I think my first serious processing of the concept of violent sex came with the realization...
posted by nate on September 17, 2002
Yet, there seems to be a fine line between eroticism and harm when it comes to being rough. It may be what makes the proposition so difficult.
Eight years later, another girl: "Since we don't work together anymore, does that mean we can fuck?" she asks me in the smoky din of the Satyricon. I had absolutely no idea that this girl liked me. I answer with a bite on the neck. We stumble outside in the late midweek quiet of downtown Portland and fall against a chain-link fence, grappling at eachother. Never in my life have I been so turned on by a single sentence: her blunt come-on is intoxicating. We are clawing at eachother with animal lust and not a scrap of recognition or caring what the outside world is witnessing. We somehow make it to her apartment, continue clawing, tearing clothes off and fall on the bare mattress. She's drawing blood, digging into my back. She's looking at me with this expression that's furious, submissive, dangerous. She looks right through me, doesn't care who I am. All I feel is absolute lust like I've never experienced. We continue scratching, bleeding and fucking like deprived animals for hours into the night. I awake a total mess: scarred, bruised and war-torn. I emerge smiling into the harsh sunlight of an early morning, heading to work, knowing I've just had the best night of sex in my life.
This deeply satisfying aftermath throws a corkscrew in my theories.
I think to myself perhaps this could be a healthy thing, and my opposition to it may be (somehow, perhaps far-fetched) akin to the Chick-pamphlet liberal-mocking adage of "don't discipline your child, you'll destroy his creativity!" ie: something apparently wrong could have positive consequences.
"I wish you would have slapped me," my first love tells me. Long after we broke up she had invited me to visit, then spent the week antagonizing me into yelling at her for being such a bitch to me. Afterwards we had one last go in bed. I half-heartedly roughed her around, brewing in frustration with how she treated me, yet confusedly intoxicated by her wanting to have sex again. "I thought about it," I reply.
I've recognized many parallels in my relationships with these girls. Most of their boyfriends have been abusive. They were the closest I've experienced to nymphomaniacs: sex was definitely a driving force. The other similarity is our short-lived relationships and elusive emotional connections. With hindsight, I see how I was played in both instances. After we broke up, they'd lead me panting with flirtation and ambiguous come-ons, the possibility of sex dangling in front of me.. Teased for months until I'm so frustrated and fed up, I break. And just at that point, they get me in bed, where I'm primed for rough lovemaking, tricked into getting what they wanted all along.
I've recently become aware of a storehouse of unprocessed anger which has been slowly building all of my life. I just don't have adequate outlets to balance out when I'm pissed off or frustrated. There are moments when these things swell inside of me and I know that if anyone pushed me the wrong way just then, I'd snap. I wonder: could these sexual experiences be a healthy release of these pent-up emotions? Or could they be a portal to an uncontrolled release?
"I like rougher sex," she tells me, a few months after breaking up.
We had just spent the night together, cuddling but nothing else. "Was our sex not rough enough?" I ask her. She pauses and says "I don't remember" with a blank expression. This floors me. Does she know how harsh that sounds? How much it affects me? I'm so angry at how flippantly she treats me, how uncaring she is, and most irritating of all: how much of a sucker I am for her. I move one step closer to the violent lover.
Also, I've known so many girls who have had questionable first experiences with sex.. Either being abused or just having an unusually traumatic introduction. It makes me wonder how much of this desire is fantasy-driven, linking into the fear and excitement of their first sex. It makes me uncomfortable imagining myself filling the role of the fucked-up male aggressor for the girl. It turns me off and then the whole situation becomes messy and we just push eachother away, get irritated, go to sleep horny and sad. I don't know the right answer to these situations. My urge to do anything to please the girl conflicts with my instinct to not harm her.
I find my mind wandering in trying to write this, much like the actual situations I find myself in. It's one of those things I tend to avoid dealing with. The general fear of being boring and not experimenting or exploring begin to creep in. These situations are charged with emotion, not to mention the incomparable, ego-crushing sensation of being inadequate in bed. They're burned in my memory.
"Hold me down. Don't let me up. Take me. Ignore my pleas to let me go."
She struggles under me, but I easily overpower her thin, soft arms. I begin to feel as if I'm channeling a rapist, then an uncle who won't take "NO," then a belligerent highschool date. I see her as a victim, then as a symbol of women under the stupid hands of men. I abstract the situation further and lose my sexual drive as it becomes more and more estranged from what I enjoy about sex. I let her go, she kisses me a few times, but soon realizes the passion is missing. I feel awful and just lay there, thinking.
There are certainly boys around every corner who would feel completely natural fulfilling this desire. But the fact that the girl and I connect on so many other levels, many of them sexual, makes me think that the answer isn't simply that I'm the wrong boy for this particular girl. I've never been comfortable using sex as a means for violent release. Furthermore, I'm not necessarily comfortable being violent at all. At some point past age 17, I seemed to have lost my strong competetive urges, as well as my urge to shoot a gun or peel out or punch someone in the face. These acts became symbols of the ridulousness of men.
The knuckle-dragging, chest-bumping, tactless, testosterone-pumped MAN seemed to disappear in me, accompanied by the shrill bleat of a deflating balloon.
But as I creep on in age, I find my testosterone level rising again. In tribute, my hair has begun to fall out in a typically unattractive fashion--onward to the mad scientist look, I say. Perhaps in response to the degradation of the body, I'm more open to the animal adrenalin release, the potent intoxicant of sex as a war of bodies. It could also be the growing pile of nights alone where the mind reaches all sorts of conclusions that seemed unheard of before, when one was placated with regular sex.
Regardless of the possibly ill-developed influences on the subject, I feel I'm more open to the concept of rough lovemaking. Hell, I'm more open to any kinds of sex at the moment. My brain is hellfire on getting laid. A frightening state of mind. An all-too-human state, unfortunately. And in this state, I move towards fighter from lover, open to any form of orgasmic ritual put in front of me, even if it means merging these two previously separate aspects of my self.
