Femme4Femme Intimacy as an Act of World Building
A collage of a group of five femmes, photographed in black and white, sitting on the bleachers. Behind them are two different floral patterns: yellow lace daisies and red pixelated florals. Overtop are hand drawn hearts.
The following is an excerpt from my book Touch Me, I’m Sick. If you feel called by this writing, and want to play a part in helping the book come to life, you can support my Kickstarter by November 7th.
Content note: discussions of rape, sexual assault, substance use, and addiction.
Summer 2020
“So what’s your dissertation about?” he asks me, lying on his bed, wearing a black lacy thong.
“It’s about trauma and chronic illness and intimacy and queer sexuality,” I respond, doing my best to give my Cliffs Notes version.
“Are you gonna write about this?” – and by “this” he means us, two strangers, both of us femmes, one non-binary, the other gender fluid, having sex during the COVID-19 pandemic.
I laugh, “Yeah, actually, I am.”
“Good,” he tells me, a smile across his face.
☾
It’s late August 2020, seven months into the pandemic. I’m in Toronto for a few weeks to support one of my best friends as they have top surgery. I knew that returning home during the pandemic would look different from the last trip I took back in December, just a few months before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic and cities across the world began to shut down. There would be no hugging. No touching. Losses that I would feel deeply within my touch-oriented friendships. But we were committed to figuring it out, not wanting to pass up the opportunity to be together after seven months apart.
The trickiest part of my stay is figuring out how to navigate hook ups. In Calgary, where I’ve been living the last year, the queer community is small and the queer polyamory community is even smaller. I want to make the most of my time here and so I create a Tinder profile: “Polyam femme witch/switch, cancer sun, sag rising, aries moon. Super into talking about feelings, transformative justice, and the queer utopia. Looking for playful makeout sessions, sexual chemistry, kink super welcome. Am in Toronto until the end of Aug and would love to navigate COVID connection with consent and care.”
I quickly matched with Jamie. I immediately thought he was beautiful, with his long curly black hair, dark brown eyes, and nails painted a sparkly black. But it was the presence of the word femme in his bio that made me excited to swipe right. We exchanged Instagrams and then quickly started texting. As we discussed a time to meet up and see if the chemistry was there, he offered to send me some nudes, to which I enthusiastically said yes. The next day I woke up to a number of photos of Jamie in various stages of undress. In my favourites, he is wearing fishnets and a thong. In another, there is a jewelled butt plug in his ass. I send him some of me in lacy lingerie.
In between nudes, we discuss our boundaries and what we need to feel safe.
“You don’t mind being around someone smoking weed do you?” he asks.
I pause and reflect on this question. I knew he smoked weed because in many of his Tinder pictures there’s a joint in his mouth. In the past, this would’ve been a deal breaker for me.
“It’s something I can be around,” I text back, “but just for full disclosure, I’ve been sober from drugs for ten years. Addiction was something I really struggled with and so I tend to not spend time around folks who’re smoking weed. But given the circumstances I think it’ll be fine.”
I hit send and then nervously compose a follow up message: “Hope that’s okay—always feels a bit vulnerable to disclose that.”
I first got high when I was fourteen. After dinner, I’d walk to the park near my house, where some older boys hung out, smoking cigarettes and joints. I knew one of them: he was the son of my old babysitter. I’d stand around with these boys, in my low rise flared jeans (extreme low rise, for the record) and cropped tank top, and soaked in their attention. I’d never been the pretty popular girl, but was doomed to like the boys who’d date those girls and hang out with me in secret.
When I return to the diaries I kept when I was thirteen and fourteen, I find poems where I write of unrequited love: “But your love goes to that of another; you are her world, you are her lover. You hold her, you kiss her, you are in love. I will wait for the day for you to love me. I wish one day, you could love me too.” I used to think that my longing to be loved by those who couldn’t or wouldn’t love me didn’t start until after my mother’s death. Either I didn’t keep a diary before the age of twelve, or they didn’t make it in the eviction from our home.
