My Pleasure

I'm not a lesbian because of trauma.

Photo by Align Towards Spine on Unsplash

CW: Sexual trauma.

Dearly beloved readers,

I submitted a couple of iterations of this essay to A LOT of literary journals. I received in response a whole bunch of form rejection emails. A handful of non-responses. And a few almosts - made the short-list, in the final running, multiple editors on the team liked it. But ultimately, this one has not been selected for publication. After receiving my most recent “almost” a few days ago, I decided that I don’t have to wait for a journal to choose to publish this piece. I can just decide that I’m ready to release it, so I can move on. So, here it is! My most rejected piece of writing ever! On my Substack, where I choose not to reject myself!

Thank you for being a part of me getting this out into the world.

---

I'm a lesbian.

Whew.

A lesbian.

I can't believe I said it.

Finally.

That's who I am.

If I had to give something complex a simple label, one that someone else could understand.

What does attraction feel like? I thought it was supposed to feel like butterflies. I didn't know that I was a lesbian for so long because I did, in fact, experience what felt like butterflies with men. That churning sensation in my low belly, my heart beating faster, my breath shallow, my senses heightened. I know now that this commotion in my body is a marker not of desire, but of anxiety. I experience anxiety in the presence of an attractive man. Anxiety because thrill, threat, and shame are playing a mean game of Twister in my body.

Thrill, threat, and shame became entangled and bound early on for me. I was a child. I didn't understand. I knew that someone was hurting me, that something I didn't want was happening to me. I felt scared and powerless to stop it. But I also felt a physiological response to sexual stimulation, recognizing something in my body signaling that this sensation was supposed to feel good. I couldn't understand the coexistence of this bodily response with something I didn’t want. It felt good. But it didn't. But it did.

Arousal doesn’t mean that we enjoy what’s happening. It also doesn’t mean that we want what’s happening. Arousal is simply a way that sexual organs respond to stimuli.

Sexologist Emily Nagoski tells us that pleasure, desire, and arousal occur in different parts of our brains:

Liking – pleasure – is one system in our brains, the opioid system; wanting – desire – is another, mediated by dopamine; and learning – physiological response to learned cues – is a third. Genital arousal is the third – a learned response, the way that Pavlov’s dogs salivated in response to the bell…[it] can happen in response to sex-related cues, whether or not those cues are wanted or liked.

I didn't know the differences between liking, wanting, and responding to sexual touch. I thought that what I was experiencing was pleasure. Pleasure from being hurt. And that made me feel bad, wrong, filthy. It felt good. But it didn’t. But it did.

And the did is the root of the disgust, the reason why I sometimes feel sick when something starts to feel too good. The did is the root of the shame, the reason why I sometimes feel I’ve committed a crime when something starts to feel too good. The did is the root of the fear, the reason why I tense and clench and shield myself when something starts to feel too good.

I learned as a child that thrill, threat, and shame would always be one and the same. I never had the chance to discover what arousal, desire, and pleasure feel like for me, in my own time, in a safe way.

Many survivors are familiar with the discourse about trauma responses. We are collectively learning how these survival strategies in response to harm – strategies that are involuntary, unconscious, and irrational – shape our behaviors long after the injurious event has passed. They are the four F's: Fight, flight, freeze, fawn. Fight and flight can appear as more “active” modes of defense against that which we fear, while freeze and fawn might be deemed as “passive” strategies. None are right or wrong, and all share a common goal of keeping us alive. When I first learned these terms, I identified as a freezer and a fawner. But flight is the link between my freeze and fawn responses.

Flight doesn't always look like running away. It can also look like dissociating, like leaving our own bodies.

