Hera and I have been engaging in all sorts of fun projects together. One of them concerns anger, and its relationship to sex. Hera asked me a couple of interesting questions:
Do you know how to most effectively stoke your anger?
I read this question, and I was like, wait, what? The idea that I might seek to stoke my anger is just… totally foreign to me. As I’ve written, my understanding of (my) anger, my relationship to it, is that it’s almost always a sort of artifact of other, more painful emotions. Sadness. Loss. Fear. Envy. Jealousy. The anger is a sort of secondary response to those other emotions. And while I do not actively seek to avoid negative emotions – at least, I try not to – I certainly don’t affirmatively seek them out. So…. were I to “stoke” my anger, I’d have to chase one or more of those emotions, and that just sounds… really unappealing. I mean, I get it. There’s a payoff. One of my hottest encounters with V was when I was just FURIOUS with her. Scared. Jealous. Sad. Miserable. And yeah, the fucking was good. But honestly? I’d so much prefer not to have had that fuck.
Ditto with Charlotte. I’ve fucked her a few times, each time, in a context of anger, a context of fear or sadness or envy or jealousy or some combination of all of that.
Fucking? Good. Anger? Not so much, for me.
And/still…. Hera’s question has me thinking. What if I were to seek to stoke my anger, and/but, to do it within a context of control, of self-protection. Is that even a thing? Like… Envy feels to me, in some ways, the least painful/destructive substrate for (my) anger, as I don’t, actually, need to suffer anything other than longing. Sadness requires loss. Loss requires loss. Fear? Well, that’s just scary. But envy? It sort of transmutes itself seamlessly into rage, without any threat to my ego, to my existence. So maybe, maybe, if I were to cultivate a sort of radical envy, I could spur myself on to a destructive, ferocious rage that might inform a particularly good fucking. Maybe?
That’s interesting to ponder…. And, I suppose, also interesting to ponder is my profound aversion to all the rest of this….
Have you practiced trying to get angry?
Um. Ditto, here. Like, what would that even look like? I can’t imagine being an actor, having to gin up all these emotions for realz that aren’t pleasant. It just sounds… awful. So no, I haven’t practiced trying to get angry. But. I take it I should definitely give all this a lot more thought.
Related: Hera wrote, “[I]t’s interesting to me that you say the position you are most likely to last in is the one where you are the least aggressive in posture and in some ways you aren’t the perpetrator.“
This, in response to my having observed – here, on this blog, and in conversation with Hera – that when, in the past, I paid for handjobs, or when, in the present, I get a blowjob, my control over my orgasm is something close to perfect. That is to say, a woman can suck my cock for days. She can rub my cock for days. I will come within, roughly, sixty seconds, and often, just five or ten seconds, of when I choose to come. NEVER more. Only once in seven blue moons less. And, my having noticed that, when fucking, this control of mine is just a little less comprehensive. It’s not to say that, generally, I can’t fuck for a long time (often I can’t, but not because I come; because my cock often goes limp). But it is to say that it’s not uncommon, and certainly not unprecedented for me to come at a moment not of my choosing when fucking. So Hera’s observation – which really isn’t so much an observation – it was I who said it – as an elevation from observation to scrutiny – fascinates me.
What is it about agency that leads to a loss of control; about passivity that leads to a maintenance of it? I’ve written before about the Mobius strip of dominance and submission. This feels very related to that. Somehow, getting my cock sucked – sort of passive, sort of not – I’m in control of my orgasm. Getting my cock stroked by a woman’s hand – sort of passive, sort of not – I’m also in control. But fucking? Where I’m holding a woman’s body down, where I’m penetrating her cunt? Thrusting? Actively? Or underneath her, driving her hips, and her cunt, on my cock? (Again, here, I’m not passive, I’m active. If I were to simply sit back and let her ride me? I imagine I would also have something like perfect control.) In all those settings, my control is somewhat less total. The frequency of a slightly premature ejaculation? Higher.
So. What. The. Fuck?
Why is it that, if I’m in control, I’m less in control; if I’m receptive, I’m more so?
I feel like there’s lots here to explore.
Thank you, Hera, for pricking at this. It’s definitely interesting….