Image by Suehiro Maruo
Ditching My Vibrator for Bataille
Sometimes masturbating means to read an erotic novella at your desk in a sterile office, senses on edge as grey passersby drone on about regulations and billing codes.
I sometimes find masturbation to be unpleasant, like digging endlessly for a treasure I’ll never find. When I masturbate on my bed, in my little room with the thin purple walls, I feel alone. Everything around me is just me. Neither memory nor imagination feel sufficient. Each image is destined to appear only for a moment before disappearing again on the baggage carousel of fantasies.
I repeat a good fuck over and over again, from different angles, with different outcomes, tapping into unperformed possibilities. It feels so nice to think of being eaten that way and so I dig harder and harder until it hurts. Not just in my cunt, but all over – in my stomach, in my hands, in my heart, in my brain. It’s that same awful drop of the stomach I get when I am dumped out of an excellent dream and into a reality that does not contain the same arrangement.
“Get a vibrator,” my friend Al tells me.
“Yeah, yeah...” I used to have one. But I’m not interested in an efficient orgasm. I’m not interested in physically replicating what sex feels like at all really. Imitation falls flat. I want masturbation to be an independent pleasure, incomparable to other sexual acts. Not because it’s necessarily “better,” but because it’s a way of acting out my sexuality that has no standard or comparison, a way of speaking that no one can understand but me.
I’m starting to suspect that my insecurities about all of this are rooted in the promise that masturbation should bring me satisfaction, power, and control beyond anything I’ve ever managed to achieve. Two cultural references come to mind that put this idea in my head. The first is Hélène Cixous and “The Laugh of the Medusa,” that weird essay you’ve probably read in an undergraduate women’s studies class. There are beautiful things in this essay: the call for bravery, the appeal to women and to anyone labeled as “other” to embrace difference and to channel it as a source of strength and creativity and power. Cixous says masturbation can represent this, too, because it liberates pleasure from the need for an other. Autoerotics affirm agency.
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Beatrice Loayza is a writer and translator living in Washington, D.C. She is an unconventional Capricorn, but a Capricorn nonetheless.