I see a man I find attractive. I see him seeing me. He approaches me. Freeze, flight, fawn, all ever so subtle. There's the initial freeze, that first hit of anxiety, in which I feel heavy, stuck, immobile. Then, I dissociate – flight. No longer present with my own thoughts or feelings, my consciousness vacates and floats above my body. Finally, I fawn. My awareness merges into his body, mirroring him, powering my mouth to say what I sense he wants to hear. Freeze, flight, and fawn are the responses that kept me alive as a child. It remains an automatic process. I can't fawn if I'm in my own body, attuning to the distress signals it gives me. Freezing and fleeing allow me to fawn, to feel this person's desire instead of my own, and to become what he wants.

---

Romantic and sexual attraction are not the same, though they are often conflated. I can experience romantic feelings for people of all genders. I can also feel arousal and have orgasms during sex with people of all genders. But does that mean that I’m sexually attracted to all genders? What parts of sex with cis men do I desire? What about sex with cis men feels good to me?

I get off on knowing that a man is getting off on me. I enjoy knowing that a man is experiencing pleasure not with me, but on me. If I'm something that provides gratification, an object upon which a man satisfies himself, that's how I know I'm worth something. If I'm not a doll upon which a man can enact his desire, what am I? Probably nothing, right?

I don’t desire sex with men as much as I have survived on the validation of my existence that came through being an object of male pleasure. I learned as a child that this objectification was my purpose. As an adult, the confirmation of this role was the only way I knew that I had a body others could see and feel. The only way I knew that I was real.

I once watched a woman online discussing how she was drawn to porn that depicted dynamics similar to the sexual trauma she'd experienced. She felt so much disgrace because of this. In a society that demonizes non-normative sexual practices, many of us judge ourselves for what we want, what we like, what turns us on. It's a scary thing to admit that, as survivors, we may be aroused by sex that mirrors our trauma. We may desire and enjoy that which resonates with our pain. Many of us already feel ashamed because of what happened to us. Getting turned on by echoes of harm – and feeling like we can't be honest about it – may exacerbate shame. But playing out, or watching others play out, sex that reminds us of our trauma can be part of how we transmute the energy of the violence we've experienced.

We may not even realize that that's what we're doing, that our bodies are drawing us to this kind of sex to help us face and heal our wounds. I never consciously sought out sexual experiences that reenacted my trauma. But my body did. And it did so, unbeknownst to me, every time I had sex with a man.

There I was, again. A boy on top of me, satiating himself with my body. Me knowing that it didn’t feel right. Knowing that I was wicked for allowing what I didn’t want to be done to me. For complying and resigning to never resist. I was rotten and deviant for this. I couldn’t tell the truth, couldn’t feel the truth. I floated up and away from what I couldn’t feel. And I landed inside of him. I felt that he felt good on me, felt good because he was on me. I couldn’t feel myself, so I left myself in order to feel his feeling good. Because I was not made to perceive from inside of me. I was made to be this freeze, this flight, this vacancy.

I struggle to write these words because I worry about the assumptions people might make and the stereotypes they might hold about queerness as a byproduct of trauma. The truth is that I was only ever sexually active with men because my wounded body wanted to return to the scene of its violation, seeking some kind of medicine. It was my wound that wanted men, not me.

I'm not a lesbian because of trauma. I was straight because of it.

My body looked not to porn but to romantic relationships with men to fill the void. It hoped that being chosen by men as an adult would grant me the safety, protection, and care that my inner child desired from the person who harmed her. But no amount of romantic love from men could mend what was maimed inside of me. The pain remained, even as I received that for which I thought I ached.

I know now that, when I have sex with men, I'm facing and transmuting trauma. There’s a magic in that. When I have sex with women, I'm exploring what it means to experience my authentic desire, my original blueprint. There’s a magic in that, too. But it will be the work of a lifetime to learn how to, deep down, feel my sexual self as something other than an object of shame.

