I enjoyed a long discussion with S. last week, a woman in her mid-thirties with a deep relationship with pornography as a viewer. She shared my interest in rough sex, but took issue with my desire to want to explain the interest via early trauma or familial upbringing, ie, the psychoanalytic approach. Some days after we spoke, she sent me this treatise, which was just too interesting not to publish:

last year, i read this quote from a 2008 article on scientific american, and its essence is the heart of sexual dynamics in women and men: “[Orgasm] requires a release of inhibitions engineered by shutdown of the brain’s center of vigilance in both sexes and a widespread neural power failure in females” (here’s the entire article). when i read “widespread neural power failure,” i think i gasped. that is exactly what happens in the female brain during sex. and that phenomenon is the thing i love and loathe best. this is a tough topic to tackle.

my main issue with your point of view re: rough sex is that it does not take neurological impulses into consideration. nurture plays a vital role in all mammalian development (all organisms, actually), but it is not the opposite as nature. nurture and nature, i’ve come to believe, are the same thing. evolution is not a reaction to environment. evolution isn’t even really evolution as we’ve been taught. it’s more of a continuous formula that never, ever hesitates or finds an end solution. “DNA is history, not fate” - picked that up somewhere, and even just looking at the basic structure of a helix, it makes so much sense.

as i’ve gone through the ridiculous and often pointless journey that is art skool, i’ve had too much solo time to think about my intentions, and to feed my brain audibooks on neuroscience and medicine, which have quickly become strong obsessions. i’ve got old sob stories and hence many experiences with psychology, analysis and various kinds of shrinks - i’ve literally exhausted psychiatric resources to help understand how to navigate the manic impulse that is my brain, an endeavor that has included much off-road shit like body work, psychics, soul workers, etc. - and although a few answers came about, nothing has made more sense than basic brain neurology. a lot of the art i’m making is saying, i think, that popular psychology and psychiatry and the entire mental health industry are almost entirely off point, and pretty much full of shit. DNA, heredity, genes, compound chemicals and everything else that makes up the still-budding science of neurology are slowly beating freud to death. it brings me great pleasure to watch him die (though i’ve always admired his own sexual obsessions).

how the fuck does this tie into human sexuality? i think my ever-growing theories on this are a little too left-field to be valid. of course i’ve spent more time examining my own sexuality because i have rarely met women who have the same sexual impulses that i have. as i get further into my 30’s, my sex drive just gets stronger. i’ve often wished i could take a pill to calm it down, because the eustress it brings is always overwhelmed by the distress. and it’s the distress that ties back to widespread neural power failure. men wish that women could fuck without emotional attachment; women believe that men cannot fuck without experiencing at least some degree of emotional attachment. the battle between the sexes goes on and on.

i’ll attempt to steer this into a smaller ring of thought. looking at marriage, which is where the majority of people my age end up, and its history is interesting. the notion of romantic love and marriage is a fairly recent phenomenon, and has been pretty good for the human population in terms of procreation. but it has also created a couple generations of emotional basket cases who believe that monogamy is the right, good path to a rewarding life, and a sign of robust mental health.

i had the benefit and disadvantage (same thing?) of coming from a totally broken home, one that was linked to many generations of unhappy unions, and was raised by religiously cynical people. from a very young age, i was discouraged to marry, and both told and shown that marriage destroys sexual health. my mother had and has a crippling, inhibited sexuality, though she did some exploring in her 50’s after she divorced my father. my dad, quite oppositely, has always been a ferociously sexual person, and his aggressiveness is something i believe i inherited. i’ve never been inclined towards shyness when approaching men, and my aggressive sexuality has been a very difficult thing to deal with - especially in the south, which is where i fled when i was 18.