One day, I’m going through old report cards that my mom kept, and I find a poem that I wrote. There’s no date, but the penmanship tells me that I must have been eight or nine. I’m charmed by the title “heart bet” -- clearly a misspelling and yet it perfectly captures the wager that is intimacy.
When your heart bet’s like thunder open eye and see your heart bet for love. Open your eye and see the man that you love like you love like crasy. Give him a big kiss. Then tell him that you love him. Over years and years you tell him that you want to marryed but love stoped’s there so stop rint there the love is gone he doesn’t love you any more kiss your love goodbye.
For my thirty-sixth birthday, I ask my friends and loved ones to read things they wrote as kids, and I surprise them all with a rendition of this poem, accompanied by my friend’s banjo. It is meant to be playful, but I also want to retain the sense of sadness I felt upon finding this poem: proof that my desire to be loved by another pre-dated my mother’s death. I don’t know what to do with this information, as it gives a new beginning to the story of my attachment wounding.
Maybe it’s the case that I’ve always been needy. In her book White Magic, Elissa Washuta, a fellow Taurus north node, writes that “what we Taurus north node people want is to merge with another person; what we need is to stop feeding our power to another” (55). Washuta goes on to quote Jan Spiller’s Astrology of the Soul: “The first step toward self-acceptance for Taurus north node people is to acknowledge that there is a needy person inside and to take personal responsibility for fulfilling those needs.” The website Astrology Owl offers another explanation: “The North Node in Taurus is helping you achieve the sense of self-worth you feel you have been denied.” I think about how my south node is in Scorpio in my twelfth house, where Pluto also lives. My past is the realm of the ineffable. An underworld of ghosts and spectral wounds that need healing. It makes sense that I’m needy. I have spent lifetimes attached to ghosts. Now, I am hungry for bodies that are of this world.
Or maybe my attachment wounding has something to do with the fact that Chiron, the planet of the wounded healer, is in Gemini in my seventh house of committed partnerships. I open up my Chani app and see that astrologer Chani Nicholas describes those with this placement as follows: “Your bruises include moments where you find yourself searching, again, for your twin -- where you doubt, even for a minute, your own wholeness.” Chiron is conjunct Venus in my chart, meaning that I will find beauty in pain, that I will let myself be hurt again and again in the name of love. You can call it the fate of the stars, or the fate of being a human being trying to love under the cisheteropatriarchy. In reality, it’s both.
Whether my attachment wounding may have begun earlier than I can remember, or was part of my destiny from the start, the rape solidified it. I’m not sure how many nights I’d been going down to that same park, that same group of boys. But one night the group refuses to let me smoke the joint on my own. If I want to get high, and I do, I’ll have to accept their supers. As they place the joint into their mouths and blow smoke into mine, I become so high that I black out. Next thing I know, I’m in the woods beside the park, sitting on top of a log. Underneath me is the sharp stab of a sixteen-year old boy’s cock entering me. When I realize what’s happening, I get up. I’m grateful that he lets me, though the damage has already been done.
I’ll continue to see that boy for the rest of the summer. He’ll come to my house with his friends after midnight and I’ll sneak out to get high and pool hop. He tells me that he doesn’t have a girlfriend. That the girl who stands across the street from his house, glaring at me, is an ex. In his darkened basement, I’ll lay there, passively, while he enters me again. Too high, and too sad, to say no. Maybe I’m repeating the original trauma in an attempt to assert some sense of agency. If I let it happen again, it’s as though the first time couldn’t have been rape. I think about all of the horror stories I’ve heard about women accusing men of assault and rape, and how prosecutors will use the fact that they saw the accused again, after the assault, as evidence that it couldn’t have been rape. I continue to wonder why no one calls a trauma expert to the stand.
