How do we write about love of cock?

There's something embarrassing, shameful, about enormous desire: cuntstruck, dick-drunk, dickmatized, down bad. So much work goes into pretending to be more upright, less addicted, than we really are. When I was fourteen years old, I bemoaned a doomed crush on a senior in my art history class. I knew it was maddeningly stupid to want a man. It never stopped. They played guitar, climbed trees, sent me John Rawls' Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, wrote letters, chopped up psilocybin mushrooms on their mother's wooden cutting board, shook hair out of their eyes, looked beautiful asleep in the morning. I wanted to follow them everywhere.

The impulse felt self-sabotaging. Romantic and sexual relationships between men and women are sites of immense gendered immiseration: there are widely-documented inequities in household labor,1 care work,2 leisure,3 orgasm during sexual encounters,4 and bargaining power.5 Ellie Anderson writes compellingly in this cluster about another injustice, hermeneutic labor: women having to do sleuthing and interpretive work to draw out taciturn male partners' under-communicated emotional cues. Despite these rampant inequalities, women continue to partner with men. Why? Philosophers like Manon Garcia and Charlotte Knowles have written about the subject of women's complicity in their own subordination, with the former describing women's choices under patriarchy as adaptive preferences and the latter challenging assumptions from liberal thought that individuals seek to be agentive subjects at all times.6 Other narrative accounts, influenced by evolutionary biology, describe women's desire for men through a naturalizing discourse in which desire is keyed to monogamous pairing and reproduction.7 When women don't desire men "enough," doctors intervene, largely to maintain a status quo in which women fulfill male partners' sexual wants.8 A woman's desire registers as important to philosophical, scientific, and medical authorities because of how it can be instrumentalized — upholding her subordination, reproducing the species, contributing to a "healthy" marriage — not as a vital phenomenon in and of itself.

We should not trivialize heterosexual erotic yearning (the mistake of those who seem not to comprehend the power of women's attraction to men). Nor should we take it as a given (the mistake of those who make biological essentialist claims about heterosexuality, or otherwise say "this is simply how things are"). Avoiding both of those errors, we can begin to develop better understandings of women's choices and affective experiences without ignoring the role of desire. This is not to say that desire for men is normatively good or that it allows straightness to evade critical inquiry; only that if we seek to understand the propulsion of some women towards men, we have to interrogate what legal scholar Janet Halley says is presently inadequately theorized: "women's erotic yearning for men . . . [a] women's version of what Leo Bersani, writing on behalf of gay men, has called 'gay male love of the cock.'"9

Why does Halley turn to gay men's expression of desire for men's flesh as a proxy for the potentially similar, but unspoken, desire of women who sleep with men? One answer is that there is a proliferation of discourse about men yearning for men. Officially pathologized, criminalized, and stigmatized at many times and places, the "gay male love of the cock" has been the subject of intense inquiry, depiction, and description — intellectual and political authorities demand justifications for queerness that are never asked of the sanctified conjugal heterosexual relationship. There's also the way expressions of desire perform gender. If the stereotype is that women are emotional while men are physical, "love of the cock" is more acceptable for a gay man to express than a woman. A gay male acquaintance commented to me at a party, in a discussion about cocks, "Yeah, sometimes I wake up and I'm just so grateful they exist, it's like, they're so wonderful I could cry." When I smiled and said I knew what he meant, he remarked, "I didn't realize women actually liked dick." This comment is both incredible — considering that the majority of women identify as heterosexual — and eminently understandable. How much space have women been granted historically to express highly embodied desire? While their male counterparts were sketching prostitutes, cadavers, and models, nineteenth century European women hoping to be professional artists were denied access to life drawing classes. While Alvin Baltrop, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Peter Hujar turned to the robust cruising culture of New York City for subject matter, it's difficult to imagine a woman standing in their position, photographing public sex on seedy abandoned piers. Art projects like Nan Goldin's images in the Ballad of Sexual Dependency of her lover Brian (who would go on to be physically abusive), Sophie Calle's Suite Vénitienne (where Calle stalked a man around Venice, taking photographs), or Chris Kraus' book I Love Dick (about an obsessive and unrequited love for the titular figure), stand out so much because desire as obsessive watching, perhaps predation, is such a departure from normative performances of femininity.

