How to kill a baby
I write from the depths of a book. Vanilla, the book, has gobbled me up and is refusing to let me out until I complete it. It has, however, allowed me to briefly return to you in newsletter form, provided that I do not make any promises to return again any time soon and I do not spend too much time on this (the newsletter), that would be better spend on it (the book).
In other words, I will be taking a leave of absence from regular newsletters for a while. An unknown amount of while. If permitted by my bookish monster, I might occasionally swim back up to dish out a few choice scoops and a sprinkling of toppings. Which you might even prefer to my usual extensive rants. Quicker to eat!
To keep you whet until then, here are some scoops from the current draft of Vanilla, the book.
It is excruciating. I keep gasping and snapping it away from my clitoris. Too much. Invasion. Panic. Stress. Pain. Breathe, you remind me. I take a breath. You sometimes confuse pleasure with pain, I remind me. What if, I think, what if I pretend this is pleasure. As soon as I think it, as soon as I think that this horrible thing I’m feeling, this panic, might in fact be that elusive pleasure, that alien feeling I am so unaccustomed to, the orgasm floods through me. Floods is the right word. Like water, like I’m going to urinate everywhere. It gushes directly to the place in my head where for two days now a headache has raged. Zaps it away. It gushes directly into my feet, my whole feet. Dissolves them. Sets them aflame. Vibrates everything on high frequency. I can only handle a few seconds of it before my fear, my control, takes over again. I throw the sucky thing aside and I collapse. But I have glimpsed something. I have glimpsed something that is beyond what meditation, what weed, what the ocean, what love, what sex, has ever given me.
“We did it!” says the caption of the photo my cousin posts of her and her boyfriend holding the keys outside the house they have bought, the two of them grinning for the camera. They did it! The thing everyone is supposed to want to do: the monogamous heterosexual relationship, the boring but well-paid jobs, the position on the property ladder and in a few months time, no doubt, rings and save the dates and baby bellies. She wears high heels and has curled her hair, her face is covered in powder and mascara and lipgloss. He is just a man, an undecorated man. They look happy. I wonder if this is the easiest route to happy, after all? Simply following the script, adhering to the recipe for heteronormative bliss. I envy them. I envy them because they don’t seem to question any of it. They were born into the same world as I was and are living up to its expectations. The same expectations that make me feel repressed and trapped and a little bit sick, but that I am all the same, expected, somewhere on some level, to live up to. If I only stopped resisting them, if I only believed in them wholeheartedly without calling them expectations, without conceptualising them as the script, the recipe, would I, too, be grinning from ear to ear?
Before porn I am tied to a tree. It’s the future. We’re all sexually liberated and lo and behold, we make the same choices as men used to make for us. Or at least, some of us do. We hold some of the highest paid jobs in the world and we enjoy what we do. We leave our homes in the morning and we go to the parks in the cities, where runners run by. Our hands are tied around trees and we wiggle our bottoms, enticing the runners, a public service. They fuck us all day long and we never tire of it. We live a life of orgasmic pleasure. As for pregnancy, if we get pregnant, we only get paid more. Men are fighting for their rights to be paid to have sex and give birth and raise children. It’s the free market, the natural way of things, human nature, we tell them. They stage a coup, they try to withhold sex from us, knowing that their sperm is feeding the ruling matriarchy, but it only lasts a couple of days. They are too weak.
They say that only when you love yourself will someone else be able to love you. I say that when someone else loves you, truly loves you—even the part of you that doesn’t love yourself—you can learn to love yourself. Those someones are just hard to find, hard to allow in, hard to believe if you do let them in.
It makes me think about the art project I’m working on. A very short film called All the lost orgasms. A film that is supposed to represent all the orgasms all women could have had throughout all of time, if only female sexuality hadn’t been so repressed, if only PIV POV hadn’t been so widespread, if only they’d told us what the clitoris was, what pleasure was, that we too, like the boys who will be boys, deserved pleasure. Who am I kidding? This is a film about me, not women. About me punching myself, frustrated at myself for not being able to relax enough, not being able to trust enough, not being vulnerable enough to let someone else witness my orgasm. This is the film I need to make. Not a film of me faking an orgasm on behalf of all women, but a film of utter desperation. A face covered in tears, anger bursting out of me, only to be directed right back in at me, the fucking unfairness of it all. Next time I’m about to punch myself in the face, I’ll film it.
Optional toppings
👙 How to kill a baby is not a film of me faking an orgasm or a film of me punching myself in the face but a photo of me lying underwater (in December!), holding a chair, wearing a thong that I never wear because it’s uncomfortable
📘 The Depressed Person by David Foster Wallace is a legendary work of literary introspection
🐒 Him Too on the How Cum podcast features male people talking about female orgasms
🕳 @anatolknotek on Instagram
Thanks for reading Vanilla so far. This is goodbye. Although really it’s more of an au revoir, an until we meet again.
If you miss me, you can always dip back into previous scoops.
— H. E.