---

I’ve led workshops with young people and adults on sexual violence prevention and consent education. I’ve offered resources and support to survivors on a rape crisis hotline. I’ve studied the systems of oppression that create and disseminate beliefs that normalize harm. I’ve had access to incredible therapists who’ve supported me in understanding how my unique combination of life experiences shaped my nervous system and, in turn, my trauma responses. Even as I’ve learned, healed, and shared what I know with others, I still face shame. Shame remains because of all I was taught about how real survivors were supposed to react.

Real survivors fight.

I felt I was not worthy of support because I never tried to fight. Fighting was impossible, a non-option in my body. But not fighting meant I wasn’t someone anyone would believe. Not fighting meant I didn’t try hard enough to make it stop. Not fighting meant it was my fault that it happened, and therefore I would never be afforded the care I needed.

I didn’t fight then. But my body sure as hell fights now. It’s as though every cell is kicking and screaming to the sky in all of my sexual encounters. I’m not fighting against an attack. I’m fighting against pleasure, treating pleasure as a perpetrator. My body tries to protect me from shame by not allowing pleasure in. It knows that I viewed the arousal response to harm as a betrayal. And it doesn’t want to betray me ever again.

But pleasure was never my enemy. Pleasure has only ever wanted to be my remedy. Could I even withstand it, allowing pleasure in to that degree?

There may come a day when I feel so safe within myself that I can be that open, that out of control, that receptive with someone else. For now, I’m grateful that I’ve developed a practice of learning how much pleasure I can allow in the container of my relationship with myself.

Pleasure with myself is healing me. The feeling of my own hands transmitting safe, loving energy into my body. An energy that, I, in turn, receive from myself.

I’m learning how to exchange the thrill/threat/shame game for an arousal/desire/pleasure dance. A dance that can be as fast or slow, gentle or raucous, as I choose. A series of steps that, with time, I begin to remember. Steps that some part of me always knew.

From the practice of self-pleasure, I build self-trust. I learn to trust myself with myself, trust my body in my own care. Many survivors lose access to this trust when we are harmed. This can be especially true for those of us who didn’t fight. We, the freezers. We, the fawners. Those who submitted, appeased the people who hurt us because it was the only way we knew how to survive. Those of us who couldn’t explain why we froze. Those of us who didn’t understand why our bodies experienced arousal during abuse or assault. Those of us who thought the arousal or the fawn meant that we were bad and wrong. I’ve learned that I can reclaim a piece of that lost self-trust every time I locate my faith in my own hands, every time I place my pleasure in my own custody.

---

At the beginning of 2021, safely ensconced in the cocoon of my studio apartment in the months before my first dose of the Covid vaccine, I had a virtual consultation with an Iyanifa, a mother of wisdom and divination in the Ifá tradition. I’d recently begun to maintain an ancestor altar, deepening my curiosity about African Traditional Religions into an experiment with practice. I was eager to develop my capacity to commune and communicate with my ancestral lineages.

I was also scared. I feared that my ancestors wouldn’t understand or accept my queerness. I knew of no queer ancestors by name, had no known queer point of contact in that realm. Would my people on the other side – especially those I knew in this lifetime or who died shortly before I was born, people I knew to be rooted in Christian heteropatriarchal norms – be there for me if my embodiment existed outside of what they understood or accepted while they were here on Earth?

I posed this question to the Iyanifa, holding my breath during the pause in which she consulted with Spirit. She emitted a soft giggle as she relayed the answer. You are not the first, not the only, not the last, she began. They support you. They love and accept you. What they won’t accept is you lying to yourself.

In that moment, I interpreted her message as an encouragement to be more open with myself and the people in my life about the depth of my attraction to women. It’s only now that I understand what my ancestors truly meant. No more lying to myself about what I thought was my attraction to men. No more lying to myself and others about who I am or what I’ve been through. No more living unconsciously from my wound. No more hiding from the truth.

I’m a lesbian and a survivor.

Whew.

A lesbian and a survivor.

There, I said it.

Finally.

That’s who I am.

My ancestors know me, and they understand.

Photo by Adéọlá Adérè̩mí on Unsplash