a 'yeah?' at the appropriate places, and he waits, and wonders if she will ever come.

Pavlov's dog and boredom

Did the dog ever tire of salivating for the food at the dinging of a bell?

I know we can be conditioned to our responses. If he puts a particular song on the CD player, if she sets the table in a particular way using candles, if she always wants sex on a Wednesday if he always has a wank in the shower after a run.

I am trained to my sexual responses. If I am home alone to work I come back again and again to the idea that I am free to masturbate undisturbed. I have a weekend habit for sex that is perhaps boring if you look at it that way.

I wonder if Pavlov's dog ever wanted to shake it up a little. Perhaps wait till after the 7.30 report to get fed. Use the sound of the bell to indicate sleep time just for something different. Do we get bored of our conditioned responses or will I always find myself fidgeting on 'working from home days' unable to settle until the deed is done?

She stole a dog

She stole a dog out of love. We knew her a little and therefore we knew that these were the actions of a crazy woman. She had become a kind of a joke, someone we tolerated vaguely, taking a deep breath before serving her. We knew there would always be some pedantic instructions about wrapping her gift, the wrong ribbon, the wrong coloured paper. When she stole the dog we were not too surprised. I suppose the others just added it to her eccentricities, but I have to admit I wondered. If a love is so strong it becomes sexual. I know this because of the terrible tug of my love for my friends. One friend after another falling victim to this odd obsession. The dreams, the little fantasies, the late night longing. The early morning apologies.

When she had the little dog in her hands how did she stroke it? When the object of obsession becomes real for you what will you do? How would I react if one of the objects of my longing responded positively? Was she frightened? I know I would be. Did she touch it in secret and with no one to know? How would it be for me? For her?

We hang the new article on the door of the cupboard and laugh about it. She stole the dog. A joke because we have made her a joke. I am sure that it is only I who have left to wonder. Empathetically. What on earth would I do?

Speak sex

I send her a letter which is a file contained within an email, and the letter is about a letter which is actually an email. Anyway it is a communication and a reaction to words, specifically the word 'cunt'. I do not react to this word in real life, but in the communication my reaction is earth-shifting, orgasm-inducing. In the letter, language still has the power to transform me. The language of sex that is.

I speak sex almost fluently by now and yet it is an ever-changing language. My vocabulary grows daily. I am immersed in the study of sex. Three years with nothing else as my focus. Perhaps this means that at the end of this time there will be no more words for me to learn, and yet there are always new words for it. My education will never be complete.

Still, at the end of it I may go back to using sex as something hidden within the folds of a text, parting the damp pages with sweating palms, one finger inserted to hold your place, a page turned down, the shadow of a stain blotting the paper where your excitement has marked this as the best bit. One tiny sentence that holds enough erotic charge to move you with a hint of a wink, or one paragraph, one chapter, and when you return to the work, the rest will hide the sex as effectively as the body folding back over it, legs crossed, knees together, you will not read it the same way. You will have been changed by what we have shared, reader and writer fused together by this fissure in the chaste surface of the real world. No one else in the library or in the cafe or on the bus will know that I have put a part of myself inside you, and at the height of our shared pleasure, the ejaculate of my words is left inside you as I withdraw, effecting you, growing something in you that we have made together. The product of this odd understanding of love.

Reading as writing

So I read things I would never write. It is the otherness of the words that strikes me. This is someone else talking about sex. I could not emulate his style or try to write like him and yet we have these things in common. We share a sense of play. We use plain words or make them up, equally delighted by the naughtiness of language. We both have a fondness for breasts and have no issue with the size of them or the shape of the woman they are attached to. We both have a lust for variety and are happy to laugh at ourselves in the moment of pleasure.

We are different too. He is heterosexual perhaps with a nod towards a fondness for watching women lick each other. I am astounded by the variety he can imagine in the connection of man and woman. I am a little more erratic with my coupling, switching genders as quickly as I switch partners. He likes his cock big. Or perhaps this reflects the size of his own penis. The women are always wanting something bigger and better, the men they long for are long haired and muscled. Too many of the penises have a large bend in one direction, I suspect this is a quality he is intimate with. Perhaps his own banana bending penis? I have different desires. I don't need a huge cock for my pleasures. I am more tactile I suppose. There is not enough cunnilingus in his work.