Art that is capacious, offering room to experiment and engage with physicality, desire, and abjection, offers a guiding light to where scholarship could go. Angela Jones writes that academic researchers face concerns about legitimacy and propriety, driving a lack of "a pornographic imagination" in sociology.10 How might we develop that imagination? I want to propose a methodological turn towards art as sociological data, via my own engagement with heteropessimistic novels and San Francisco writer Dodie Bellamy's 2011 creative nonfiction book The Buddhist, to describe a woman's version of "love of cock." Bellamy's book appealed to me not only for its emotional honesty but for its corporeality and ludic grossness. When I've talked to bisexual women about desire, I've sometimes heard a similar bluntness. During a language immersion program abroad one summer, I experienced an agonizing crush on a woman. I perked up when she walked into a room, all my senses came alive; in her presence, the world sharpened, then slid out of focus again as we tossed back whiskey in crowded clubs. She was straight; there was no chance of anything happening. I had not realized until that summer that I was bisexual, and I confided in a friend who was out as bi. After consoling me, my friend turned to the topic of desire. She had a boyfriend, she told me, then added with a blasé expression, "Yeah, I'd just be lesbian, but I like dick too much." Jane Ward writes about a similar moment in The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, when a straight friend tells her "I am in it for the dick."11

I cannot speak with certainty for either of these dick-loving interlocutors about how they meant the word "dick" here. If purely about enjoying the physical possibilities dicks engender, the statements would have little explanatory power for dating men. Penises have no monopoly on penetration, as anyone with fingers, strap-ons, or sex toys can attest; nor are they the only sensitive zones with bundles of nerve fibers. But "I am in it for the dick" does not elide the importance of sexual attraction, as might happen with an answer closer to "I like romantic relationships with men." My summer program friend and I hadn't read our Lacan; we did not interrogate if being in it for the dick meant being in it for the phallus as signifier, the organizing logic of the symbolic order. I will make a more vernacular claim. "I like dick" is easier to say than a messier explanation, something like I am powerfully aroused by people who have a certain way of moving through the world — a way of moving that is often associated with being socialized male, maybe a way of moving that comes from people making room for you, bowing a little. I interview women who date men about their experiences, and one interviewee, Shruti, said the element of her ex's attractiveness she linked most to gender was how "he walked in the world like he was very confident in what his place was." In contrast, Shruti said that women and nonbinary people to whom she had been attracted had a confidence she described as the product of "work."12 Identifying as a bisexual woman who "likes dick" does not imply resigning oneself to only sleeping with people who have penises, but it may express a resignation to often feeling attraction in a direction that entails your own relative subordination.

This attraction is serious, but some responses to the problems of heterosexuality under patriarchy trivialize the thralldom of erotic yearning. In their polemical 1981 tract, the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group argued that earnest feminists should become political lesbians. They said, "Giving up fucking . . . is about taking your politics seriously. Women who are socialists are prepared to give up many things which they might enjoy . . . They will resist buying Cape apples because the profits go to South Africa."13 

If you are not ready for divestment to come to the bedroom, there is the refuge of heteropessimism. I appreciate heteropessimism as a cultural phenomenon and analytical lens, because it acknowledges what is terrible about heterosexuality while also giving gravity to women's desire for men. If some of us are fated to this desire, it's imperative for our well-being and liberation to figure out how to live with it better.

