Democra___y: A year without sex

Obergefell, "The Dry Season," spells, and stories

A few days ago, I attended an “unliterary salon” titled “Pleasure and Resistance,” where we were encouraged to bring something to share related to “how pleasure dismantles oppression or what comes after the end of patriarchy” — a poem, a reading, a story, a song, etc.

Last summer on a witchy pilgrimage to Salem, MA, I picked up a spell from HausWitch metaphysical shop that I’d been saving for just the right occasion.

Bingo.

The spell instructions involved writing down the names of individuals or groups “utilizing the cis hetero white supremacist patriarchy to promote hate or cause harm,” then rolling up the paper, tying it with cotton string, and burying it in the ground where the negative energy would be composted into something nourishing and positive.

Because the theme of the salon was related to pleasure and its relationship to patriarchy, I wanted to add my own spin to the spell.

I shared a story with the gathering of mostly queer, mostly strangers about how when I started having sex with my first college boyfriend — the first boyfriend I’d ever had sex with — I was able to cum easily any time I was on top. But one night mid-coitus, with an exasperated sigh, he looked up at me and said, “You might as well be humping my leg; I can’t feel anything at all.”

I lost my orgasm for YEARS after that, at least in the context of sex with other people.

To be honest… I have still not fully recovered, 25 years later.

My fellow salon-goers reacted with horror and fury and a chorus of “fuck that guy”s. Then, at my suggestion, they wrote down the names of anyone who had ever separated them from their own pleasure. (One sweet new friend asked the name of my ex-boyfriend so she could include him in her spell, too.)

At the end of the party, I dug a shallow hole, piled up the names of all the various jerks, and buried them in the rocky dirt.

The next day, I celebrated one year of celibacy.

Maybe “celebrated” isn’t exactly the right word. But it also isn’t that far off…

I’ve been trying to figure out how to talk about this past year in a way that feels accurate to my experience. Fortunately, I finished reading Melissa Febos’s new book The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex on the one-year anniversary of my own last sexual experience. It’s been a useful accomplice in my self-reflection.

To disrupt her possibly-unhealthy patterns in relationships, Febos decided to commit to three months of celibacy, which she ended up extending into a full year as she “learned to relish the delights of solitude.”

As I navigate a divorce from a man I was with for the better part of 20 years, I might be leaning a bit hard into solitude. While I know many fresh divorcees sprint to the apps to sow all the oats they’ve stored up throughout their marriages, that has not been my impulse.

My abstinence has felt more like a “flight response” than a thoughtfully considered course of action — if someone sends a flirty DM or tries to catch my eye IRL, I get the urge to fling my phone in front of a bus, or Homer Simpson myself backward into a bush.

Is this just a normal fear of the “mortifying ordeal of being known”?

Maybe. But I’m starting to think it’s something else.

Today is the 10-year anniversary of the Obergefell v. Hodges U.S. Supreme Court ruling that made gay marriage legal throughout the country — a decision that came down five-ish years into my own straight marriage.

This morning, I read reflections from Americans who had been profoundly impacted by Obergefell, and I felt such tenderness for all of them. I was overcome with joy and awe for the tangible difference a single pen-stroke had made in their lives.

And then I thought about Sally Ride.

Obergefell legitimized gay couples in the eyes of the law barely less than three years after astronaut Sally Ride died of pancreatic cancer, her obituary revealing publicly for the first time that she’d been in a 27-year lesbian relationship with the love of her life, Tam O'Shaughnessy.

A few days ago as I watched the new Sally Ride documentary, I sobbed and sobbed.

I cried for how quiet Sally and so many others had to be about their love. How painful it must have been not to have any photographs with your arms thrown around the person you’d committed your life to.

And then I cried for my younger self.

The self who’d fallen hard for a woman with whom I’d made a mutual decision never to be in a “real” relationship with because we felt certain our conservative parents would disown us, that the road would be too hard for us to walk.

We’d have to be satisfied with stolen kisses in bar bathroom stalls until I met the man I’d marry and I had to steal my kisses back from her forever.

Once, I told my young daughter that I had a girlfriend before I met her daddy. Her eyes grew wide. “YOU? Did you love her? Did you marry her?” she asked in astonishment.

“I did love her,” I said. “I couldn’t marry her, though. It was against the law.”

I don’t know if we would have had a lasting relationship even if we had given ourselves permission to let it be “real.” I doubt it, considering I was a baby queer with an underdeveloped pre-frontal cortex.

But sometimes I wonder how my life might have been different if the possibility of gay marriage had existed sooner… if I’d had permission to imagine a different life for myself than the one the culture had imagined for me.

I’m so grateful that Melissa Febos is also queer, and that The Dry Season grapples with the ways that the cis hetero white supremacist patriarchy shapes our relationships to others and to ourselves, consciously and (for most of my life) unconsciously.

Febos’s clarity in this section in particular took my breath away:

“I don’t date men anymore,” I reminded my friend.

“So what?” she said. “If I remember correctly, you’re capable of enjoying sex with men. You can stop if you don’t like it.”

Was that true? One of the things that I remembered about sleeping with men was that it was hard to stop even if you didn’t like it. It felt easier to just keep fucking them, because then you wouldn’t have to emotionally clean up afterward. It was easier to keep fucking them than to find out how awful they might be when sexually thwarted — a potential I knew was hard to overestimate. Masculinity was a glass vase perpetually at the edge of the table.

I thought of my you-might-as-well-be-humping-my-leg ex-boyfriend and suddenly remembered a piece of the story I’d left out in my retelling the other night.

The last time we’d had sex before that time, I had grown tired of being pounded at. Rather than risk the consequences of asking him to stop, I had allowed my gaze to wander around the room, absently scratching at an itch on my hip. Even that subtly rebellious move was enough to push the glass vase of his masculinity off the edge of the table, and he was looking for a way to retaliate.

He succeeded smashingly.

He convinced me that my own pleasure was not something I was entitled to pursue, at least not in the context of a relationship.

My copy of The Dry Season is riddled with dog-ears and underlines, but there was one particular sentence that I surrounded in asterisks as an audible gasp escaped my lips:

“Identity is a story other people tell us, that we learn to tell ourselves, that is housed inside relationships.”

Perhaps my fear of being perceived is the protectiveness a writer feels for a piece that’s not yet ready for anyone else’s opinionated eyes.

I’m re-writing the story of myself, and the new story (which is just a return to the beginning of my story before the cis hetero white supremacist patriarchy took over the narrative) is not yet formed enough to bear the weight of someone else’s gaze.

Like the tiny scrolls I covered with dirt the other night, the stories other people told me about myself still need a little more time to compost before the bud of identity that’s beginning to re-emerge is strong enough to withstand the elements.

So for now I’m going to keep working on my story without worrying about anyone editing over my shoulder.

And I’m going to see if I can find out how much fun one person can have in bed.