On sex, grief and history

First of all, I would like to thank you for still staying subscribed during the last month. It means a lot to me. This is a space where I write for pleasure – and having someone to talk to in this space feels good on many levels. Now I have to type that again, the strange beginning of the sentence: since the war started…

Since the war started, it’s been increasingly difficult, strange and alienating to think about desire – and what desire means when the world is being burnt to the ground. What does desire mean when it cuts through sadness and blends with rage? What does desire mean in the collective experience of mourning? I wrote the draft of this a month ago, while I was trying to remember how to breathe and  thinking a lot about sex and grief. 

It’s Wednesday afternoon, and the world is at war. The world has been at war forever, but this time it is so close to home, and people at war speak my language. I realise that tomorrow people who I love might become war refugees, I realise that I don’t know when I’ll see my family again.

I’m at a sound performance in a south London venue that looks like a cathedral filled with thick smoke. Conversations we have are a blur, but we talk about grief and loss, and I pretty much always talk about sex – so we end up talking about being horny at funerals. I do believe it’s a thing. (Please do send me your stories of that nature if you have any).

So here I am, horny at a funeral. A funeral for hopes, delusions and the vision of history we trusted. I was born in the same year the Berlin wall collapsed. I’ve always loved this fact. I’ve self-indulgently used this fact numerous times in essays. You know, the David Bowie concert in West Berlin, chunks of concrete hitting the ground, the binary world is gone – and at this point, I appear in the story in my little tender fleshy form.

When I grew up and my bones were fully formed enough to attend university, they taught us Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History and the Last Man” from 1992. In the book, Fukuyama argues that after the dissolution of the Soviet union humanity has reached "not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such. That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." The end of history – It sounded dull but reassuring. Like nothing will ever happen again. Like there will be no history books with dates we’d have to memorise. We’ll just all be high, or browning the internet, or working a corporate job, and it’s gonna be all comfortable and beige. Instead, we’re here. Like most of Russian kids, I raised my hand in class to recite history which did not mention the colonial nature of the Soviet Union. As a result, we peacefully slept through wars in Afghanistan, Syria and Georgia. We were only small. Now, we’re here.

I press my fingers into the wine glass, seeing how hard I could press it till it breaks. The sound of the performance is like water, like overhearing chimes on the street. My back is aching. I don’t press hard enough.

I am acutely aware of the people around me. I wonder whether they’re checking me out. I think of mindless fucking. I think how much of a great scene I could do with all this darkness. I think of that scene. I get wet. I think of cruising and leather bars. I think of how much loss and grief they both encompass. All the teachers who died of AIDS. Wiped out communities, broken encounters, memories ditched into the water with ash, forgotten names, bruises that heal forever.

In BDSM, we often choose to play with dark things. We lean into emotions that are terrifying and uncomfortable: fear, anger, grief. A few weeks back I talked to professional dominatrix Eva Oh about it – knowing that she is an expert at playing with deep emotional states.

“I think people are afraid of a lot of these emotions. And I think that even from the beginning, I understood that it's a mental rush that I really get off on,” she told me. “To do that, I push into the edges of my emotion, whether that's anger, or fear, or disgust, or bottomless grief, these very powerful emotions that people shy away from, that we're told to shy away from. Playing gives you a space to really push into all of them, and to push them out of other people when you're at the top. Which comes with severe ramifications if they're not a strong enough person, or we haven't got enough of an established relationship or support system around them. But when there is enough of those things to push into it safely enough, it’s pretty liberating in terms of the human experience.”

In The New Bottoming Book first published in 2001, Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy describe a scene that is both powered by grief and serves as an outlet to actively live through it – in a highly ritualistic way.

“My bottom and I were in deep grief over a mutual friend and mentor we had lost to AIDS, and we had decided to seek release in ritual S/M. I tied her to a padded table and flogged her to the point of weeping, all the while chanting "Om Krim Kalyae Namaha," an invocation to Kali, the terrifying Hindu goddess of death and birth. As I struck with the whip in rhythm with the chant, I felt myself go into trance, the words of the chant serving to occupy my conscious mind, leaving me free to feel the energy flowing through the whip, my bottom's grief surging beneath me, until I felt in myself Kali the inexorable, the implacable force of nature which dictates that everything we love must die. My partner struggled with her grief, writhing and thrashing, held safe by the bondage, and wept copiously, chanting "Jaia Ma," an invocation to the Mother goddess, over and over, until both of our grief and despair had been fully poured out, and we had reached a sense of exhausted peace with the universe. The Hindus say of Kali that there is no way to understand her, no logic to explain her, no justification - she is like a storm, we have no choice but to love her, and in that love, come to acceptance of our human condition.”

I try to remember when I cried in the scene. I don’t remember crying from pain, but there was this one time when I cried from a gentle whisper “I’ve got you, you’re safe” while on a major endorphin high. I remember how it felt, gently falling apart. As a top, I sometimes cry a little after an intense impact scene, or after a shared emotional high. I love these moments a lot.

Truth is, I was not very intimate with grief before I had to experience it in this strangely collective, detached, distanced incarnation. I can imagine that you’ve had this moment too – weeping from horror and disbelief while looking at your phone. But I didn’t expect that it would wash over me too gently, suddenly bringing up memories of my home town, the petrol-lined smell of river, my parents and sunlit parks, ice-cream cakes for birthdays and my mum’s fur coat in winter and how I’d bury my face in its cold smooth pool of mink. 

Memories of Kyiv were even worse because they were unbearably beautiful. A warm Summer’s night, I’m in a passenger’s seat of my best friend’s Mercedes, and we’re driving fast down the hill, and the hills are lush and emerald green in the night and the birds are singing so overwhelmingly loud that it makes me smile. A rave on the 8th floor of a disused office block, red lights, people around are beautiful and high. I try not to open the door to those because it hurts. But I am also worried that I will never be able to relive them properly – because the world I knew in both places is now gone.

You came here to read about kink – I’m sorry I dragged you into this elegy of grief. I’m not sure there is a scene that could make it better. I am not sure we should be using our scenes for that anyway. It is a tragic point in history, but pain and rubber are still beautiful. On a giving or receiving end, as a kinkster, I am just eternally and viscerally grateful to be alive.

Image:  Bloodshrimp by Jácint Halász