We are sexually mismatched and yet I read him voraciously. He inspires me to create more outrageous scenarios. I borrow from his particular tastes. I like the scene where they are shopping for pens because I can see the eroticism of the written word. I am aroused by his difference to find my own voice. I am shocked by his new words into words of my own.Reading is good for writing. Reading is a part of writing. Sometimes I forget this in my desire for consummation. Reading is the foreplay, writing is the act itself.

House of Holes

Oh Nicholson Baker. Seriously. How can I not love you when you leap at words like 'scrotatiousness'. You race past me in your hunger for perversity. You leap at the severed arm and the girl who can tell if your sperm is magic when she licks your balls. You place a woman's legs in the stirrups and ride her against the leather bicycle seat. You use play words, toy words and all it does is make me laugh like I have just been tickled. You throw political correctness to the wind and take us on a romp that stays on the right side of Benny Hill just by the strength of your language.

I love you Nicholson Baker. I wish I could send you a copy of my next book.

A zoophile walks into a bar

Today I finished an essay I had been asked to write. It was an essay about watching porn and in particular I talked about my focus on zoophilia. Strangely I began to worry that perhaps I had not read the criminal code correctly. Despite downloading it onto my iPad, quoting from it, dissecting the different parts that relate to my study, I still could not be sure that watching bestiality was legal. I had admitted to it in the essay and although it seemed ok to mention this on my blog I suddenly lost my nerve. What if I had read the criminal code incorrectly? What if I had missed something? Presenting my relationship to a the act of watching bestial porn suddenly made me worry. I had lost my nerve.

It is one thing to call it fiction. In fiction you are allowed to perform acts that you might get arrested for in life. Everything is fantasy. Everything can be a little more extreme than the real versions of the activities.

This essay was a personal recollection and I was (yet again) outing myself, albeit to admit that I did not really find the sex a turn on at all. Still it is like taking my perversion into a public space. I always see Furious Vaginas as private even though it is not. I allow myself to make mistakes, experiment, play. The work goes out with grammatical errors, spelling mistakes. This blog is lounging in my bedroom or masturbating on the couch.

Publishing my essay in a literary journal is another thing. I suddenly feel like I have taken my perversions into the local bar.

I am sure it is legal to watch bestial porn on the internet. I am certain I have committed no crime, and yet suddenly I am naked with it. Suddenly everybody might see and know that I have done something wrong. The very reason for my study is to explore our conversations about perversity and sooner or later I will have to take them out of my bedroom and down to the bar. I know that now, despite the fact that I am not into animals, I will be the go-to person for all things zoophile in nature, just as now I am a go-to person for things about sex, despite my admission in Affection that I am not particularly good at the act. If you want an expert lover, go to Kate Holden. She has admitted that men have found her 'too good' in bed. I have only admitted that men have fallen asleep under me. I have only admitted that I am curious, love the celebration of the flesh and am willing to intellectually explore.

Still, now is the time to take off my clothes the protection of my ivory tower and walk the neighbour's dog down into the bar. Still if anyone finds any whiff of proof that it is somehow illegal to stumble across bestial porn then please post the link to that particular section of the criminal code that must have slipped by my in my dedication to find out what I can and cannot do.

strange pace

This is a strange pace bouncing between the fiction which I would like to stick with, and then the essay. There is the reading too which is slow and varied but which does not contain any fiction. I have Nicholson Baker burning a whole in my ipad and I cannot get to him. All this changes what I do. It changes my relationship to sex.

I do not watch pornography on the internet for pleasure now. It has become research. I deconstruct it in the same way as I read The Porn Report. Sometimes masturbation is for research as well. Perhaps this is why the fiction is so slow. I wrote 2000 words today and fell in a heap with it, my head thumping, all vision stolen from one of my eyes. The only way to lift the haze was to run a hot bath and soak in it, my hands straying to my vagina, wondering, even as I touched myself if it should be called cunt or snatch or hole. What words to use for this when I can only see out of one eye. What words to use for the act when it is an act of medical expedience. Three neurophen and an orgasm, prescribed and once administered, I find this has indeed been a temporary cure.

