The Erotic Doesn't Let You Lie

What I love about the erotic is that you can’t lie.

To yourself, I mean.

People lie to each other all the time in erotic spaces. They fake orgasms and say, “No, that doesn’t bother me,” when it does.

You can lie to yourself during the act of sex: you can turn off the lights so you don’t see the truth about your body. You can pretend like you aren’t attracted to that gender or that person or that idea and shove it away as deep as it can go.

But you can’t lie to yourself in the erotic. Your body wants or it doesn’t want. It reacts or it doesn’t react. You cry or you don’t cry; you leak, spill, gape, shut down, turn off, or turn on. You just do. The truth will out. The truth cannot be faked. Not to yourself. You know. You always know.

Today I joined a writer’s group hosted by the creator of the website Read Aurore (“p*rn with a plotline, as smart as it is sexy”). I have zero plans to publish written p*rn. But in my own chase towards truth, writing is my skiff and the erotic is my ever-widening horizon.

Today’s writing prompt: “What is your ‘last meal’ sex? If you knew you were going to die…what’s the last sexual experience you’d want to have?”

You can’t lie in the erotic, and you can’t lie in death, either. (Yesterday, in fact, I wrote about how church is a weekly death meditation.) The truth will out when you contemplate your last last.

When you have your “last meal,” I guess one assumption is that it will be elaborate and full of all the foods you never got to try. The last last should be the bucket list item, the trip to Tanzania, the maxed-out credit card. That’s a life well lived.

Sometimes, though, the last meal people ever want is chicken nuggets the way their mom made them. That’s the truth. You can’t pretend to be a fancier person. You can’t pretend to be a person with better or more interesting taste. At the final calculus, you just want to remember what it’s like to be loved.

I have spent years of my life thinking that I wanted or needed elaborate sexual experiences. I won’t tell you how many toys I own: it’s a lot. (I’ve never used the vast majority of them more than once.) I won’t tell you how many flavors I’ve tried and the things I pretended I might be into in the name of being cosmopolitan, of demonstrating that I’m experienced, of being a chill girl.

If you ask me this question, though, and I actually answer: what is the last last you ever want to taste? If you asked me to distill down what I really want, what’s the thing that is so precious that I would have to do it one last time?

I would call one of two people, both former lovers, both currently close friends. I would ask them to do me the honor of reminding me what it’s like to be a body on this earth, one last time. And either of them certainly would. I know they would in the same way I know they would pick me up from the airport, visit me in the hospital, help me move. Carry my coffin as pallbearers to my final resting place. They would do it for me because they love me.

I would ask them to remind me, one last time, what it’s like to have someone kiss the freckles on my shoulder and run their fingers down my arm. I would ask them to remind me what it’s like to be tasted, what it’s like to taste. The squeeze, the itch, the rub. Their velvet in my mouth. My hair in their fist, trickling through their fingers like silk.

I’d remind them of that time (that time in the car; that time we were a little high and everything looked like candy canes to me; that time at your house, at my house, and everywhere in between).

At the final calculus, when everything is stripped away, when I know I’m gonna die: I would worship their body. Every place they feel a little fat; a little small; a little jagged. I would want to leave them knowing that the things they hated the most about themselves were the things that I loved the best. I worshipped them.

And at the final calculus, I realize: so much of my own lying and pretending is because I am afraid. Afraid that the way my vagina contracts and refuses to let men in means I’m broken, means I’m unlovable, unworthy. I have spent my life afraid that if I don’t make up for the things I hate about myself, that if I don’t try harder, show up better, pretend to be different…that you will hate me too.

But if I’m gonna die, and we both know I’m gonna die, I know exactly what would be truly erotic to me. I’ll just try one last time to ride him. Because why not? And if it doesn’t work, the way it never works, the way my body always says no…we’ll just do what we always did. We’ll laugh, and you’ll tell me again, the way you always told me: it doesn’t matter. I’m just so happy to be here with you.

I would do that exact experience again: the thing I thought I hated, the thing I thought made me broken, made me flawed. If I were gonna die. The failure. The awkwardness. The ways that I fall flat, the ways I hit the skids: I’d hit them over and over and over again. Just to be with you.