Do we all get a Dick?

Dear Chris:

I have a Dick too. His name is even four letters long and starts with a D.

I met him on Fetlife and we slept together a few time, went on a few dates and then he decided we should just be friends. I was infatuated already though, thought I was in love with him. I started writing this book about infatuation. I left poems on his porch. We stayed friends. It turns out he hates women. We have these long tedious debates about feminism. He often says… “all women…” and when I point out that I don’t do that and I am a woman, he’ll say, “you’re an exception.” So maybe, I am not a woman because I don’t perform all of the acts that women perform that allow him to both hate them but also sexualize them in a way that he can’t with me because I act like what, … a man?

Of course, I would fall in love with a man who hates women. I’ve been programmed my whole life to save that broken bird.

I kept writing my book and thinking about attachments and obsession and strangers. I met my Dick by trying to be less attached to the man I was having an affair with, and I fell in love with my Dick while the man I was living with moved out and left me. And I thought now I just have to write this book and understand the way I attach to people and by people, I mean men. So, I started fucking a lot of strangers and watching how, in some cases, I felt no attachment after the fact and in some, I felt an enormous misplaced attachment. I realized my Dick was the perfect muse. I was writing this book to him, to seduce him, which is to say, to seduce myself; art being first and foremost a facet of narcissism: To solidify what I feel in language as poetry has done for centuries/repetition a  masturbatory act, love only really occurring in the confines of the idea. Lacan is right (write?)  when he says sex is always narcissistic.  It’s a thin line between the desire to please for your own pleasure and that moment when it is crossed, and you believe someone is taking advantage of you for their own pleasure; it means they are receiving more pleasure than you and that’s not what you signed up for, doesn’t it? The narcissism of using an "other" body in which to enact our desires, our pleasures up to the point where we perceive the reciprocity is off, then the balance of two narcissistic acts becomes unstable. I’m not talking about abuse, but the more subtle moment. You know, the moment when you keep blowing a guy because it takes him forever to get there, and sometimes you love that and sometimes you just want to throat punch him. Or the moment you know that it’s taking you a long time but you just don’t care because patriarchy….  or insert whatever gender roles you want in the examples and as many bodies as you want, because the metaphor remains consistent. Even exclusive of orgasmic conclusion, any physical or even media based sexual act is the desire to be seen and to be wanted by the other -outside of a sexual economy-   the desire to fulfill our desires enacted on a body not our own, conceptualized in a body not our own, various in a body not as familiar as our own. 

It’s selfish, even when we sugar coat it with the Disney premise of romantic love, even when we believe all we want is to please our partners, deep down we know the line is there, we know the minute it’s been crossed and because the line exists, ultimately, we have created a boundary around what sex is for, what is our end goal.

Sex in all of its permutations remains of the body and of pleasure when not abusive—which is not sex, but violence manifesting against our bodies in a sexualized way—and therefore subject to the illusion of our senses, the distortion by which we can write many kinds of fictions all over it. And we grow tired of all our desires… which is why we created romantic love as Lacan also points out. Desire only takes us so far…. but it’s everything in the writing. It’s a fire, isn’t it… unrequited desire. What I wouldn’t say to make you want me?

I am the I of the body and the I of the mind and the I of the Story; the story of I.

Chris, I have this fantasy. I have this fantasy on one end where the muse is replaced by the Dick. That we all get our Dicks and write like our minds are on fire. We put Dick in the role of the muse: passive, ethereal, angelic phallus in the house. And the other end that I tread even closer towards is the menstrual hut. I want to get back into the bleeding of it. I want to know a world written only from the vacuum of what occurs in the menstrual hut. I want discourse only of what is in the menstrual hut. I want art only made in the menstrual hut. I want language only created in the menstrual hut. I want to know what that world looks like… I want to have never known that there was a Dick we were measuring up against. Can we imagine that kind of universe… my book became about programming. How we are all programmed in our responses, in our attachments, in every thing we know about love. And if that is true, then we can break our coding/ we can hack into our own known variables and we can code anew… I think we can get back into the menstrual hut. I think we can learn to create out of the menstrual hut effectively erasing the fictions of history that program how we use our senses to make art.

I think our lives depend on it. I think it's something we remember, can remember, it's located in our DNA. This world inside our consciousness that erases any DICK that comes before the womb. It's our hysterical future.

More soon,

M