Over the course of the fall semester I worked on a sociology paper about a dozen novels that I termed heteropessimistic. In the novels I analyzed, which included books like Megan Nolan's Acts of Desperation, Alyssa Songsiridej's Little Rabbit, and Lillian Fishman's Acts of Service, desire provides such a powerful drive that it obviates other considerations, such as the opprobrium of one's friends or moral conundrum of sleeping with the enemy. (The narrator of Acts of Service identifies as lesbian before being consumed by desire for her male lover in Service, who sexually harasses a subordinate at work.) Each narrator is ostensibly empowered to optimize social, moral, professional, and political conditions in her own life, and she finds herself privileging desire over these other domains. The suspense of these stories comes less from any choice about whether the narrator will sleep with the man she is attracted to (she will), and more from the question of how much she will blow up along the way. In this sense, they feint around desire itself. The reader learns about attraction to a man through feeling around the edges, particularly how self-punishing she is in the absence of his attention.

Contrast that picture to something like Garth Greenwell's writing in What Belongs to You, a novel about an American in Bulgaria who has sex with a young hustler named Mitko. The narrator says of this first clandestine encounter,

I lap up writing like Greenwell's, all smell and armpits, or Tim Dean's, the semen-soaked frenzy he describes in Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, or Melissa Broder's in Milk Fed, the narrator describing another woman's "peat moss, soil, sod, loam" smell. Sitting next to my partner, I nudged him to read Greenwell's passage, in the way we often exchange excerpts of what we read. This made me think of you, I said without speaking. Part of being in love is reading everything with this eagerness for what might be shared, offered up as a kind of gift. I feel like a cat looking for mice to lay at my owner's door. He is reading with me in a rococo cafe of blue banquettes and painted peacocks. He, too, quotes lines from a book to me. I am delighted looking at him in his worn yellow sweatshirt and round-rimmed glasses. Here I am with my Cape apple. I am doing a bad job of writing about desire by my own standard, because I am embarrassed, and so gesture at attraction without using words that would make my cheeks hot if I were to read them out loud.

Andrea Long Chu says "[i]t's hard to make something as politically dowdy as a woman into a covergirl for that trendy new metaphysics you're hawking";15 a woman who desires men is dowdy times two. Much of the literary fiction or content broadly acceptable to the ruling class (if we think about taste in a Bourdieusian way) about men and women — the stuff on the front table at your highbrow independent bookstore — nods at the potential of desire to disrupt one's life without actually showing sexual experiences that convey embodied erotic connection. Even when sex is explicitly described, it is fashionable for the protagonist to be absent, somewhere else, maybe submissive and beaten, seeking sex as analgesic, sex in the service of self-obliteration. It is permissible to be insatiable, yes, but it has to be miserable and imprudent: Fleabag's rampant dissociating, Luster's Edie having inexplicable hookups that lose her a job. Sex does less to enthrall than to entrap. 

The danger of sex negativity in media is that it may prime consumers to lead more frightened, and less autonomous, sexual lives. Growing up seeing the "Have You Seen Me?" children on mailers changed how I thought about the affordances of public space — parks and bus stops, for example, appeared to be not just places for my enjoyment but places I could be kidnapped. Might sex be a similar kind of terrain? Many of the narratives that depict unenthusiastic, conflicted, and ambivalent instantiations of women's sex with men (Kristen Roupenian's New Yorker short story "Cat Person" is another example) have been celebrated as much-needed correctives to overly rosy ideas about what changing sexual mores might entail for women. In this, they are successful. But some strains of feminist thought would also caution that there are costs to the prolificness of this kind of story. In her article on the "pleasures and freedoms of silence," political scientist Wendy Brown critiques the feminist encouragement of discourse, the breaking of silences, the confessional mode as liberatory or the "site of production of truth."16 She is concerned about the possibilities too much discourse can preclude. Some experiences, per Hannah Arendt, are extinguished by the "glare of public light."17 What if one such experience is women's ability to lead "relatively uncoerced sexual lives"? Brown's fear is that speaking too much about trauma forecloses possibilities for becoming other than the injured subject. She is particularly frustrated with "the identity of women as keyed to sexual violation," asking, "might this installation be particularly unemancipatory for women whose lived experience is not that of sexual subordination to men but, for example, that of sexual outlaw?"18 