In her book Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors, trauma specialist and therapist Janina Fisher explains how,
Trauma survivors all too often develop other symptoms that represent neurobiologically regulating attempts to cope with the trauma: self-injury and suicidality, risk-taking, re-enactment behavior, caretaking and self-sacrifice, revictimization, and addictive behavior. All of these behaviors represent different ways of modulating a dysregulated nervous system and preparing for the next threat. (30)
These attempts as self-regulation are all too often read as pathological and used to discredit survivors. Fisher notes how “It would be rare in the mental health treatment world to think of these symptoms as adaptive strategies made possible by the body’s instinctive survival defenses. But from a neurobiologically informed perspective, they are ‘survival resources,’ ways that the body and mind adapted for optimal survival in a dangerous world” (42). Fisher’s non-pathologizing approach enables me to feel compassion for that fourteen-year old, who’d subject themselves again and again to the same acts of violence: get high, have unprotected unconsensual sex, be ghosted.
“It is not surprising that trauma and self-destructive behavior go hand-in-hand,” Fisher explains. “‘Road rage,’ sexual compulsivity, the inability to anticipate danger and take self-protective measures, indifference to normal safety concerns, inability to leave dangerous situations or relationships--all are congruent with past experiences of being treated as an object whose welfare doesn’t matter, whose life has no purpose other than to be used” (126). I wonder what might happen if we stopped viewing these behavoirs as a sign of pathology and see how they’re valid responses to living under rape culture, which teaches men that it’s not only okay, but expected, for them to use the opposite sex. It has taken so many years of therapy to understand that I didn’t deserve to be used. That, in fact, I deserved so much more than what was offered to me.
Before boys started to use me, I was already an object in my own home. My mother’s death turned me into a surrogate mom. In her absence, I’d be the one to make the meals, do the house chores, ensure my brother finished his homework. As my dad’s illness progressed, I’d be expected to do more: help him eat, bathe him, complete whatever tasks he’d told friends he’d do for them. There were so many moments where I wanted to tell him I’m your daughter, remember? The drugs I used weren’t just a response to the rape. They were a response to my life. Sex, care, intimacy, and substances became inextricably linked. I needed the substances to access connection. Or, to pretend that what I was being offered could be called care.
I feel like I’m being given the opportunity to untether sexual intimacy and drugs from my trauma. With Jonathan, this will be the first time I’m allowing myself to be with someone who uses substances since I got sober at twenty-four. The last time I did this, I ended up getting high again. And while I no longer feel that same urge, I worry that being around drugs will trigger a trauma response.
As if anticipating my fear, Jamie asks me “Does the smell of weed trigger you?”
I feel my body sighing at his question, a sign that I feel within my window of tolerance.
“I’m not sure. But my body isn’t freaking out at the idea, so I think that’s a good sign :)”
“I get smell linked to trauma all too well” he texts back. “I also have visual scars from interpersonal issues from the past so trauma hasn’t been hard for me to shy away from.”
The capacity to name their traumas is one of the many reasons I find myself surrounded by femmes. Without knowing the details, we accept from the start that trauma lives within our bodies. It isn’t something that we have to hide from one another.
After sharing little details about our trauma histories – he doesn’t know his birth parents, and both of mine are dead – I suggest that we talk about how we’re practicing harm reduction while hooking up. It feels easy to transition from talking about our trauma to our forthcoming intimacy.
“I basically ask people how they protect themselves from the outside and [if] it is equal to or greater than mine it check out. Not tooooo sure what else to do. Also have sanitizer when I walk in.”
I share some of the precautions I’m taking – socially distanced hangs with pals, only sleeping with one person at a time outside of my partnership. “I have a compromised immune system, so I have to be super careful.” We talk about who’s in our bubble and he tells me that he’ll let me know if he hooks up with anyone else in between seeing me so that we can wait a few days before hooking up again. Even with all of the precautions, we both know that it’s a risk to fuck. And at the same time, if this is the way that the world is going to be for the foreseeable future, we need to figure out how to access the pleasure of sex and intimacy in the meantime.
