In This Body: Out of My Head
“I am using the same fantasy I’ve used since before I used my fingers”
Our monthly column "In This Body" is comprised of true stories about sex, gender, the body, and love, written by Fiona George, for NAILED.
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You have got to get out of your head. A friend tells me, I’ve been trying to explain my head to her. She’s right. She knows.
But even as she says it I am pulling her into my head. I look at the shave of her head and the shape of her skull and try to find the right language for it. I put her on a blank page somewhere in the back of my mind with a metaphor forming.
I’ve had sex with her like I’ve had sex with nobody else. It’s something in the way that we are sitting on her front steps and smoking like we’ve never had sex. In the way that I do not have to cling to her, or worry what it means that we are not having sex right now, or hurt when she falls in love with someone else, or think that she is too into me, or want to do anything but talk right now.
All those things that happen in my head after the act of it.
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I’m going to give this to myself. Between my legs heats, I am using my fingers around the metal barbell through my hood. I am using the same fantasy I’ve used since before I used my fingers. The same one I am always trying to stop.
It began where I start to remember things, as far as I would know.
It was women tied; it was more than that.
It would always end with the woman tied.
How it would start was only a woman naked, exposed in the way of animals at the zoo. I never pictured the men—but they were there—they were the ones doing it—they were watching. This first image would come to me, always before bed letting my mind wander like a kids would.
My body physical but still. Nothing happening besides a girl's imagination. These images: my first words for horny.
I never touched myself. Not until after I learned what that feeling was, after I had become ashamed of what that feeling was, when I learned how pour that shame into that feeling and use it.
The women were never me, but I wanted to pretend they were. The word I didn’t have was: amazonian. I made them tall and dark haired, made their breasts large and legs long, pure muscle and tits and ass: this is what we see when we see a sexy woman: this is her body, her cage.
Wet. Was I wet? Was that even possible? At that age?
The images had to escalate. The woman is now in a small glass cage.
(When we went to see the famous Orca they had him in a tank just big enough from his nose to tail, just big enough to float and be seen. No room to swim.)
Sometimes she has red hair instead. Never my own dull light brown.
The cage was on a rolling cart and the backdrop was my cities zoo—the way the cart rolled, she was bouncing all around, ass and tits hitting the glass. Pressed.
I wouldn’t be able to tell you where this came from. Behind shut eyes. Some small imagination.
Blood pulse pound between my legs by the time I put the woman in ropes. Always so that her limbs made an X of her body. The image of her made by a spot light. The room around her all black.
If I was ever going to see men, it would be now and it would only be their hands. You know what they were doing.
But I don’t know, how I would’ve known to make hands grab at her breasts, her ass, right between her legs where she would be hot like me.
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What I don’t remember is what I was saying before I said it, who I was talking to, and what I had been looking at. But I remember hot red blush all over, a slight of sweat above my lip. My eyes drilling a hole in the table in the corner of the living room, a way to will myself to disappear.
I had said something, out loud, to someone, probably family, then I said, she said.
Which I usually only said in my head. I always said it in my head. Since my mom started reading aloud all words books to me before bed, I’d been writing like an all words book in my head.
By this point I could read them on my own, and would even try to write it on my own but it never felt like the words in my head.
Swore right then that I’d stop it. Couldn’t risk a slippery of tongue again. And for a while, I really thought I had. Stopped.
See, kids novels are all in the same style third person. I didn’t even recognize first person voice even as it rolled around in my head and formed into something that started to sound like this.
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I’ve tried to stop the fantasies. All that shame; they were coming from a place of shame. (Where’d I get it?) First, I stopped myself thinking on them when I was little. Ignored that first image that came with the heat and ache in the place I wouldn’t call my pussy for years.
Let the fire die till puberty and porn and the act of touching myself pours it’s gasoline all over the ashes.
I am the woman in the fantasies now. The image has to escalate, you know. Or it just won’t do it anymore. I see the men. There is not just the zoo. There are so many backdrops, stories.
Sometimes, I am assaulted on a bus. Sometimes, by a cop. Sometimes, walking home alone at night. Stock images. Internet porn has changed the way I see it.
I try, I try, I try, to separate my sexuality from the male gaze.
I’ve loved women, too.
I give up and read internet rape erotica, from the eyes of a man. So much more than the male gaze: the force of male.
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These things will never leave me: images of what men would see and do, the pulse in my pussy. The blood heat in the metal barbell through the skin of my clit. The pulse of words like blood through my brain I can’t shut off.
Words that run through my head like nobody.
I wonder if this crazy-making inner monologue is where my talent comes from. Do I have talent? People have told me I do, but I’m trying to figure on what that means. Seems, to me, like a mistake. Accidents of language.
I couldn’t do it on command, who could? This talent thing. The good ones, they come when they come like a woman. My own goddamn pussy. But, we know, that is different.
That it is the real talent, the way I can make myself come. But is it? If I always go to the same place, male gaze and the force of male.
Don’t you think my body and all the pleasure it is capable of should be enough?
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It took me till I was fourteen years old to turn masturbation to an act. To get it out of my head. It took me till I was nineteen to start writing out of my head.
Do I even remember that I have a body? That I am the landscape for all these ideas disconnected from my physical being? The places where I wish it wouldn’t connect—the men in my mind who use me.
I’ve let myself be used before.
It doesn’t feel good like the fantasies tell me it will. When the using fingers find me between my legs, I can feel that I am wet the way they slide, but the deep ache, the fire heating the metal down there, is missing. I hardly even feel the hands that seem to be creating a damp spot in my fuck-panties.
But also, I have let myself be a body, un-used, in action. I’ve let fingers and tongues and cocks slide into me and felt that bruise-burn-ache, felt the way they slip on the wet surface of me and shivered, looked into eyes, considered the word love in more ways than one.
This reality breaks through the images of male gaze, it is more. It breaks the words running a loop in my head.
Somehow, this sex is the only thing that will get me out of my head.
Sometimes, I think it’s the only thing that I can write.
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Header image courtesy of Crystal Barbre. To view a gallery of her paintings, go here.