You, The Sexless Beast

You, the sexless beast.

You hold the dirtiest, most lurid – dare it be described as perverse – secret. A guttersome, 

guttersnipish, shameful manifestation of desire: a double-want. The want to want.

You engage in the Great Pretend. You script and readjust moment-by-moment to ensure that they (the date-haver, the party-goer, the club-clubber) do not sense the well-practised facade. You pause after a touch on the arm, a touch on the thigh – your reaction must differ in some subtle way, but by how much and for exactly why is always a gamble. In a dimly lit room, your ears are pricked to the hitch of a breath, finding something to echo. There is a shameful deceit to this intimacy, something intrusive about experiencing this moment without a haze of lust.

An ethnographer of sexual relations, you are.

You engage in repeat experiments which deliver the same data. You watch porn with a passive, somewhat analytical eye: cross-legged in bed; laptop on full brightness; chin resting on a closed fist, elbow on knee. You may as well be holding a pencil and pen, taking minutes. This does little to incite a sexual awakening. You bring your face closer to the screen and scrutinise the twitching muscles of a built bicep, determining the moment the chosen position moves from tenable to a shaky inconvenience. There is a too-whiteness to the lighting, a relative lack of plumpness of the left pillow from the right. 

You observe the world with a gaze more sexually charged than those who truly possess such lust. You watch the way a hand cups an ass, make note of it. Fingers creeping up the back of a shirt, commit that to memory. The unconscious affection elicited by the rundown cinema, the supermarket checkout. Absent the comparative emotions of desire, intimacy of any kind is charged; nothing represents sex and so everything represents sex. To take a temperature with the back of your hand is to unzip a fly. At a bar, you overhear the pleasure you must perform. The women at the neighbouring table hold their heads close, conveying with raised voices and finger-puppet reenactments the process by which one has recently engaged in life-altering sex (penetrated in many ways it seems, the consensus being that this was an all-round pleasant experience). You wonder if this is some elaborate plot, an actor being fed lines, an audience fed by your discomfort.

You, the bargainer.

You pray without hope of being heard. You’ll sacrifice any hope of the missionary-appreciating, kiss-on-the-neck-wanting kind of want if only you may be bestowed with some niche, never-to-be-spoken-aloud kink. You’ll take being turned on by the blowing of a nose (a thing – it would make flu season exciting at least), you’ll opt for wanting to have sex with a car (a thing, of course), you’d even go as far as the whole falling down the stairs thing (which is a thing, what isn’t?). It’s not ideal but at least you can be ashamed about something, rather than nothing; this non-feeling between two thighs cannot be borne indefinitely.

You consider the vast swathes of compromises made. Continental barriers, intermittent attention to hygiene, and carefully ignored sports-betting addictions are sacrifices swallowed for the great union between consenting adults, yet sexual fulfilment forms an irreplaceable tenet of romance it seems. You harbour that unfixable flaw, incongruous with a world built on pleasure.

You, possesser of that sordid desire to be wanted and loved.

Your detached eroticism is musically pornographic, is it not? Your commitment to the worship of what you cannot feel admirable and steadfast, no? You, who moans and gropes, humiliated, for the sake of shared warmth, and conversation. One toothbrush next to the other. You wish for scheduled date nights on a shared calendar and held hands and memories created and kept by two. You want nothing more than the thing you do not want at all, that great overbearing prerequisite of being touched and prodded and spread, the adorned and pearly archway to fulfilment. You are no stoic soldier; you think of love.

You, sexless beast, undress one more time.

Perhaps this time it will be different. No groin-pulling horniness nor libido-led decision-making has brought you here; pure mental clarity fuels this act. The stakes of the ordeal make you shiver. To stutter, to misplace a hand, to allow a fleeting expression of discomfort is to reveal your perverse charade, is to ensure your innocent partner feels acutely unwanted. You touch your feelingless body to theirs and wait for salvation.

You see the want in others, and you covet it. You recognise the blush, the softened eyes, and you give in. You think: I want this, I want this, I want this.