☾
Many people I know in the polyamory community have been talking about harm reduction approaches to sex. In her Radical Love Letters series, my friend and fellow activist and academic Raechel Anne Jolie reflects on how “abstinence-like models of remedy,” which promote only interacting with those in your household ends up privileging “not just people who had physical homes in which to live, but very specifically, monogamous people who live with their partners/bio-families.” Raechel goes on to argue: “it behooves us to pause when we are told that protecting human life must simultaneously uphold systems that harm us … we have to think critically when the onus of stopping a pandemic falls to individuals and their actions rather than structural forms of care and support.”
Alongside questioning whose care is privileged, I can’t help but wonder: whose pleasure is privileged? The people who are the most concerned about protecting those most vulnerable to COVID-19 (immunocompromised folks, the working-class poor, homeless, incarcerated, and Black, Indigenous, people of colour) are also the ones who are asking the questions that Raechel poses:
Can we keep each other safe and also keep joy alive? Can we both make responsible individual decisions that protect the most vulnerable among us, and also direct our ire toward the State rather than toward our friends who have decided to consensually hang out with other friends without masks? Can we concede that a quick, masked hug between two consenting adults may be something toward which our bodies begin to urgently move? Can we draw on the spirit of our queer ancestors who knew that connection is all at once dangerous, life-giving, and also impossible to withhold?
I read Raechel’s questions and my body says yes, yes, yes. If anyone can imagine these possibilities, it’s femmes.
Historically, femme identity has been understood as being the counterpart to butch lesbian identity. Sadly, without the butch lesbian, the queer femme is all too often misread as straight: an act that has become known as “femme erasure.” The irony of the internalized misogyny inherent in this misreading – that as a femme, you can only be read as queer in relation to someone who is masculine presenting – has been taken up by queer femmes with the hashtag Femme4Femme, which works to draw attention to the ways that femmes desire bodies other than those that are masculine of centre.
Not only do femmes face erasure, they must also deal with rampant femmephobia from feminists and queers who believe that to be feminine is to consign yourself to the gendered expectations of the patriarchy. I’m reminded of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s proclamation: “Forget femme invisibility; the thing most femmes I know are impacted by the lack of femme respect” (137) – which is only heightened for trans women and non-binary femmes of colour.
As I write this, I want to name that as a white nonbinary femme, I can embrace my femme identity with much greater ease than trans and gender non-conforming femmes of colour. According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, 7 months into 2020 and the total number of murders of transgender people has surpassed the total for 2019, with 28 dead, the majority of whom are Black trans women. Their names are: Dustin Parker, Alexa Neulisa Luciano Ruiz, Yampi Méndez Arocho, Monica Diamond, Lexi, Johanna Metzger, Penélope Díaz Ramírez, Layla Pelaez Sánchez, Serena Angelique Velázquez Ramos, Nina Pop, Helle Jae O’Regan, Tony McDade, Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells, Riah Milton, Jayne Thompson, Selena Reyes Hernandez, Brayla Stone, Merci Mack, Shaki Peters, Bree “Nuk” Black, Summer Taylor, Draya McCarty, Tatiana Hall, Marilyn Cazares, Tiffany Harris, Queasha D. Hardy, Brian “Egypt” Powers, Aja Raquell Rhone-Spears.
That there is a rise in the deaths of trans women at the same time as a global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter Revolution is no coincidence. Femmes are the original agitators. It was Marsha P. Johnson and Silvia Rivera who threw the first bricks at Stonewall and initiated the queer revolution in 1969. And it is Black femmes who’re leading the BLM movement.
It’s vital to recognize how the continued violence against femmes and lack of respect is, for Piepzna-Samarasinha, informed by the belief that femininity and femmeness is “weak, less than, not as smart or competent, ‘hysterical,’ ‘too much,’ and not as worth of praise or respect” (137). To be femme (and feminine) is to be sick: “hysterical” and “too much.” And so Piepzna-Samarasinha will go on to write in her essay “Two or Three Things I Know for Sure About Femmes and Suicide”: “Being perceived as too much can kill you” (195). It is this logic of pathologization that informs femmephobia. Femmes are the original hysterics. Or, perhaps another way of saying this is: hysterics are always already femme.
