In This Body: Pleasure/Pain
“It’s about just telling someone that you’re in pain and you don’t have a good reason”
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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My legs and pussy smooth for the first time in almost a year. I can feel the slight sting between my legs where hair used to be. It’s familiar, still. I’d remembered the feeling of freshly shaven legs rubbing together as one of the best feelings ever. The only real reason to shave my legs.
But it’s not the reason I did.
It’s not the first time I’ve taken a razor to my skin recently.
Two months.
Two. Fucking. Months. Of hating myself for every word out of my mouth. Of mornings woken up to the disappointment of existence. I don’t have a good reason. I just hate myself.
It took two months to fall back into self-harm. I’m proud.
When I make cuts fast—an exacto knife for craft projects, a blur in my hand—the cuts are deeper and the sound is satisfying blade-on-skin, worthy of a slasher film. And the blood—that comes out of me—doesn’t look real. Like it was ever a part of me. A prop. Makeup. Fake, my meaningless feelings.
You’ll tell me I’m wrong—but the shaving, it’s more self destructive than the cutting.
I’m just trying to make myself feel sexy. Wanted and wanting. I don’t even want to masturbate anymore.
Feeling so far from sexual that I’ll even take the patriarchy’s beauty tips.
So far from happy that I think an orgasm could fix everything. So far from the things that I believe that I think my body looking “right”, someone else’s attraction to me, could fix me.
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I went over to his house to drop off stuff and cuddle for an hour before I went out dancing. I wanted wanted wanted. Kissed all the stubble on his cheeks, pulled my body tight around him. I wore a dress with short sleeves, new scabs from cuts peeling just over my elbow. Honestly, I didn’t think it would be a big deal.
People see cuts, their usually too polite to acknowledge them.
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At the club, the lights are too low for anyone to see. There’s a forgetting that I’m in pain except when I pull my elbow tight in and feel where my scabs sting. I’m thinking, I’m going to get fucked when I crawl back in bed with him.
My body moves and moves, my hair soft on the sides of my face. My arms stretch to the sides, make waves around my body. My hips make slow circles, my feet slide and twist below me. Nothing but body. Nothing but old-school goth music carrying me outside myself.
Sexy, I feel sexy in my red velvet short sleeves, cuts and all. My nylons and high-heeled black boots, I feel like I could be ready to crawl back out of the hole I’ve dug for myself.
My third whiskey.
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When you feel happy, but you know you’re just on the edge. Sometimes, it just hurts to live. Sometimes, everything’s a disaster. Sometimes, you hate yourself for everything you’ve ever said and done.
The stupid way my arms move when I dance. The way I showed my scabs to everybody like I’m the only person I could hurt.
I was on the bus. Not on the way home. But his home. The light on buses overpowering and over-amplifying. Nothing about me hidden. Made me wish I carried my sunglasses at night in the middle of winter. For a second, my eyes were hot and wet. Ready to cry.
Something inside me reaching out to pull me back down.
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Back in bed with him in front of a movie. Inside the curl of his body, I focused on the beat of his heart against me, from behind me. The warm way his hand slid under my dress and rested on bare skin.
Keeping hold to that feeling, happiness or drunkenness, or the warm body of someone I love beside me.
It had been months since I’d masturbated.
That’s another thing about it, sometimes when everything hurts: I don’t think I deserve pleasure. All I wanted is someone else to deem me worthy.
I didn’t even want pleasure. Like someone scooped out my libido with a melon baller. But I wanted to be fucked.
Why don’t you want to have sex with me? Was a stupid question to ask. It’s not like I’d asked him first if he wanted to have sex. I mean, aren’t I just supposed to drop a bucket of hints that I’m down to pound and he can take it from there?
I know better than that. But I asked anyways.
I’m worried about you. That second, I was a dark shadow of me. You’ve got cuts all over your arms. I didn’t want to bring him into this miserable loop. But that’s what I do: pull him in so I don’t have to feel so alone.
My eyes. They got hot and wet, and this time, they just went. Large tears like all the heavy rain in this city. My face on fire. Snot volcano bubbling from my nose. Animal sounds.
We held close. Maybe, I cared how obviously over the possibility of sex that night was. But just that moment, his body curled around mine—mine in tears, a shake all over, gross and snot nosed and hot—mattered more than the validation of a good hard fuck.
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The feeling of shaved legs against each other isn’t as great as I remember. There’s no perfect smoothness. Not that could compare with the soft friction of hair on hair.
My fingers down between my legs, I close my eyes. Sandpaper lips. Prickly, dry. Tug at the little strip of hair I left. I miss my full bush.
The metal barbell through my clitoral hood. My fingers twist it, tug it up and down, the little metal balls hitting deep in that sweet spot. That familiar feeling: something happening. A heat. A flood.
It’s easy to put all of the responsibility on one person to fix it: whatever feels wrong about you. Sometimes all any other person can do is hold you and tell you that they love you. You gotta believe that shit on your own.
It’s not about getting fucked good and hard. It’s about going out and dancing till your sweat-skin clings to your clothes. It’s about just telling someone that you’re in pain and you don’t have a good reason for it.
It’s about reaching between your legs to tell yourself that you deserve pleasure.
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Read the previous In This Body: here.
Header image courtesy of Suzanne Brown. To view her photo essay, “Folds,” on NAILED, go here.