In current “grrrl” culture, I’ve noted the ascendancy of the phrase “I need X like I need a dick in my ass.” Meaning, of course, that X is precisely what you don’t need (dick in my ass = hole in my head = fish with a bicycle, and so on). I’m all for girls feeling empowered to reject sexual practices that they don’t enjoy, and God knows many straight boys are all too happy to stick it in any hole, even one that hurts. But I worry that such expressions only underscore the “ongoing absence of a discourse of female anal eroticism … the flat fact that, since classical times, there has been no important and sustained Western discourse in which women’s anal eroticism means. Means anything.”
Sedgwick did an enormous amount to put women’s anal eroticism on the map (even though she was mostly into spanking, which is not precisely an anal pursuit). But while Sedgwick (and Fraiman) want to make space for women’s anal eroticism to mean, that is not the same as inquiring into how it feels. Even ex-ballerina Toni Bentley, who knocked herself out to become the culture’s go-to girl for anal sex in her memoir The Surrender, can’t seem to write a sentence about ass-fucking without obscuring it via metaphor, bad puns, or spiritual striving. And Fraiman exalts the female anus mostly for what it is not: the vagina (presumably a lost cause, for the sodomite).
I am not interested in a hermeneutics, or an erotics, or a metaphorics, of my anus. I am interested in ass-fucking. I am interested in the fact that the clitoris, disguised as a discrete button, sweeps over the entire area like a manta ray, impossible to tell where its eight thousand nerves begin and end. I am interested in the fact that the human anus is one of the most innervated parts of the body, as Mary Roach explained to Terry Gross in a perplexing piece of radio that I listened to while driving Iggy home from his twelve-month vaccinations. I checked on Iggy periodically in the rearview mirror for signs of a vaccine-induced neuromuscular breakdown while Roach explained that the anus has “tons of nerves. And the reason is that it needs to be able to discriminate, by feel, between solid, liquid and gas and be able to selectively release one or maybe all of those. And thank heavens for the anus because, you know, really a lot of gratitude, ladies and gentlemen, to the human anus.” To which Gross replied: “Let’s take a short break here, then we’ll talk some more. This is Fresh Air.”
A few months after Florida: you always wanting to fuck, raging with new hormones and new comfort in your skin; me vaulting fast into the unfuckable, not wanting to dislodge the hard-won baby seed, falling through the bed with dizziness whenever I turned my head—falling forever—all touch starting to sicken, as if the cells of my skin were individually nauseated.
That hormones can make the feel of wind, or the feel of fingers on one’s skin, change from arousing to nauseating is a mystery deeper than I can track or fathom. The mysteries of psychology pale in comparison, just as evolution strikes me as infinitely more spiritually profound than Genesis.
Our bodies grew stranger, to ourselves, to each other. You sprouted coarse hair in new places; new muscles fanned out across your hip bones. My breasts were sore for over a year, and while they don’t hurt anymore, they still feel like they belong to someone else (and in a sense, since I’m still nursing, they do). For years you were stone; now you strip your shirt off whenever you feel like it, emerge muscular, shirtless, into public spaces, go running — swimming, even.
Via T, you’ve experienced surges of heat, an adolescent budding, your sexuality coming down from the labyrinth of your mind and disseminating like a cottonwood tree in a warm wind. You like the changes, but also feel them as a sort of compromise, a wager for visibility, as in your drawing of a ghost who proclaims, Without this sheet, I would be invisible. (Visibility makes possible, but it also disciplines: disciplines gender, disciplines genre.) Via pregnancy, I have my first sustained encounter with the pendulous, the slow, the exhausted, the disabled. I had always presumed that giving birth would make me feel invincible and ample, like fisting. But even now — two years out — my insides feel more quivery than lush. I’ve begun to give myself over to the idea that the sensation might be forever changed, that this sensitivity is now mine, ours, to work with. Can fragility feel as hot as bravado? I think so, but sometimes struggle to find the way. Whenever I think I can’t find it, Harry assures me that we can. And so we go on, our bodies finding each other again and again, even as they — we — have also been right here, all along.
For reasons almost incomprehensible to me now, I cried a little when our first ultrasound technician — the nice, seemingly gay Raoul, who sported a little silver sperm-squiggle pin on his white coat — told us at twenty weeks that our baby was a boy, without a shadow of a doubt. I guess I had to mourn something— the fantasy of a feminist daughter, the fantasy of a mini-me. Someone whose hair I could braid, someone who might serve as a femme ally to me in a house otherwise occupied by an adorable boy terrier, my beautiful, swaggery stepson, and a debonair butch on T.
But that was not my fate, nor was it the baby’s. Within twenty-four hours of hearing the news, I was on board. Little Agnes would be little Iggy. And I would love him fiercely. Maybe I would even braid his hair! As you reminded me on the drive home from our appointment, Hey, I was born female, and look how that turned out.
Despite agreeing with Sedgwick’s assertion that “women and men are more like each other than chalk is like cheese, than ratiocination is like raisins, than up is like down, or than 1 is like 0,” it took me by surprise that my body could make a male body. Many women I know have reported something of the same, even though they know this is the most ordinary of miracles. As my body made the male body, I felt the difference between male and female body melt even further away. I was making a body with a difference, but a girl body would have been a different body too. The principal difference was that the body I made would eventually slide out of me and be its own body. Radical intimacy, radical difference. Both in the body, both in the bowl.
I kept thinking then about something poet Fanny Howe once said about bearing biracial children, something about how you become what grows inside you. But however “black” Howe might have felt herself becoming while gestating her children, she also remained keenly aware that the outside world was ready and waiting — and all too willing — to reinforce the color divide. She is of her children, and they are of her. But they know and she knows they do not share the same lot.
This divide provoked in Howe the sensation of being a double agent, especially in all-white settings. She recalls how, at gatherings in the late ’60s, white liberals would openly converse “about their fear of blacks, and their judgments of blacks, and I had to announce to them that my husband and children were black, before hastily departing.” This scene was not limited to the ’60s. “This event has been repeated so many times, in multiple forms, that by now I make some kind of give-away statement after entering a white-only room, one way or the other, that will warn the people there ‘which side I am on,’” Howe says. “On these occasions, more than any others, I feel that my skin is white but my soul is not, and that I am in camouflage.”