To be femme is to refuse the cisheteropatriarchy’s valorization of the individual and independence. What femmes recognize is the power of interdependence: that we need one another in order to live. If the future is femme, which I believe it is, then it is full of pleasure and possibility. Femmes are the ultimate dreamers of care and intimacy. It’s not surprising to me that my fellow femmes are actively crafting templates for intimacy in the midst of a global pandemic. Because femmes are always already sick, we understand that our mental health is inextricably linked to our physical health, and so in staying away from those with whom we practice intimacy, pleasure, and care, we’re putting our bodyminds at risk. And so I return to Raechel’s final question: “Can we draw on the spirit of our queer ancestors who knew that connection is all at once dangerous, life-giving, and also impossible to withhold?”
☾
I arrive at Jamie’s place the night after we meet. I’m anxious. And not because I know that we’re about to have sex. In between my legs, right at the top, is an eruption of red spots. Eczema. Since birth I’ve been haunted by dry skin that transforms into a rash at the blink of an eye. Atopic dermatitis. You can see it in my baby photos: cheeks aflame. As a preteen, it’d flare up conveniently the day before picture day, just above my lip. Waves of shame would come over me as I prepared myself for yet another rashy yearbook photo.
None of that would prepare me for the ways that eczema would take over my arms and legs after I began high school. I’d wake up in the morning with swollen red blisters, oozing and inflamed all down the insides of my calves, the backs of my knees, and inside of my elbow. As a young teen full of hormones, and who equated sex with love, the worst part of my eczema wasn’t the pain or the constant itch: it was the shame and fear I felt whenever I thought about my legs being exposed during sex. I’d turn off the lights and take extra precautions by removing my pants underneath the blanket. I masked my shame with coyness and it worked. But I was always dreading the moment where my red, pusing legs would be revealed.
I could never find a pattern for my flare-ups. Dermatologists have long understood the link between stress and eczema outbreaks. But what if your whole life is under constant stress? What do you do then? Doctors still aren’t sure what causes eczema, but recent research is showing that there is a connection between the parasympathetic nervous system and atopic dermatitis. Polyvagal Theory, developed by Stephen Porges, has demonstrated how our autonomic nervous system functions through the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). Our SNS controls our fight-or-flight response. Our PNS controls our ventral vagal system, which is our optimal state of engagement, and our dorsal vagal system, which controls our freeze and submit responses. When you live with trauma, your SNS and PNS are under chronic stress, and chronic stress causes autonomic imbalance, greater sensitization, and triggers the massive histamine release associated with atopic dermatitis inflammation.
Given that the most traumatic years of my life happened between ages eleven to twenty-one, I can see why these years were also riddled with flare up after flare up. If I couldn’t talk about and process my mother’s death when I was eleven, or the rape that happened the summer before high school and the slut shaming that came after, or the years of having my needs and identity erased because all that mattered was my father and brother, then my body would speak it for me.
The etymology of the word eczema confirms my suspicion that these red rashes are inextricably linked to my trauma. Eczema: “something thrown out by heat.” Trauma as heat. Eczema as that which is thrown out of the body, externalizing that which is internal.
Perhaps my eczema was my body’s way of saying Don’t do it. You’ll only get hurt. What if those eczema outbreaks were my body’s way of telling me that there was just too much trauma around sex and intimacy. What if my red oozing skin was a somatic attempt to keep me from repeating the same pattern: get high, have sex, be abandoned, abandon yourself. Or maybe it was like a shield. A protective barrier between the vulnerability of my soft flesh and the other person’s body. I’m not that fourteen-year old anymore, I try to tell my trauma responses. This time can be different. You can have connection without abandoning yourself.
