Self-Knowledge, Empowerment, and Sexual Liberation
To write a poem is to have sex. To have sex is to write a poem. I cannot write a poem without having sex and I cannot have sex without writing a poem. When I was nineteen, I began writing poetry, which at the time was in the form of cringy and crass scraps of images and phrases typed in my Notes app. One of the first “real” poems I ever wrote was titled “A Woman, Bare,” and it was about an unnamed woman who rode around a suburban neighborhood on a unicycle, naked, holding cherry pies in her hand and balancing them on her head. This surreal, erotic, morbid poem culminates in her running a red light and the image of freshly baked pies splattered on the pavement. When I wrote this poem in my early years of writing, it felt as if I were hearing a song, some tune I subconsciously recognized, and in my writing, I sang back.
In her acclaimed 1975 essay “The Laugh of Medusa,” writer and critic Hélène Cixous posits that the act of writing is closely related to women’s sexual pleasure and personal power. While it would be naive to argue that writing alone can lead to change in cultural conversations and power structures, Cixous encourages women to “write yourself,” to “win back [your] body.” For Cixous, to free women’s writing is to liberate one’s personal sexuality. She proclaims, “Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes.”
A few days before my senior year of college, I lost my virginity to a guy I met at a bar on Long Island. He was tall, covered in tattoos, and knew who the Melvins were. Back then, that was all it took for me to be impressed. While I had not yet had penetrative sex, I was already a sexual person: expressing myself through risqué clothing, enjoying erotica novels, and letting my lust run wild in my writing. I was not saving myself for marriage, nor waiting for a grand gesture of love, but rather I felt I was tethered to the bodily autonomy I felt I had cultivated up to this moment. Though I considered myself a sexual person, I still held back in many ways. When I was asked out on dates, I would feel an anvil drop in my stomach. From as long as I can remember I exuded confidence in every area of my life, my career, work, friendships, but the thought of romantic or sexual intimacy sent shockwaves through my nervous system. Somewhere along the line, being a virgin became intertwined in my identity, someone who has already “won back” their body, someone whose body and pleasure is only for them. I was attached and almost obsessed with the idea of how being a virgin could protect me from my private fears. Despite this revelation, a question echoed, could my self-protective behaviors around sex actually be self-punishing behaviors? Yet, here I was, at a trashy dive bar, with the desire to untangle certain beliefs I tethered myself to and shatter my entry to the world of sex. So, after a few dates, X took my virginity. The beginning of sex was, unsurprisingly, the most painful, and after many positions, it was through doggy-style that X was finally able to fully enter me, tearing my hymen. Ultimately, the sex was rough, exciting, and pleasurable.
The next morning, I woke to a burning sensation radiating from the walls of my vagina. I attributed the sensation to being sore from having my first time having sex and thought it would go away soon enough. The next day I boarded a flight to Los Angeles to head back to school. On this flight, I began experiencing searing pain: burning, rawness, and inflammation coming from my vagina. My legs went numb and I became feverish. My mother and aunt had no idea what was going on, and for days I was bedbound, waiting for whatever was happening to end. I tested negative for UTI, yeast infection, STIs. In moments like this, I learned what it meant to be eye-level with the power of language, to attempt to reach for new descriptions of what my body was experiencing—because if the language already existed, I did not have it—so that others could believe, understand, and help me.
After a week of suffering, I made an appointment with a gynecologist at USC. She asked several questions: did I have rough sex? Did I use lube? Was there foreplay? I tried to quiet the voice in my head that felt judgment in her tone. My answer was yes to all three. I was aroused, I was comfortable, I experienced pleasure. When she performed the vaginal examination, she discovered I had deep vaginal tears, and the image of smoked salmon being cut with scissors coursed, unbidden, through my mind. This was one of the first instances of my imagination running wild as a way to dissociate, trying to bring image, humor, and language into the folds of pain to cope.
Why had this happened? How could I prevent this next time? What can I do to take away the pain? The gynecologist, inappropriately, instructed me to “drink some wine to relax,” and that there was nothing more she could do. The tears would take six to eight weeks to fully heal and all I had was Advil and the advice of frequent baths. I was dumbfounded. I had felt relaxed and aroused in the act, and would rather not have to be inebriated to have sex. And now walking to my classes was an uphill battle, working out left me almost in tears, and the thought of intercourse made me shiver. I lay in a red patch of pain that distracted me from everything else in my life. The only reprieve was sleep. I felt that whatever sexual liberation I had enjoyed before penetrative sex was dissolved by the onset of this chronic pain. It reinforced my deepest fears that I was somehow defective or undeserving of sexual pleasure. I felt like I was being punished, that my body, which experienced a brief moment of pleasure, was a crime, and I was paying the price.