Dodie Bellamy is a perfect example of this. She is a San Francisco Bay Area-based writer whose work spans and defies genre; she has written poems, novels, and essays. She is associated with the New Narrative movement of experimental writing, and exemplifies the movement's attention to physicality, authenticity, and explicitness. Her book The Buddhist is a nondescript yellow softcover book with nothing printed on the spine but the date MAR 17 2011. I thought perhaps it would be a religious document. I opened the book. The first line is, "I'm curling back on my spine, ass up in the air, cunt pointed toward the ceiling, and he's plunging into me."19 What follows is a staccato description that flies from the pain of unlubricated thrusts to the logistics of sex in old age to Bellamy's encyclopedic knowledge of the Buddhist. The book is compiled from a series of posts Bellamy wrote on her personal blog, belladodie, throughout the dissolution of a tortured love affair with a married man. The man is a religious guru, apparently successful on the influencing and speaking circuit; she refers to him only as "the Buddhist," sometimes lowercase.

Bellamy's desire for the man is inextricably entwined with disappointment. His coldness and secrecy make her exasperated, but also keep her yearning for him: "With him I simultaneously experienced profound alienation and profound tenderness. Maddeningly, I bounced back and forth between desire and anxiety."20 There is tension between her preference for explicitness and exposure versus the Buddhist's more reserved temperament. Her perception of his preferences and moral judgment leads to self-restriction. In one scene, this directly affects her ability to enjoy the sexual experience:

Bellamy's characterization of her orgasm, not as a moment of pleasure but of intense negativity, something that literally unsettles her stomach, resists the popular image of orgasm as joyful and transcendent. Bellamy gives us disenchantment — not Weber's, at the hands of scientific rationality, but a desacralization produced by squelching, shitting bodies.

She refuses to sacralize the attraction she feels for the Buddhist by depicting it as clean, good, separate from his body or from the realities of their environment and respective occupations. She refers to the Buddhist's cock as a potentially "satisfying framing device" for the book. Cock as "framing device": this is far from rainbows and sunshine, but the instrumentalization of an organ for Bellamy's art. Bellamy dances between using the Buddhist's cock as body part and as a shorthand that allows her to speak about a larger idea of what it is to be attractive, a concept that is wrapped up in entitlement, coldness, and gender performance. She writes, "It's a tragedy the buddhist has such a nice cock. Last summer I dreamt it was huge and shaped like a pelican's beak" — before turning to interpreting her dream and then running with the image of the beak: "A beak is a hard, scary mouth. The cock beak is speaking to me right now, it's saying you're a bitch for writing this nasty, personal shit."22 

Not only is the cock, or the Buddhist, frightening, judgmental, withholding, and insufficient; it is also disappointing. Bellamy actually writes at the end of the graphic essay at the beginning of the book about sex concluding anticlimactically, the Buddhist softening within her after she has "pushed too hard."23 Despite this insufficiency, the cock delimits what is acceptable or unacceptable, wanted or unwanted, hidden or exposed.

Bellamy acknowledges the aspects of her attraction to the Buddhist that are non-normative — his power and grooming and withholding, her klieg lights, staginess, relationship to the gaze. When the writer Lux Alptraum tackled the question of desire and masculinity in her newsletter, she said she was intrigued by the "bad" elements of masculinity: "With men, I felt like a champion acrobat, daring myself to take riskier and riskier leaps, always existing right at the edge of my own sanity and safety."24 For Alptraum, being the "champion acrobat" is out of step with feeling "like a person," as she characterizes her romantic experiences with women; in The Buddhist, the enormity of Bellamy's desire and its resistance to reason is definitional of what it is to be a person, at least to be a person like Dodie Bellamy. That excess, that propulsive force — "this is what I do," Bellamy writes in the beginning, talking about pushing things until they break. She names what is monstrous, dirty, excessive, lustful — and far from rejecting it, revels in the ludic act of description. This is her feminist praxis. 

