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A reminder that much of the coupling impulse (within romantic/sexual relationships, friendships, political groupings etc) is in a large part a reaction to the fear of loss/abandonment/loneliness, rather than a pure desire to exist in a relationship with someone. That so much of this requires a control and limiting of the actions and thoughts and desires of others, which prevents us from living as our actualised selves. even if u want to exist in close coupledom, worth a read and a think, it’s got some great ideas about the purpose of relationships and how generative/life-giving they have the potential to be 🤔
Oct 15, 2024
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@mothersuperior post on latex and the yearndemic reminded me of this essay that I read a few years ago about the commodification and fetishization of the body and how it’s been paralleled with a lack of chemistry and sexuality that we used to see on screen. The title is your tldr: everyone is hot and no one is horny. The sterilization of sexuality and sex is everywhere, past even film. It’s a response to the acceleration of capitalism, war and colonial extraction of the earth. It has crept into the ways we view ourselves, our experience and our bodies.
One thing I took away from this essay is that to align yourself with traditional beauty standards will make you too tired to fuck. Similarly, the whole « working on yourself » grind that I heard on first dates all the time is this strange, individualistic perspective that makes you too exhausted and distracted for the holistic chemistry we desire. We flatten our lives to marketable lines that make us appear attractive - I’m working on myself, I’ve been going to therapy, I have a nice job and apartment. And while people are obviously horny, they don’t know for what - forming our bodies to be better, our minds fixed and correct, we can’t pinpoint what the purpose is cause we’re too fucking exhausted to investigate further than that. Love, desire, and chemistry feel more and more elusive.
For us to morph ourselves into the image of sexiness according to western beauty standards, there is sacrifice (nutrients, your current corporeal form, the ability to be perceived as more than an object, working long hours for your grind) that doesn’t align with sensuality (unless you’re into that). There is no room for the spectrum of sensations you body is capable of feeling. There is no room for desire when we’ve given it all up the capitalist war machine. :p
3d ago
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She and I are both in the midst of a reckoning. We once saw romance as a narrative tool of oppression, a construct designed by the patriarchy to make women accept subjugation. But now we’re beginning to believe that it’s real and reconciling those two truths is proving more complicated than we expected.
People today approach love like online comparison shopping, scrolling through options on apps. Instead of courtship, we have the “talking stage,” something that is noncommittal by design.
But romance can’t be casual; it requires conviction and presence. It demands vulnerability and a kind of giving spirit that feels almost alien in a culture that prizes detachment and transactional connection. Romance isn’t dead—it’s just antithetical to the way we’ve been conditioned to interact.
Feb 18, 2025
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fuckin uhhhh,, wrote this at like 4 am for a powerpoint night,,, examining cannibalism thru litcrit,,,, no promises about that part 2 but i do have Thoughts
title: eating you (out): the inherent sexuality of cannibalism
So much of our sexual language contains also that of hunger. Conversely, cannibalism contains within it the hunger of sexuality – the hunger for another’s body. “I’m starved for touch” “Oh I could just eat you up” “they were eating each others’ faces” “Eat my pussy” The knowledge of cannibalism as erotic — and eroticism as cannibalistic — is carried through our language of sexuality hunger from tender to sensual to pornographic. Cannibalism is the ultimate act of a possessive, starving sexuality. It is the ultimate knowledge of the other, from whence there can be no return. Once you have partaken of another’s flesh, you are something different. You’re full.
The King James Bible often translates sexual acts as "knowing"; thus knowing someone, in the biblical sense, is a carnal knowledge. And what knowledge is more intimate, more totalizing, than the knowledge of another’s taste? Cannibalism is a carnal knowledge, but it also exemplifies the horrors of being known intimately, the fears associated with sex. Will I become absorbed by this person, this other? What does their knowledge of me mean for my selfhood? How much of me can they Know before I cease to exist entirely?
