TouchDesign

The last thing I want, when someone is unfastening my dress, is to be understood.

I want the delicious suspense of being misunderstood. I want to be looked at with the kind of attention usually reserved for expensive paintings and terrible accidents. I want the performance, the anticipation, the little cruelties of withholding a kiss. What I do not want is to be fucked into a more truthful version of myself.

We have become terribly earnest about sex. It’s no longer enough to desire someone. We must understand them, communicate our needs, dismantle our inhibitions, interrogate our attachments, and emerge from the encounter having discovered something previously inaccessible about ourselves. Even pleasure has acquired a professional development component.

The contemporary invitation to have authentic sex sounds generous: remove the mask, bring your whole self, allow yourself to be seen. But I spend enough of my life being seen. I would like, occasionally, to be spectacularly misrepresented.

Why must the woman beneath the lipstick be more real than the woman who applied it? There’s an extraordinary amount of honesty in artifice. A woman who spends forty minutes constructing the precise conditions of her own desirability is telling you something about what she wants. Perhaps more than she could articulate naked, sitting at the edge of a bed, explaining her childhood.

I am suspicious of anyone who insists on knowing the real me. The man who announces that he sees through your performance rarely considers that the performance might be the part you most wanted him to see. He wants access to the woman underneath, as though intimacy were a burglary and her interior life the safe.

I love the exquisitely erotic idea of invention. The unfamiliar voice you discover yourself using. A dress chosen not to be worn but to be removed.

None of this is accidental. That is precisely what makes it beautiful.

We are told that good sex requires vulnerability, but vulnerability has become so closely associated with disclosure that we have forgotten the peculiar exposure of pretending. To perform desire is to risk looking ridiculous. The woman who arranges herself beneath the gaze of another is not necessarily surrendering to it. She may be directing the entire production.

And what of the fantasies that contradict our politics?

I can object to obedience in every institution that governs my life and still find a command intoxicating when it comes from a mouth I have chosen. I can enjoy the temporary extravagance of surrender without wishing to make a permanent residence there.

My feminism does not need to stand at the foot of the bed taking notes.

The distinction, of course, is freedom. An instruction is only seductive when disobedience remains possible. Surrender becomes pleasurable because it can be withdrawn. The fantasy must answer to the people having it, not the other way around. Consent is real; the characters need not be.

If I enjoy being adored, must we discuss my father? Perhaps I like being difficult in a room where difficulty is welcome. Perhaps the pleasure of a fantasy is precisely that it does not have to survive an explanation.

There ought to be some corner of a woman's existence that is not immediately converted into evidence.

I want sex that can be lavish, absurd, theatrical, a little vulgar. I want to be fucked, not figured out. I want the freedom to be vain, demanding, tender, ridiculous, almost unrecognizable. I want to invent a woman for twenty minutes and then abandon her without the obligation to make her a permanent feature of my personality.

In the morning, I may want coffee, ordinary affection, and someone to leave me alone while I read.

We have confused intimacy with excavation. We believe that loving someone means digging until nothing remains concealed. But perhaps the greater intimacy is being trusted with somebody's inventions. To be invited into a fantasy without demanding its confession. To touch what is offered without assuming ownership of what remains hidden.

I do not want a lover who sees through me.

I want one who knows when to look, when to play along, and when to turn off the light.