I come to the safe vanilla images that have been furthest from my research. I come with the idea of a kiss, the idea of a penis inside me (yes, I must use medical terminology for this cure) a penis made of nothing but the idea of itself being squeezed by the muscles of my vagina as I find my pleasure. This vanilla sex, penis in vagina, the machinations of an orgasm, the tightening of my nipples in an imaginary mouth. These things are the catalyst and the vision floods back into my eye, the world becomes whole with a little light missionary position sex.

How do I respond.

The sex research is having an impact on my work. This is fascinating to note. I feel that as the year progresses I feel more able to express my own ideas about it all. I know now, for instance, that there are two ways of presenting sex in fiction, one is as a representation of joy and delight like the work of Linda Jaivin, all celebration and laughter and fun, and the other is to see sex as something shameful, the perversions best kept hidden like the psychologically complex sex of Rod Jones.

Triptych is of the former variety, a comedy, a playful exploration of alternative sexualities. It is porn of course but it is fun porn, light and full of word play. It is a nudge and a wink and a running towards sex with open arms. These next works are darker. They are perhaps more about the shadow of the thing than the thing itself, they are about grief and shame and jealousy and revenge, sex that is conducted in the dark and in complete silence.

For some reason I have begun with a scupture I have seen by Arnish Kapoor. A sculpture called void which is so matt and blue that it eats light. A sculpture that is one thing from one angle and another from a different view. Unspeakably blue. It is a colour that seems so full of reverberations that you can almost hear it. This is the next story. This is the next trilogy. This is sex from another, unsettling angle altogether.

The Films

Maybe I have been distracted. I have taken a little turn down the path of pornography. There is a fight to be had here, but I am not sure I have the energy to fight it. When I think of my own pornographic writing I know that I am aiming towards the stars. My heroes are the great guns. The Story of the Eye as the pinnacle of success, Anais Nin sidling in behind, The Story of O and yes, despite my personal preferences, I have an admiration for Sade.

I watch a documentary about perversion in film and I realise there are things I haven't seen. These movies that may add to my armory of perverse stories. I have not seen Shortbus, but it seems that perhaps this film and my work will be easy bedfellows. I already have a love of Catherine Breillat. I have not seen so much of the cannon. And even though there are Australian stories I need to explore, I think I find my work eases towards the European cannon.

It has been so long since I have read wonderful literature. My reading has been focused and full of non fiction. I feel that I am drying up from lack of story. I am not sure where any of this is going. It is a slippery spider. I can feel it crawling out from the site of my reading. Perhaps the films can fill the gap for now. Shortbus for one and then the cannon, the perverse films, like the literature, corrupting our morality one country at a time.

Bi-Polar and Sex

I will pause here to explain myself. I have been diagnosed by several different psychiatrists to have bi-polar disorder. I think that in my case it is mild and mostly manageable, but it effects my work in a very unique way. My best writing comes in short intensely prolific bursts. At the very top of my high I can write 60 000wds in 4 weeks. At the very bottom of my low I can do the same. The results are entirely different. My writing swings from light to dark as easily as my mood. When I am down and in a particularly prolific period I judge everything I do as poor work, badly expressed. This isn't always true. I come back to it on a more even part of my cycle and I find the work is fine, even inspired in places as all first drafts should be. When I complete a large body of work on a high it is even better, full of humour and lightness and cheek.

This cycle means that I must take advantage of my highs and my lows when they occur. I can slog away through my ordinary days, but usually it is not this work that finds its way into the final draft. My muse is my disorder in a way and the only trouble with it is that in my lowest moments I hate everything I do and am in danger of destroying it as fast as I create it, worse, I suppose, I am in danger of destroying myself.

Sex follows me from high to low. When I am up I want it because it feels like I am on Ecstacy. All my skin revels in the touch. My whole body becomes an erogenous zone. I walk through each moment as if immersed in a bath of sex. When I am low it is only the electric shock of an orgasm that breaks me out of the numbness that has descended. I seek out the orgasm like one might seek out a drug, desperate, self-hating, aware that my demands are too much for my partner, aware also that physical contact with another is a major part of my cure.