As I sat in this red patch of pain, I desperately tried to articulate how I felt to friends, to WebMd, to support groups. I tried other over-the-counter pain medication, yoga, soaking in epsom salt, breathing exercises, ice packs, numbing cream, and avoiding sex. Despite my efforts, the shore of relief continued to shrink in this distance. At this time, I had also met somebody with whom I had sexual chemistry. I was now in a position, I hoped, where the possibility of having sex could be on the horizon. It had been two months since the tear, and I wanted to please this person, Y, and fulfill his needs. Looking back, I think of Annie Liontas’s Sex With a Brain Injury: On Concussion and Recovery, in which she discusses how her concussions have affected her personal intimacy: “How many people are afraid of sex? That it will hurt, even as we ache for it?” Up until this point, I had not received any diagnosis, and I saw red everywhere. While I craved sex with Y, I was also increasingly afraid of sex and of my body.
As a result, I engaged in excruciating sex with Y for over two months where I hid my winces and took quick steps to the bathroom to check for more tears, burying my pleasure deep in the red patch’s soil. I was on fire during and after sex with Y. Like so many women, my pain had been dismissed by doctors, and so I began to dismiss it myself, deciding that silent suffering was how I was supposed to live.
Something I didn’t fully understand at the time was that I was engaging in self-punishment, as a way to cope with this relentless pain and gain back some of the bodily autonomy I felt had slipped away when I began having sex. It was disturbingly satisfying (and the impulse unfortunately still delicious during a flare-up) to permit myself to have sex with Y, inflict pain upon myself, and embody the blame I thought I deserved. If my body was a crime and I had to do the time, then I would, on my own terms. At this point, I hadn’t written poetry in weeks, another form of self-punishing behavior. When I did, I avoided writing about sex. The disconnect between me and my body, which I tried to ignore, grew.
Six months after my first tear, a friend recommended I see a pelvic floor therapist, who taught me not only about my pelvic floor but about advocating for my health. Youthful, informative, and empathetic, Dr. Jaronczyk listened carefully as I explained my sexual health journey, asked important questions, and reiterated to me how my quality of life had been disrupted. I’ll never forget our first appointment, with my legs spread wide on the table and her, after examining me asking, “How have you lived like this?” I finally felt seen, heard, and most importantly, that there was hope. For the first time in months I could exhale, began to entertain the idea that my body was understandable, that it was not evil. After this time, I reapproached my poetry, which I had let stand shyly on the sidelines, and began writing without shame, without timidness. I was leaning into the grotesque to grasp what I was living with. I was being braver and more honest, discussing not just my sexuality but all of my sexuality, including the parts that were gross, weird, not socially acceptable. I began to see my sexuality as something that belonged to all of me, all of my body and mind, not just my genitals. Food was erotic, shit was erotic, giving birth, dying. It all felt related, in the messy, human way that living is. I embraced repetition, mimicked my process of metaphorically thrashing myself, and took comfort in the notion that even if it was self-punishing, it was not for nothing. It was a part of me, and so worthy of exploring in my writing. I embraced a louder voice.
My doctor diagnosed me with vulvodynia, a condition of pain and discomfort in the vulva referred from tight and dysfunctional pelvic floor muscles. My vaginal muscles were unknowingly flexing, all the time. My pelvic floor was the place I was holding all my stress, anxiety, and trauma similar to someone with a stiff neck or shoulders. It was as if I had done 1,000 kegels a day, an outdated Cosmo dream, but for me, this eroticized idea of being “tight” was preventing me from experiencing pleasure without immense pain. I began to see Dr. Jaronczyk regularly for pelvic floor therapy to relax and stabilize my vaginal, core, and leg muscles. My “homework” was to begin dilator therapy, which was meant to trigger and release my vaginal muscles, while practicing breathing techniques and establishing a “mind-body connection.” After months of rather uncomfortable therapy, I was slowly improving. However, in one particular exercise I continuously failed. The exercise consisted of Dr. Jaronczyk inserting a finger inside of me, simulating penetration, and of my having to breathe in and then release, almost pushing the finger away, to trigger the release of my pelvic floor muscles. I struggled to visualize and connect to my body, specifically my pelvic floor. I had experienced sexual trauma in the past, and while I believed I had moved on, processed it, my body seemed to operate independently. It was still afraid, unwilling to cooperate with my brain. Everytime, I continued to have sex with untreated vulvodynia I was re-experiencing the sexual trauma inflicted onto my nerves, bones, and flesh. No matter how hard I tried to relax and push her finger out, I could not release it.
At 23, after several years of writing erotic poetry and struggling with vulvodynia, I finally admitted to myself that there was a discrepancy between what I was writing and what I was doing with my body and my life. I believed Cixous, that women could write the body, could take back power and sexual freedom. But I needed a guide. So, I began to read contemporary erotic poetry, and tried to learn how other women had done it.
In her essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Audre Lorde writes, “The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.” Lorde recognizes the erotic as not merely sexuality but as the “empowerment to action,” since women have been raised in a patriarchal society where we are taught at a young age to fear the “yes” within ourselves. In that way, the erotic is an embrace of power, and in direct opposition to male domination.