several years ago, i had my blood tested for something - i don’t remember what. my testosterone levels were twice the normal rate in females my age at the time. over the years, i can actually feel my testosterone levels rise. i can identify the sensation of testosterone hitting my bloodstream and traveling to different areas in my brain. i have to shave my face and chest daily, lest i sport a fairly impressive chin and cleavage beard. one of my sisters has the same deal with the hairy factor. the real bitch - the crux of what i struggle with when it comes to sex - is that i also have regular/possibly abnormal levels of estrogen/adrenaline/other gonad hormones that, when combined with the high testosterone, create very intense emotional reactions to sexual behavior. i also can’t make it through the day without a good overdose of dopamine. i have tried for years to segment emotions, to redirect neuro pathways, to replace one activity with something less distressing, and art-making has been the one single thing that can harness this energy. but even as i’m obsessing with a project, my brain is still constantly bombarded with impulses for sex. i can go about 9 months without acting on them, and then i must. fuck. something. or. go. insane.

here’s the thing, though: khan tusion, who i believe shares similar sexual impulses - in that what he’s after is intensity - believes he is seeking an outlet for power, emotional domination, etc. i don’t want power. when i have that kind of power, it has little interest for me because the sport is gone. i want to give that power away and challenge myself or whomever i’m obsessing over at the time with getting it back in the form of obsession. i don’t want to drive a man to suicide, but i do want him to fall in lust with me to the point of breaking. i’ve broken a few in my day, and the subsequent shame is probably the same guilt khan deals with after his own breaking methods. the main difference, i think, is that i cannot prevent myself from breaking in this process. in order to break someone else, i have to let myself break first. this is one of the things i dislike most about being female. if i could enjoy sex without such intense emotional fixations, that would be great. i think. maybe it would suck. the ongoing game obviously has some appeal, because i’ve been playing it since i was a child.

so when i think about this these days, i try to figure out and locate the root of the why. one of my left-field theories is that, based on the intellectual and professional inclinations of my family and my ancestors, we have some serious warrior-DNA circulating through our systems. like, scottish serfdom battle axe grinding killer drinker fuckers. i think we were bred to live short and hard, which may explain my family’s fairly consistent themes of sex, addiction, anger, fighting, working hard and playing even harder. maybe we come from a peoples who were bred for war. there is a strong history of military connections in my family, and i have literally had to stop myself from joining the national guard on multiple occasions.

so - take the above wordiness into account, and then get old-fashioned and take some more popular items into account. i was molested at a young age, exposed to pornography at a young age. but i do not agree with the passiveness of those statements, because i sought them out. my molester was a family member, a good-looking teenaged boy whom i remember flirting with. i deliberately sought out porn magazines when i was like 8 or some shit. and i wanted to watch my first porn so intensely that porn itself has become completely entangled with how my brain handles sexual response. i will always love it. and like you, i want it dirty, honest and challenging.

i guess what i’m saying is that i don’t think i was molested because my molester was a pervert, or because my family life was fucked up, or because i was weak. i think i sought out sexual attention at the age of 5 because i am hardwired to be highly sexual. i understand how the environment in which i was raised affected this wiring, but i do think i could have been born into any caste system in any country and i still would’ve ended up with high levels of testosterone and a pretty ferocious sex drive because of it. i often think i would’ve ended up in porn or some kind of sex work if i’d chosen a large city to escape to, instead of the south. i often think i should do sex work for a living because i’d enjoy it and i’d be pretty good at it if i could train myself to control the estrogen/emotional side of sex. i’ve begun approaching sex as a physical sport, training my body and brain for different kinds of encounters on different levels of emotional attachment, and the results are interesting so far. training works.

this is where i get into judeo-christian cultures of sexuality, and how different cultures have approached sex as sport throughout history, and how sex serves many purposes instead of the most common romantic version we’re raised into in america. the internet’s impact on sexual culture is probably the thing that fascinates me most at the moment. i can’t wait to see how things change as the web becomes older.

i’m not crazy about using my own experiences as the primary demonstration for some of the theories i have, but it’s difficult to find discourse on this topic in this town. this is a difficult place to explore sex period, though it can be done. just lots of prying open minds :).