loading . . . The OSA, sex, and a funeral This week, I renewed this website for another year. It almost didn’t happen: I left it to the very last minute, after weeks of ignored reminder emails, before the service ceased. I spent the time considering whether I should keep it going, or let it quietly die, seeing as I haven’t published anything new in so many months. I actually haven’t written anything new, to publish, in so many months.
There were multiple reasons for my hesitation. The OSA has sapped some of the fun out of operating smutty enterprises, and, although I’m extremely privileged to not be as affected as other creators, it signifies a ruling class increasingly hostile to sex and LGBTQIA+ people. I say sex, but what I really mean is visible sexuality: people enjoying sex in all forms, rather than enduring closeted, formalised sex. Visible sexuality is freedom, and there’s nothing that terrifies authority more. It’s a return to puritanism, forcing sex and sexuality behind closed doors and something to be ashamed of enjoying, and especially something to be ashamed of talking about. I see this attitude increasingly permeating my ordinary life and me increasingly having to defend against this. Just this week, a friend expressed an opinion that music was becoming increasingly sexualised and that this is a Bad Thing, despite art and sex being intertwined since they were both conceived. Sex is real life, not simply pornography, and every time I point that out to someone new, a little piece of me dies inside. Watching other creators struggle and rally in the face of OSA, advertisers becoming wary of platforms that are even slightly suggestive, and payment gateways backing away from sex altogether, encourages doubt to creep in. Why continue to do this when it seems no one wants it?
Another reason has been plain, old-fashioned misery significantly impacting my creative output. I’m sadly not one of those artists who works through their torture, embraces pain and uses it to create beauty: I am paralysed by it. I don’t wish to brag, but writing this, writing anything, is a pretty big deal to me because it represents a return to an old self who I thought was lost forever.
Last autumn, I attended the funeral of a family member whom I wasn’t close to, but who has been a major, happy figure in my memories predominantly because of their connection to my dad. My dad, who is also dead. At first, I was sad but coolly unaffected by this family member’s death, until the funeral, when I started to loudly and publicly sob and couldn’t find a way of stopping. I cried more than all of their children combined. I wish I could say I cried for them; I didn’t, I cried for me and my dad and for the grief I thought was resolved. It wasn’t helped by other family members talking about my dad and how much he was loved and missed, and, despite it being truly, truly lovely to know others miss him as much as I do, internally I was screaming for them to stop while externally nodding my head in placating agreement. At the burial, I retreated to my car alone; first to cry some more, then to try to wipe the displaced mascara off my cheeks with an old Maoam wrapper.
Then, an aunt fat-shamed me at the wake and I was truly lost.
It was many months until I realised that the funeral was a trigger for yet another mental health decline and eating disorder relapse. And every relapse becomes more sad, more predictable, more boring, and more embarrassing every time. I won’t bore you with the details, it was pretty much just like this, again. Don’t worry friends, during that time I was still fucking. Some of it was amazing and meaningful, other times it was just going through the motions to encourage some feeling in me. Sometimes it was simply a depressed person needing fleeting positive attention to feed their own depleting self-worth. And when I use sex as a coping mechanism, I have no will to write about it. Over the past few months I’ve had good, even fantastic sex: kinky sex, group sex, intensely romantic sex, stranger sex, bareback sex, anal sex. But afterwards, after the last drops of dopamine have leaked from my cunt and the misery creeps back in, I ask “what’s next?” and seek the next hit. Writing the story, retelling it, reliving it, leaves me cold, even when the sex was red hot. It feels like a betrayal of sex itself to use it in that way and then tell people about it, as though it should remain my dirty secret to not sully its name. It’s as though I’m letting the haters and the puritans win. If that’s the only sex I’m capable of having, I can’t write anything, so, why continue to do this?
The answers are actually very simple: people do still want this, and so do I. Yes, society’s leaders are increasingly segregating sex, sexuality, and LGBTQIA+ people from real life and making it seem as though it’s not welcome, but society as a whole, they’re pretty horny. It’s easy to view OSA and recent supreme court rulings as being indicative of a wider trend, however it doesn’t have to be, and I appreciate now, as my head’s a bit clearer, that I, as an individual person in society, have a responsibility to ensure it’s not. Do I owe it to others to be constantly and consistently happy and sexed up and leading the charge for sex positivity? No, I actually don’t. But I owe it to myself to be as happy and creative as I can be, and a core element of that is to write and publish and share. If I can keep going, maybe it will help other creators, even a tiny bit, by highlighting their amazing work and demonstrating there’s still a thriving and engaged audience out there for smut. Because, although you’re reading this slightly self-pitying piece full of feels and dark humour, I know you really want to read the sexy stuff too, and not just mine. Stay horny, friends.
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