When I first read Lorde’s essay, I was a college student, writing poetry that shied away from vulnerability, which I viewed as a weakness. Peers in my writing workshop would comment that my speakers’ voices were bold and alluring, yet that there seemed to be an intentional distance separating the reader and the speaker. I’d receive comments that were curious about why I never used the first person point of view in my poems. Why was I being distant in an art that couldn’t be more permitting? What did I feel I wasn’t permitted to say? How could I say it? While I thought those questions then, I wasn’t ready to answer them. I liked engaging with the erotic in my poetry, liked feeling confident, but I couldn’t allow myself to admit I wasn’t.
I think of Lorde’s discussion of how the erotic can act as catalyst for change in one’s life: “Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.” At twenty-three years old, I returned to Lorde and the erotic poets, ready, this time to put myself and my work on poetic trial and cross-examine it. To internalize criticism, and figure out how to write unapologetically about all aspects of my sexual, emotional, and intellectual desires. I was ready not just to say yes, but to feel yes, to act yes, and to write yes.
One poem I found myself connecting to, and returning to over and over, was“hungry tsunami/tsunami as galactus,” by Lee Ann Roripaugh. In it, Roripaugh describes a tsunami who is something between human and monster goddess, who controls the poem’s narrative. By personifying the tsunami as a female, Roripaugh embodies a state of chaos, long ascribed to women in Western discourse. A tsunami destroys, without concern for the welfare of others, without concern for how it is perceived, or received. It destroys, not viciously or out of malice but because it is natural, it is what a tsunami does. A tsunami is a force of nature. Roripaugh’s work seems to ask what would it mean if women were to “take the cake” and eat it too.
An important aspect of Lorde’s work as realized through the tsunami’s fantasies is that satisfaction—not to be confused with the false pleasures of sex as found in mainstream pornography—can make the erotic powerful, can create joy and fulfillment within a woman’s being. Lorde argues the erotic can function as a way of questioning how acutely or fully one can feel an experience. Rorpiaugh writes about the tsunami’s desire to “to feed past the end of greed / to feast past the end of want,” trespassing against the socially constructed boundaries of respectable behavior, going to excess in a way that is unbecoming of a woman, and finding satisfaction in doing so. Roripaugh’s tsunami is pleased with its lust for destruction, its hunger, its greed. It is satisfied, thus powerful, thus erotic.
However, when Roripaugh depicts a gory, merciless feast of women, we are surprised to learn that this isn’t, in fact, the glorious erotic it seemed to be. The tsunami would destroy the coast, kill thousands, and there is no splendor in that. The poem ends on images of awful violence—“the blooded face / blood in the water / the blood moon’s exposed sweet throat / with its lipsticked jugular bitten clean out”—placing the emphasis squarely on the horror and devastation of this destruction, not the relish of destroying. This form of strength via violence is illusory, fashioned within the context of male models of power. Roripaugh’s position is a complicated one, simultaneously lionizing the wild freedom, hunger, and violence of women as a form of erotic embodiment and power, while also reminding the reader that this type of reactionary power is still incomplete, still constrained by the need to respond to oppression. In poems, we can, if we so choose, create worlds in which there is no patriarchy, in which women are never made to hate, dismiss, or ignore their bodies. But in the real world, and in Roripaugh’s world, we are still very much fighting against an outside force. Even still, when women no longer suppress the erotic in their lives, they may be able, like Cixous suggests, to become an interruption to patriarchal ideologies.
While reading Cixous, Lorde, Roripaugh, and other writers and theorists of the erotic, I began to realize that my sexual dysfunction, rather than being something that is shameful or that holds me back, could actually aid me in writing about topics I feared off the page. When I first began writing about vulvodynia I wrote a poem titled “Towards Applause,” which I submitted to a magazine. Their rejection letter read: “The voice is excellent, the talk of sex fine, but the emotional aspect feels a bit out of touch.” I laughed. I felt almost attacked, like being called out on my bullshit. While I found the criticism accurate, I also thought, well, maybe the distance or lack of emotional clarity in this poem is actually its point. When you have vulvodynia, it is not uncommon for a mind and body disconnect to arise, one which feeds into a vicious circle of trying to experience sexual pleasure. Imagining the pain of future events can trigger pain in the body in the present. Even while aroused in bed with a partner, my mind might be scared of the pain I could experience upon penetration, thus tightening my muscles, and creating the conditions for that pain to occur. While I was working on overcoming this mind-body disconnect, it was in fact how I felt. My “emotional aspect was a bit out of touch,” and for me, poetry was an ideal form in which to explore that disconnect.
Writing poetry has been a space for me to “release” what I could not always physically in pelvic floor therapy, as well as a space to navigate sexuality and gender beyond societal limitations, and even a space to create a call for freedom. I write in the form of sestinas, a complex 39-line French form whose rigidity derives from selecting six final words, to be used in a strict order. I have found the constraining form of the sestina to be an enriching venue for expressing defiant, messy, grotesque, and lusty ideas—the contrast of pleasure and severity works sort of like a cock ring, or a ball gag. To continue to seek sexual pleasure despite such sexual dysfunction and to write despite formal constraint, I was, like Roripaugh’s tsunami, practicing what it meant to be free.
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