I know myself better now, and I know how I work. When my supervisor at uni says he wonders if I understand how to sustain a project over three years I say that I do. I have written three novels each over a three year period. These are the novels that have not been published and I think that my editor's reluctance for me to publish these comes from the fact that they contain a snapshot of the low moments of my bi-polar, they are about death and fear and hate and jealousy. Better then to tap the humour that drips out of me when I am high. Better to publish a project that was completed in a joyous rush of chemically unbalanced pleasure. Still those longer works are good. I know they are, and in this 3 year PhD project there will be some work (Triptych) done in a heady rush of good will but there will also be some that takes a plunge into that dark self-hatred that is such a strong part of my psyche.

If you ask me to work on something over a three year period, then this is what you will get.

Who watches pornography

Yesterday I met Alan McKee. He is a porn researcher and he has been doing it for a very long time. I am reading his book, The Porn report and in these pages I see myself and I see you. I see my neighbour and my colleague and the guy on the bus that is irritating me by talking too loudly. We all consume porn even if some of us do not admit it. Pornography is different things to different people. For me it is mostly trapped within the pages of literature but that is because I am a reader and I prefer to read sex most of all. I like pictures of sex too, still images and also the moving kind. I like to watch it and read it and think about it later. So do the people in Alan McKee's book, one third of the population that admit to it, a few more perhaps who do not.

Why would you not turn to porn. What kind of pressure do you put on a partner to be your soul erotic stimulous? How about marriages, like mine, that have lasted twenty years. How does it not feel like you are repeating yourself? If you close your eyes during sex there is perhaps a passing parade of images, lovers of the past, things you have read about, dreamed about, imagined. Is this not pornography? These phantom sexual experiences. Closing your eyes, touching your clitoris or your cock, seeing the people who are not your partner involved in acts that you might never do? This too is pornography, a pornography of the imagination. If this counts then I suggest we all consume it. Waking from dreams unsettled and aroused, staring out of the window at the orgy you have invented on the street corner. All of this a kind of porn and one I intend to watch for as long as I take breath.

Relief

The relief. Something I was dreading, that discussion where I have to defend my stance on my own pornographic fiction. It is over now and I survived although I am a little shaken. Not as bad as it could be. Not as bad as being naked on the stage at a writers festival with Dworkin in the audience. That is the ultimate moment of debasement. Someone entirely dedicated to a hatred of the pleasure I have spent my life on, looking at my tired old cunt and saggy tits.

On this day the jacket of my new book was released into the world here http://textpublishing.com.au/books-and-authors/book/triptych/
On this day I survived the first round of my own defense. I am exhausted. I retire to the couch where I treat myself to some furtive masturbation under the cover of a throw. It is not the worst day but it is a day that has played havoc with my relationship to the work.

Lets see what tomorrow brings.

The Second Pornographic video

I watched the second video clip with the sound down. I did this at the loungeroom table, my husband quietly working on the other side, his brow furrowed, sniffing, sick with the flu that I had given him. I watched because this is what I have to do for my studies. I worried about computer viruses. Strange that viewing this kind of pornography makes me worried that my computer will get some disease. There is a correlation between watching transgressive sex and the idea of uncleanliness. Perhaps my mind will become diseased by watching this too.

There is a tiredness to this video. A sadness. I can't guess the attitude of the woman in the clip. She seems like any person, someone's mother, someones, child, me. She seems tired. I can't tell if there is any pleasure in the act. It seems to be her pet. She is familiar with him. She kisses his neck as I would kiss my family dog. She lets him lick her vagina for the longest time and he enjoys this, or so it seems by the wagging of his tail and by his enthusiasm. At some point he tries to mount her and she must prop herself up on the couch, lifting her hips. You can't tell from the angle of the camera if he has made any connection. At some point he leans on her awkwardly or scratches her and she moves his elbow. It is the same kind of consternation that I used to have with my dog when he stepped on my ribs or scratched my leg. He goes back to licking. I have a feeling that he will never put his penis inside her. They will try, endlessly, but the connection will never be made. She tries to make the connection whilst facing him. I wonder why she doesn't turn over and let him mount her as a dog would mount another dog.