So too is her commitment to exposure. Bellamy criticizes the injunction to keep some things behind closed doors, arguing that keeping emotion private is a norm for high-class people and male writers, while she associates displaying emotion in public with her gender and her working-class background: "if someone betrayed you, you would tell anybody within earshot what that son of a bitch did to you," eliciting commiseration and respect.25 When emotional redress is unavailable within the relationship, exposure offers opportunities for palliative attention from one's community. Is exposure a weapon of the weak? For Bellamy, it is tactical: a response to the notion that "one has to be strong, knowledgeable or responsible in order to speak."26 She writes, "the act of commandeering words flips me into a position of power."27 While Wendy Brown expresses the concern that disclosure narrows the field of what is possible, Bellamy argues that writing from vulnerability builds solidarity and power. 

She is keenly aware of critical reception, writing that when she began, "my work was considered stupid and my eyeliner was too heavy and I talked too loud and whenever the opportunity presented itself I was always eager to fuck. I was a bad experimental feminist."28 Why is being "eager to fuck" at cross purposes with being an experimental feminist? It's as if embracing bodily pleasures confirms one's limitations — to be trapped in the sphere of immanence, in Beauvoir's terms. Bellamy doesn't privilege transcendence over immanence. She describes herself as a "monster," celebrates the "outlaw female presence with squirting nipples and an insatiable flabby hole," and writes about this hunger as part of her gender identity:

Never enough. "Love of cock" in The Buddhist involves coming to terms, again and again, with disappointment. Bellamy's writing shows it is a productive disappointment — providing the grounds for speech, solidarity, and an understanding of one's own capaciousness. Bellamy plays with humiliation and shame, revels in it. She announces her Janus-faced feeling, desire and disappointment, with all the gusto of a carnival barker. Far from being servile and regressive, her declarations of cunt hunger and carnage, anger and abandonment, are powerful declarations of the validity of her own need. They rally the support of her community of beloveds, and they make life inconvenient for a man (the Buddhist) who wants her to be more chaste and pliable in relation to him. Both the narrators of the heteropessimistic novels I read and Bellamy have to contend with men who disappoint, but the novel narrators get less of a chance to air their grievances; their hunger and dissatisfaction are depicted as quieter experiences. By being a sexual outlaw, Bellamy achieves a self-actualization the novel narrators cannot. As someone who has frequently loathed my own feelings of "never enough," resenting the hold of desire, I take instruction from how Bellamy deploys her own insatiability.

The Buddhist is not a work of academic literature. What if it could be? There is much to learn from Bellamy's critique of certain silences as upper-class and male norms, and the idea that liking sex too much would make one a "bad experimental feminist." We all lose out when arguments about women's complicity in the conditions of their own subordination within heterosexuality fail to seriously theorize about desire, and the cultural products that depict yearning in explicit terms are sidelined or regarded as lowbrow. What might it look like to unseat the primacy of language that is abstract and unfeeling? To ask less "Is it morally correct?" than "Did it move you? Did it seem true? Did it make you glance over your shoulder in the bookstore, did it make you squirm?" The Buddhist did. Heteropessimism's resignation implies belief in an outcome that is predetermined: I will be lured in, I will be disappointed. Bellamy's cunt shriek "never enough never enough never enough" reminds: there is fruitfulness in being desirous, stumbling, miserable, the champion acrobat falling through the air. Sometimes you catch me. Call it something like luck, or grace.

---

Adora Svitak (@adorasv) is a second-year graduate student at Yale in the joint PhD in Sociology and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her current focus is gender inequality in heterosexual intimate life. She has explored this subject through research projects on topics like female orgasm as a site of self-optimization and, most recently, the production and reception of "heteropessimistic" contemporary literary fiction. She received her B.A. in Development Studies from UC Berkeley, where she also minored in South Asian Studies and Creative Writing. Prior to coming to Yale, Adora worked in communications at the Wikimedia Foundation (the non-profit that operates Wikipedia), developing campaigns related to women's history and representation on Wikipedia. Outside of academic research, she also enjoys writing essays and fiction, considering literature both a source of creative joy and an integral form of sociological data.

---

References