my desire is for you. but also for the sexual community summoned by your body, the inordinate possibility of you, your dream: of a sexual and social empathy that negated the strictures of gender […] before girls were crushed under and segregated. it was a dream of sexual transcendence: transcending the absolutely dichotomized male-female world [...] a dream of being less female in a world less male...1 and my desire precisely for this: your quixotic bisexual energy, an abandon which is not hedonistic at all, but ecstatic, in the true sense of the word. that is, revolutionary. how i wanted to tell them, the boys, that on the contrary, i had no desire to dominate, to “turn the tables”, but to forge (as it were) in the smithy of my cunt the uncreated conscience of my sex. and if i cannot have a fucking so free that domination itself collapses inside of it, then i do not see the point in fucking at all. when i wanted sex, i wanted sex as an act of muscular cherishing. and your body, which calls to me less as a form than a frontier, a wide horizon that excites exploration. i imagine the voluptuary vigour of you, your alternating currents of resistance and give. i want to want. you wrote this too. my desire is for desire itself, the essence, the quick. not this, this limply hedged thing of consequence and calculation. wanted – want – simultaneously, the freedom to desire and the freedom from it. you are not desired as much as you are desire itself, a model for desire, for desiring, how you contain an erotics of multitudes, a map and a path to new and miraculous ways of being in and being with the body. this was my dream. one of them. and a gay male friend says “yuck, how can you possibly be attracted to that?” and a straight male friend calls you a “monster”. and a queer female friend calls you a “prude” and a “terf”, “hysterical” and “anti-sex”. but, no. if you are monster then you are monstrous only in the sense that you are a kind of revelation; that the sight of you burns, knocks aside your receiving subjects, forces a painful expansion in the aesthetic canons of the female body, to what they call “beauty”, to what they call “natural”. yes. the unbearable shock of a body having escaped its status as a collective object; of a body unavailable to male desire, an illegible body whose meaning exceeds their dweeby grasp. the etymology of “monster” summons “freak”, but also “omen”, “prediction”, “sign” and “wonder”, a warning from the forces of the sacred.2 in this way you are monstrous, a “that” whose rhetorical inclusion in the human community they cannot stand. you surpass and refuse this community, its values and its visual culture. “monster” is your being (in) a body that belongs to and is an elsewhere and an otherwise, that must necessarily exist – must place itself, by sheer force of will – beyond gender. there is nothing in you that is cold or repressed. you write of sex, of your own sexual desire, with pure whitmanic relish, with a raw sensual reach. your rejection is not of sex, but of the nauseating positivity that glosses abuse. you hate, are saddened, and ultimately defeated by what they have made of sex, of desire itself, of the loathsome psychic and social architecture that narrows the parameters of our sexual expression; that anticipates and limits the very language in which we might frame our wanting. my desire for the sheer integrity of you, how whole you are, how you cannot and will not be shamed outside of yourself, looking in at yourself with a hate-conditioned eye – with their eye - as if you truly were a “that”, a thing. how i have looked at myself, cannot stop looking. i desire you how they tried so hard to turn your miraculous body back into the subject of their stare. monsters are seldom represented. monsters are strenuously produced. women exist – and “ugly” women in particular exist – under a kind of surveillance that seeks to covert their living flesh into text, into fetish and spectacle. they made you a trope, a meme, a caricature, a crutch for their referential systems; tried to force you back into their frameworks, define you in relation to themselves. you evade such capture, and only the stupidest refuse to see it. for everything they call you, you have already claimed, trumped, turned upside-down and inside out. their rage breaks (on) you, has nowhere to go. i have desired you for your strength. for your frustrated pursuit of pleasure, or comradeship, a way to exist in – and if not exist, then remake – the world. a body that will not be measured, enrolled, verified, accepted. a soul that does not seek those things, for whom survival was never enough. whose desire was for life, who wanted to live.
…
1 From Right Wing Women, Chapter 3, Abortion (Picador, 1982)
2 Zakiya Hanafi, The Monster in the Machine (Duke University Press, 200)