Hello dear ones,
I’m stoked to share another excerpt from my book manuscript, Touch Me, I’m Sick: Essays on Hysterical Intimacies. This writing comes from the second chapter of the book, entitled “Ambivalent Desires, Ugly Sex.” The TLDR for this excerpt: I define what I mean by “ugly sex,” talk about why we need to hold space for ambivalence in conversations about consent, bring in some parts work and structural dissociation theory to map the relationship between disorganized attachment and ugly sex, and share some very cringey poetry from my late teens/early 20s.
You’ll be able to read some of the writing here for free, and then some will be behind a paywall (though if you can’t afford the paid sub, please email me at hello@margeauxfeldman.com for access. Money should never be a barrier).
I have a complicated relationship with paywalls, but I’ve chosen to have one here because this writing is truly special to me, took years and years to write (this began as my PhD dissertation) and because I dream of reaching 500 paid subscribers by the end of the year (I’m currently at 231, so this feels like a lofty but hopefully achievable goal).
Thank you for your understanding.
I feel called to start with a confession: I have had ugly sex. No, I do not mean bad sex (although I’ve had plenty of that too). I’m talking about the sex that you desire but also feel a bit repulsed by. Sex that gets you off, but leaves you feeling unsettled afterwards. Sex that is messy and ambivalent, and thus different from the so-called fully empowered, unequivocally “yes!” sex that feminists are supposed to have.
Ugly sex is a term I am using to refer to sexual encounters that might be degrading or humiliating, that might leave you feeling not so great afterwards, but that are still pleasurable in the moment and might cause you to want more.
Part of the reason I have chosen the word “ugly” to describe these sexual encounters is because ugliness is an aesthetic category, defined by its opposition to the beautiful. What constitutes beauty and ugliness has a long history of debate, one that I won’t rehash here because I’m not interested in subjective definitions (though many philosophers will try to tell you that beauty is objective). Rather, I’m drawn towards ugliness for the ways in which it marks certain bodies as unworthy of desire and certain acts as abhorrently undesirable.
Included in the list of those marked as ugly are the disabled, queer, trans, gender nonconforming, fat, aging, and racialized. Marking those whose ugliness is visible, by way of physical appearance, (disabled, fat, aging, racialized, trans) and those whose ugliness is invisible but marked by their desires (queer, trans, gender nonconforming), ugliness is as much about a body’s appearance as it is about what we choose to do with that body. In other words, that which is ugly is viewed as being morally offensive or repulsive; the ugly is base, degraded, and highly objectionable.
Ugly sex might be offensive to “good feelings” but it does not have to occupy an exclusively “bad” position. Ugly sex can bring us joy even as it makes us feel a whole host of “bad” feelings. And so when I talk about ugly sex, I am referring to an experience that can feel pleasurable and devastating all at once. Ugly sex captures the oscillation between empowerment and devastation, attraction and repulsion, agency and subordination. Ugly sex is the sex that we are not supposed to talk about, especially as feminists, because the only kind of feminist sex is the sex that empowers you.
I used to suffer so much shame every time I recalled how these ugly sexual encounters were all I really knew for the first decade that I was having sex. From ages fourteen to twenty-four, I’d sleep with boys whose sloppy kisses disgusted me and turned me on at the same time. Their hands always moving too fast, as we went from kissing to fucking on bathroom floors or dark bedrooms illuminated by strings of white Christmas lights. They’d always get up and walk out first. I’d leave feeling used and abandoned. And yet, there was something that compelled me to return again and again to these boys. I was a repeat offender.
Melissa Febos will share a similar reflection in her book Girlhood when she writes about “empty consent”: scenarios in which we consent, but we don’t necessarily want to. “During fleeting casual sexual encounters, women and girls are expected to place a man’s physical and emotional interests above their own, to assume responsibility for ensuring that they are met. But in committed relationships, they are often expected to do this every minute of their lives.” One of the ways that women prioritize the needs of men over their own is through empty consent.
There are other reasons we engage in empty consent: “the need to protect our bodies from the violent retaliation of men and the need to protect the same men from the consequences of their own behavior, usually be assuming personal responsibility”; we may offer a blowjob in order to avoid being forced to have sex; you may feel exhausted at the end of a long day, a long week, a long month, but you also desire connection with your partner.
I know that this is a contentious opinion, but I believe that consent is often a messy space that cannot always be defined by a yes or a no. Trauma complicates things. Why we say yes matters, and empty consent does not negate the pleasure we may have experienced by engaging in an act that we didn’t necessarily feel hundred percent enthusiastic about.
There is a way in which we pathologize experiences that fall short of an uncomplicated, unequivocal yes. I spent years and years of my life feeling ashamed of my early sexual experiences once I recognized that consent couldn’t really exist if I wasn’t sober. Was I harmed by these experiences? Yes. And, at the same time, ugly sex enabled me to access the intimacy and connection that I desperately needed to survive. It’s complicated.