There is something poignant in these attempts at sex. Something akin to my often loveless couplings in the time before I met my husband. I don't want my husband to know that I am watching this. I know he would react with disgust. He knows I must engage with this kind of sex for my study, and in theory he understands that zoophilia is like any other fetish. There is good with the bad. Still, when he gets up to put the jug on I click away from the website so he will not see. The things we hide from our partners. The people we want them to think we are. I feel awkward masturbating when my husband is home. He doesn't mind, he knows my sex drive is voratious. Still, I feel like I should wait till he is not home.

I wonder if I should try to find the bestial images arousing. Certainly I am aroused by the transgressive act of watching them and trying not to be caught, but strangely, later, when he goes out to get something from the shops, I do not masturbate, or return to the bestial sex. It is not a fetish that I share. I am also confused by the tone of the image. What if the woman was coerced into filming this. What if the dog was trained cruelly to perform these acts. The tone of the video gives me no clues one way or the other, therefore I am more confused by the images than aroused. I know that I will return to this website, and others. Perhaps it is just that I am too close to dogs. I grew up with them like sisters. Maybe a horse would arouse me more. I have been told there are videos of girls with horses somewhere on the internet. One day I will search. One day I will see this. I need to know how I react to these things in the flesh - in my flesh. Next time I write about it I need to move from fantasy to reality, from the theoretical to the practical. Soon. Some time soon.

the story

I want to write it quickly and with the same sense of movement as the first ones but this story is struggling against me. It is all darkness where the others were light. The only image that comes to me is something by Joel Peter Witkin, something dark and stinking of death. A dog with a truss mounts a man in a mask. I am not sure if they are both alive because he often worked with corpses. It all stinks of death.


I suppose it is my attitude, this struggling with the ideas, struggling to contain something that normally comes to me like breathing. I hold the vibrator to me and force yet another orgasm that gives me little satisfaction. I am irritated, fractious, het up. I watch these things, this bestiality, for the sake of the story and to thank me the story becomes bleak and sexless. It is full of shame. Sex should never be about shame. I am peering into someone else's view of it and it is just not fun over there in his back yard. I fall asleep and the last image that comes to me is of the barrel of a gun put into my mouth, the trigger under some pressure.

Not again. I have outrun this beast but now he has found me again. Incubus creeping up onto my chest which is filled with phlegm anyway. Sex with just a whisker of death. I have been ill. Blame this. I am finding university a chore. Blame this. Some of my events at work have challenged me. Blame this.

If I tell him he will speak about drugs, the need for another perscription, so I try to smile. I try speaking of clothes and food and shopping. But this time smells of endings. I am drowning in nightmares. The touch which is light and sweet and sexy has been denied me and now I must relinquish it. Back to Witkin then. Back to A Little Death.

Pets are like Iraq

"Pets are like Iraq" I said this and I meant it, but not quite in the way it was taken. "We probably shouldn't have gone in there in the first place but now we are we can't just pull out."

I have a problematic relationship to pets. I love animals. I grew up in a family that valued animals more than humans. I slept beside one animal or another and always had more than one pet. My pet ferret was my closest companion for a while. I told him everything and took him for walks in the park on a little lead. Pets were important to me and my family still surround themselves with animals.

Animals make their lives smaller. They can't go out of the house for too long because of the pets. They can't all leave at once for a family trip because the dogs will fret. Cleaning the animal cages takes half their day. A replacement for work. A replacement for friendships.

When we domesticated animals we were playing god. We were shaping the world in our image. How sad for a pet to live its whole life without the pack or the paired union. Imagine being plucked from your natural family and kept alone amongst another species. A dog in the wild would hunt and mate and raise a family. A dog in a human house will live a sexless existence, infantalised forever. No matter how much you love it, its development has been arrested. Like Iraq, we should never have gone into owning pets in the first place, but like Iraq now we are in there how can we get out? We can't just abandon the dogs and the cats and the ponies. We can't just set them to roam free in packs through the streets. I also love the idea of a kitten or a puppy of my own, a child replacement perhaps, but still something vulnerable to love.

