I’m in the pub bathroom. A nondescript graffitied stall. Phone numbers. Declarations of love. Of fear. Of want, and need, and desire. Denouncements of ubiquitous male names. Who is a cheater? Who is a rapist? I’m imagining them melting down into one big entity: sixteen arms and legs asking ‘where’s my hug at?’ – when I overhear two women outside of my stall:
Two women stand by the public bathroom mirror. One re-applies lipstick, the other scrolls on her phone. (There is a third woman hiding in the stall beyond, with her ear pressed to the door like a mouse.)
WOMAN 1
I don’t know—
WOMAN 2
What? You just couldn’t-
WOMAN 1
Yeah
WOMAN 2
But I thought you liked him
WOMAN 1
I do—
WOMAN 2
You couldn’t get wet?
WOMAN 1
No
A beat.
Do you think it’s my fault?
Her fault? A small revolution occurred from behind the thin, wooden door that separated me from the scene. Somewhere between the flush of the toilet and the sudden lack of paper to dry my hands, I thought, is it really her fault she didn’t experience a bodily function that we are told we must?
I googled. A saturated, pink infographic ocean. “How to gauge if the amount of lubrication you are creating is OK.” As if our bodily function, however different from one another, can be labelled as somehow ‘Not OK.’ A Victorian-esque fear and distrust of the body; the broken body, the hyster of the ectomy, a descent of good old insanity.
There are potholes and minefields of self and bodily hatred derived from believing one is “not normal,” and therefore unhealthy, broken, or ‘worse’…undesirable. What are we when undesired? It seems like a pitfall: a gouge so deep we’ve never seen anyone claw their way out. No one wants to be undesired, and yet no one is born hating their bodies. When we are children it is innate for us to look at ourselves with awe. “Wow, this is my arm,” will typically lead to curiosities about the elbow, the hands, dexterous and complex fingers. The body is not yet broken, or sick, or unnatural. It is just a body. But like most things, this curiosity, especially of the female body, dissipates into a mythology more tangible. A sensual response that is learnt through a saturated media: one giant, flickering, semi-sadomasochistic billboard that protests “My Head’s Saying No, But My Body’s Saying Yes!”
Who said it first?
This dialogue of the taboo, the so-wrong-its-right kind of intimacy. Was it pornography? Perhaps cinema? High and low art, romance novels (from Wuthering Heights to Twilight to the “spicy” 2-ply toilet paper pages of Kmart Erotica)? Perhaps Christina Aguilera’s Genie In A Bottle, “my body’s saying let’s go, but my heart is saying no no.” Or the other 92.7% of Western lyricism about sex — So Bad It’s Good. À la “Body Talk,” a narrative that urges us to listen to the sexual response of the female body, and not the woman herself. And then? A dismemberment of the woman: mind and body cut smaller and smaller in easy-to-digest, and step-by-step narratives. A constant reinforcement that the idea of “getting wet” is not only a bodily function, but a necessity for arousal. And if the body doesn’t react how it is supposed to – according to said instructions, then what? As far as popular media is concerned, arousal and genital response are one of the same.
It’s a well-rehearsed and secretive cultural dilemma only to be mumbled in the decadent bathroom of the Courty, a phenomena by the name of arousal nonconcordance. It begins, at first, in the reward centre in your brain, which is divided into three areas of wanting, liking, and learning —all which combine together to tell us what feels good. Nonconcordance, in its basic form, is a lack of predictivity between physiological response and the subjective experience of pleasure. Genital arousal is a physical response to sex-related stimuli, unconnected to the subjective experience of wanting and liking: the actual overlap of this predictive relationship exists between 10 and 50%. Unbeknownst to monoculture arousal, you cannot really predict how a person feels about a certain sex-related stimuli just by looking at genital blood flow. We can feel aroused without the overlap of genital response, and vice versa.
Did Pavlov’s dog salivate at the sound of the bell because he wanted to eat the bell? No. It was a learned response through means of association. The body simply responds to sexual stimuli, it is not an indicator of pleasure or consent. When we are told what we want, what we must desire based on the way our body reacts and ignore subjective experience, we ignore pleasure. Is it not degrading and dangerous to say you feel one way, and be unbelieved because your body may “prove” something else? Genital response does not necessarily mean sex of any kind is wanted, liked or most importantly consented to. Lubrication is not causation. Lubrication is not asking for it. Sexual arousal is not linear.
And so, how do we then measure arousal? How do we ask for consent? How do we know what we are doing is okay, and wanted, and enjoyable?
Words. Big words, small ones. Whole sentences. Monologues. Three-dimensional poetry birthed from the intersection between consent and arousal. Serenades. See how many times you can fit the word pleasure into a Haiku.
The antidote to this mythology is a verbal overwriting.
Pick up your pen, listen to her words.