Thus, cultural depictions of cannibalism are overwhelmingly stories where love and horror coexist. In the ancient greek myths, we can see these inklings of a cannibalism borne out of love. When Saturn, or Cronos, hears the prophecy of his destruction at the hands of his children, he knows he must kill them. But rather than merely dispatching them in some sterile, unphysical way, he retakes into his body that which came from it. He cannot allow his children to live, and yet he cannot live without them; they must become a part of him. This presents a painful physicality of love that could only be expressed as cannibalism. This is the erotic complexity of cannibalism – possession, love, knowledge, sex, fear, consumption.
Modern tv and movies have heightened awareness of the sexual nature of cannibalism to a degree that cannot be ignored. [slide w/ NBC Hannibal and Twilight posters] Both these depictions are deeply possessive, and certainly toxic – I need you so much that I must bend your body to my will and consume you totally — yet hold space for tenderness, intimacy, friendship, and marriage.
In NBC’s 2012 horror/comedy masterpiece Hannibal, we see the ways in which cannibalism can present both this deep possessiveness and hunger (literally and figuratively), but also the ways in which cooking and eating someone is an act of intimacy. Hannibal spends hours making people into gourmet meals, familiarizing himself with their bodies before taking them into his own. Imagine the caress of spices before the heat of the gas stove flame. He remembers each of his meals like one might remember an old lover.
We might say that the relationship between pleasure and pain is central to the cannibalism’s sexuality — the pleasure and the pain of being known, the dichotomy of possessiveness and tenderness.
Cannibalism is kinky, it’s sadomasochistic.
In Twilight, Edward's vampirism, the capital-b Bite, is a clear metaphor for sex. Metatexually, the story needs this metaphorical distancing because of Meyer’s Mormonism, but the choice of vampirism, of cannibalism, as the sexual metaphor exposes the already existing cultural linkages between the two. Bella’s erotic fascination with the Bite, and Edward’s shame at his bloody desires, entwine the cannibalistic act of vampirism with sex and sexuality. Let us not forget that Twilight spawned the massive softcore kink book/movie franchise Fifty Shades of Grey. Reading these texts together, we can see clearly how the vampiristic, cannibalistic hunger of Twilight IS the kinky, sadomasochistic sex of Fifty Shades. These authors are writing the same thing.
An interesting dynamic that arises with regard to the sexuality of cannibalism is the aspect of penetration. There is a double penetration occuring – that of the carving knife, and that of the flesh. In the first instance, the cannibal as the power-holder is doing the penetrating; this is to be expected in a cisheteronormative culture. But the second penetration is that of the cannibalized into the cannibal — the cannibal is allowing someone else’s flesh into them, is allowing their body to be changed by someone else’s. Here, although the cannibal is still (obviously) in a dominant role, they experience vulnerability and penetration at the hands of their partner. This is queer as fuck!!
Cannibalism is not just sexual, it embodies a queer sadomasochistic sexuality. Bones and All (2022) highlights this perfectly -- the eroticism of satiating a hunger that has been condemned and relegated to psychiatric institutions and subversive subcultures.
We as a culture have accepted --- and even adore --- the sexual nature of cannibalism in our media. But how has the sexual cannibal presented throughout history? What institutions does it support, and is the sexuality of cannibalism something that must be destroyed? Stay tuned for part 2 for a historical materialist analysis of sexy cannibalism :)
Feb 21, 2025
Top Recs from @siddhartha
So sweet to send them to thank them for your shared experience, and I’d much rather look at one of these than ten pics from that day
Jan 23, 2024
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go to events even if u think they’ll be iffy - better to have some memories of living life than none, go to library, go sit on the nearest grass
also u can’t expect good arts and culture if u don’t support the bad/amateur stuff as well 🦀
Jan 30, 2024
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Eg in shower, on walks, during commute, making dinner, to go to sleep, getting dressed. be able to do all these comfortably in silence. then u can try phase them back in in a way where they actually contribute something and ur not just listening for the sake of it
Jan 29, 2024