It is very complicated. Now that we have them, what are they to us? What if your pet Alsation wants to be sexual with you, the only other animal in sight? What if you want to be sexual in return? You in your loveless house judged too old or too ugly or too odd for the company of another human being? Who am I to say that your dog can not have sex with you? Sex is natural to all animals, a need and a desire. If this kind of inter-species love is reciprocated then who am I to judge. Now that we are in there how can we just pull out? What is the right thing to do? What is so wrong with it anyway?

Why write this? Do I even care?

Do I care that there is very little written about zoophilia and literary fiction? Is it the act of sex between a human and an animal that attracts me?

I think it is more about the idea of the unspeakable. The idea that there is an unspeakable thing. I am always drawn towards what can't be said. It is my job to find the words because there are always words to be found. I remember being fascinated by the idea of describing colour. It must have been primary school, I remember sitting in class and imagining how you would speak red or blue or my favourite colour, that colour of the sea when it is not blue and not green but something close to both those colours and with sunlight infusing the whole palate with a kind of glow.

Perhaps the idea of animal sex is like the idea of speaking colour. When I watch the pornographic images on the forbidden websites I shake my head. This isn't the language of bestial love. There is no love for one thing, there is little pleasure for another. I prefer to imagine still images, the image of a collie leaping into the air to catch a stick, all that playfulness and erratic energy, the image of a child curled into a canine hug, the image of a girl with her head resting on the shoulder of her pony, the slick of sweat outlining flank and cheek. The gorgeousness of transgression, the joy of it, and yet, also the darkness, the fear, the hidden thought of it.

John A Scott calls it 'the exhilaration of sin'.

This from Xavier Pons Messengers of Eros:

"The practices that society frowns upon are often labeled perversions. There is something both exhilarating and constrictive about them - the exhilaration of being at once different and true to one's own nature, and the constriction that comes from the risk of being found out and of paying the price for one's transgressions. At bottom it is perhaps this delicate balance between gratification and apprehension that is enjoyable."

Encounters with Animals: Dogs 2

She sleep with the rest of the pack. One long bed made of discarded mattresses. It takes up most of the floor space in the lounge room. The lounge suite pushed out and away towards the far reaches of the room. The lounge chairs are used, often. One dog or another will lope up onto them and settle their great haunches on the frayed upholstery. The scent of dog so strong that you would barely imagine a human lives here too. She does. One human, she leads the pack most times, Alpha female, pitching her voice low as she growls and snarls at one dog or another, asserting her position as defender and provider.

I wonder about sex. Surely this pack is not entirely sexless. There are female dogs and males all in together. None of them desexed, all of them a raging pack of hormones. And then she, the human amongst them, isolated from her natural tribe. I wonder if she masturbates beside them, breathing in the stale wet scent of dogs who have been swimming in the ocean. I wonder if she lets one dog mount another, if she watches, if she chastises and separates. I just wonder.

Encounters with Animals: Dogs

We grew up as a pack. The dogs often outnumbered the humans in the house. Sometimes I thought we were living by dog rules and not human rules at all. Other children certainly did not live as we did, crowded into a bed taken up by paws and doggy breath and slightly oily fur. Other children were not told to sit on the floor if the dogs had, by chance, beaten you to the lounge chair. I remember feeling the injustice of the idea that our labrador was left at home when we went to see The Empire Strikes back. She would never experience that opening night queue. She would not be able to find some resolution to the story until it came out on video years later.

Sometimes at night I would lie beside her, she always slept on my bed, and I would cry into her fur. She seemed to know when I was upset. I was a happy child during the day but I had nightmares and I often cried myself to sleep. Night times were the worst. I would press my face into her stomach and I would whisper "You are my real mother."

Some girls dream that they are a real princess, I dreamed that I was my dog's daughter.

Dog Live on Cam 2

She is wearing a coat and glasses and I suspect, a wig. She has a porn star body. I suppose she is working. This is not a home made labour of love. I am concerned for her. I am concerned about the conditions of her employment. She seems cheerful enough as she lets the dog jump and leap onto her chest and then steps away, but I know it is an act. Danes have the longest claws.