I stand here at Jamie's front door, aware of the red itchy pain in between my legs. I worry about how he’ll respond when all is revealed, but tell myself that he won’t notice. And if he does, it won’t matter.
He opens the door in a robe, and I can see the hint of a black lacy bra underneath. Eventually, as we undress one another, I can see the care and pleasure he took in getting ready for me. He moves his body as femmes often do. Wrapping his legs around mine, he pushes his ass up into the air so that I can observe his soft brown skin next to black lace. When he fucks me, my legs wide open and up in the air, he moves his hands alongside the inside of my thighs, overtop of my eczema, and keeps fucking. In this moment, I feel how queerness makes it possible for us to find pleasure in loving our sick and traumatized bodies.
Afterwards, sweaty and out of breath, he is the little spoon. I trace my fingers over his skin, and he shivers. Laying there wrapped up in each other, he dozes off. I must have been falling asleep too because I suddenly awaken: his arms and legs start to spasm, contract, and then relax. They go through the same motions again and again. I feel him move his shoulders and hear the bones crunch and crack underneath the skin. Then he shoots up. Awoken by his own body.
“Does that always happen when you sleep?” I ask.
“Yeah. Used to be way worse. Sleep paralysis. Eventually it stopped freaking me out.”
I want to ask him more questions, but then he’s asleep again. As I lay there beside him, I think of the hysterics at the Salpêtrière Hospital. In the photographs, you see their bodies in various states of contraction and contortion. Their bodies trying to speak the trauma that their mouths cannot. I understand this all too well. Eczema. Fibromyalgia. My body attempting to speak the unspeakable. I’m learning how important it is to listen. I will not gaslight myself as Freud once did with his hysterics. I lay there, letting his body communicate with me. I want him to know that I’m listening.
We’d continue to see each other many times over the next two weeks. One day I show up wearing a black lace bodysuit and Jamie takes photos of me. I have a hard time finding myself sexy in photographs. But with Jamie behind the camera, his hands reaching out to move my head back, I find that I’m excited to see the results. Then he joins me. Our legs – mine bare, his in black pantyhose – contort and twist together, and we transform trauma into pleasure and intimacy.
Back in Calgary, I tell my therapist about Jamie. In recounting my experiences, I realize that not once during our time together did I get triggered. Not by the pot smoke (which was copious). Not by hooking up (also copious). According to my therapist, this is stage three of trauma work: future templates, or integration and living without dissociation. In trauma recovery, stage one is finding stabilization (me, starting somatic therapy after spending the summer of 2017 in a near constant state of dissociation). Stage two is reprocessing (four years of weekly therapy later, and we still haven’t touched all of my trauma, but I know that we’ve reprocessed a lot). In stage three, you start to use the new neural pathways you’ve created and instead of getting triggered by a smell, event, scenario, your frontal cortex knows that this time is different.
I ask my therapist how this is possible – how did I manage to do this on my own? – and she tells me that it’s not so much the memories themselves that need to be reprocessed, but the stories and beliefs attached to them. I think back on all of the work we’ve done so far: the trauma of my mother’s death when I was eleven and all of the emotional abuse and neglect I suffered under my father. I now know that all parts of me are deserving of love. That I am loveable. It becomes clear that these same stories drove me, in the wake of being raped, to seek out the love of so many adolescent boys. In offering them my body, I was hoping to affirm that I was loveable.
We’ve only just started to return to those memories, which are, really, just fragments of memories. But that doesn’t matter. Because I know that the story attached to these traumas isn’t true. This is how I find myself doing something that I used to do, something attached to so much trauma, without dissociating: fucking a human I don’t know, during an eczema outbreak, pot smoke around me. Instead, my adult self tells my trauma responses that this time is different, that they don’t need to protect me. Without knowing it, I’ve reprocessed and integrated years of traumatic memories. This is the magic of Femme4Femme intimacy.
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