She takes her coat off, keeps the sunglasses on. Anonymity. I wonder if what she is about to do is illegal. She is playful with the Dane. He licks her vagina immediately. I am certain he has been trained. Again an ethical nightmare. Still he seems to enjoy his task and she is playful in return. I wonder about the camera. Who is it that is filming her. What is their relationship?

I am aroused.

I am aroused because I am watching something I shouldn't be watching. I am aroused because of what I am about to see. I am aroused because I am nervous. It is not difficult to arouse me. Sometimes all it takes is the mention of sex. The sight of the girl without her clothes would be enough. I am aroused but I am on edge with it. I keep trying to figure out if this is a bad thing to do. It is a free site. I am not contributing money to any unethical business. There is no actual sign of abuse. Perhaps the girl is having as much fun as she seems to be. She laughs. The dog wags its tail. There is pleasure here. His penis emerges from it's sheath. She is long legged this girl and when she crouches she is just the right size for a Dane to mount. He leaps up onto her back and begins to thrust. It isn't clear if he has found the right orifice and in a second she rolls over and spreads her legs and he licks her there. I see the clitoris and know what it must feel like to be licked like that. But is she aroused? The dog is clearly aroused. They repeat this game of kneeling, being mounted, the little jiggling of his hips, the rolling away. It is expert and for the camera. She is a performer. This much is clear. It goes on for so long I wonder about his claws and the scratches that must be gathering on her skin although none of this is visible to the camera. I am aroused but not in the way I often am, unable to operate without a moment alone in the bathroom. My arousal is complicated. I am not sure if an orgasm would bring me much relief.

Am I a bad person for even contemplating this kind of act? What of the people who do not perform for money, what of the humans who can't contemplate sex with a member of their own kind. What about a more domestic coupling, the best friend kind of relationship between dog and girl.

The climax happens quickly and I can't be sure the thick white stuff trickling from her cunt is semen at all. Certainly the dog's penis was in there. The image showed the penetration and the animal leaping off, but there are tricks in the game and this video is part of the game. I imagine they put a condom on the dog. I imagine that this is thick white paste inserted into her, displayed now for the camera. There was certainly a break in continuity just before the come shot. Still, a quibble. This is the first bestial coupling I have seen. I know I will have to watch more. There are at least eight free videos on this site. Some seem home made. Maybe these will be the kind of thing I have come here for, the window into my soul. The next time I write something about this I will engage with the act in all its complexity. No love, but perhaps this puppy playfulness, a small moment of relief in what may be a very dark space indeed.

Dog Live on Cam

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Dugong 2

The belly is soft and feels like the underside of a snake. He has a penis there. Inverted I suspect, hidden in his body and prepared to slip out when erect and into mine. I am aware that this is possible, his body and mine, connected in this way. I am frightened by the idea, flattered, curious. I touch his body and am surprised by the softness of it. On top he is a carpet of barnacles. If he were to swim past and brush against me I would be cut and torn. His paws are gentle but firm, hugging me to him. I am afraid of drowning. I am more afraid of drowning than the strength in his thick warm boy. His eyes are dark and if he were a human I would call them soulful. He is ugly but also beautiful, that odd mix of things that I am prone to like. I am aware that this would be an adventure and one that women seldom have.

Sailors, it is said coupled with female dugongs spawning mermaid myths. I imagine this creature, here, now, sidling up to a sailing ship and calling mournfully up to the crew. Do dugongs have voices like wales or dolphins? Do dugongs have song?

I am frightened and yet if I could breath under water I might swim with him out to sea. The locals tell me he is bereft. They mate for life and his partner was killed over a year ago. I imagine he is love lorn. It is flattering to be the object of such attention.

A dolphin's penis is sickle shaped and pink, almost red. I wonder about the penis of a dugong. I wonder as he clamps his paws harder around my stomach and moves his powerful tail, towing us further out to sea. I am out of my depth. I push away from him gently and kick back to where my husband is waiting, anxiously on the beach.