cw: needles, blood, ingesting blood
Most of the world spells Sex P in V, parts rubbing together for the purpose of, biologically speaking, creating the miracle of life. If we’re talking dirty, like Genesis 1:28, God mandated that we “be fruitful, and multiply.” This is why I said I lost my unholy virginity to the boy on the patio swing when I was 18 and not to the boy in the basement bathroom when I was 12. It’s great to have definitions for things to be able to categorize them. Words mean things, as they should. However, in the cursed year of our lord 2020, there are a whole lot of us (homosexuals) who do not know each other biblically and thus the cultural mandate does not apply. So how do we define sex? (hello, welcome to another post about queer imagination)
When gossiping about dates it’s pretty normal for me to ask “Did you fuck?” without literally meaning “Did at least one person penetrate the other in one or more holes?” It’s all about context. It’s so boring for me to ask that, just as it’s boring for the person I’m asking to assume that’s what I meant. My definition of sex basically doesn’t exist. This is really obnoxious for me personally because I desperately want words to mean things. Sex is always action, but not always the same action. Sex is anything that feels erotic and exciting. Over the past five years or so my relationship to sex has changed a lot. I’ve become a lot more hungry for power and pain. The ways I’ve eroticized power and pain have caused me to reimagine my relationship to S-E-X and I realized I don’t even need to involve genitals when I fuck. Are you lost yet? Good.
During a recent virtual leather femme brunch, we were discussing how a lot of young queers don’t know about stone sexuality (You haven’t even heard of Stone Butch Blues, and it shows!!!). In the most literal definition of “words mean things,” younger queers have created 75 new terms and corresponding flags for the varying shades of asexual. I support all people to fly whatever flag feels right for them, but the need to have a name for every degree of sexual and romantic attraction also signifies to me, a grumpy elder, that maybe younger people leading this charge don’t yet understand that sexuality and attraction are fluid, always in flux, and not everyone wants to fuck each other all the time? Or that many of us have lots of limits and boundaries around how we have sex and with whom, and that is totally normal!
I very much do not identify as asexual… but at the same time I don’t really “have sex.” WHAT IS SEX?!?!?! In the biblical vanilla sense, I guess my sexuality is pretty close to demisexual, except that I don’t want to fuck, I just want to erotically hurt people, which can sometimes include fucking them. Essentially, I’m a leatherdyke sadist who has leathersex and I only want to fuck people who understand what that means.
I remember feeling all kinds of butterflies when I first read Xan West’s (still unfinished *sobs*) blog series on stone sexuality. Xan, aka Corey Alexander, was “an autistic queer fat white Jewish genderqueer writer and community activist with multiple disabilities” whose recent and untimely death has left a resounding sadness in many different communities. I think Xan shared one of these blog posts on Twitter, which sent me down a long and emotional rabbit hole. I read and reread the series of blog posts because I had never heard stone conceptualized in this way.
The first woman I ever had capital S sex with waited until after she fucked me to tell me that I couldn’t return the favor. She said she was stone, and I was devastated! My shining moment of blissful lesbian sexual reciprocity that I had dreamed of for many years had arrived— I had a hot nineteen year old model from okcupid who lied about her age in my bed AND I couldn’t touch her. I obviously respected this, even if that was very much not what I was expecting nor what I wanted at the time. This was my first encounter with stone sexuality and I’m glad I had the cultural knowledge of queerness to know what this meant. My desires at the time definitely didn’t align with not being able to touch my partner. Little did I know what the next ten years would have in store for me. (Not to sound horny but the next woman I dated was a twenty three year old who had never been kissed and also would’t let me fuck her. I consider this time in my early twenties a karmic period of sexual misalignment.)
Stone sexuality is not something widely written about at all, but Xan epically fixed that and wrote about it really beautifully. They propose stone identity as so much more than just being “untouchable,” that it’s additionally marked by the ability to locate one’s own pleasure in creating pleasure for partners. I love juicy, feral, hungry types of desire, like how I felt the other week eating food from my favorite restaurant for the first time since April. Anything less than this—meh. This is the type of desire Xan describes that really resonates for me. For them, a one-way gaze (within the consensual framework of mutual desire) fueled by response and energy exchange is a marker of being stone. Keeping up with the food metaphor, it reminds me of a predator out hunting for their next meal. The prey instinctively knows the hungry gaze of the predator and how to react accordingly. However, what if the prey/snack’s deepest desire is to be devoured? This works out really well for everyone.
“I can fuck every inch of someone’s skin, and create a whole and complete sexual experience from that. That experience feels rooted in my stone sexual identity; because of how my sexuality works, not only can I fuck someone’s skin with my knife or my boot, but I can come from fucking them that way, and if I’m in tune and they are in the headspace for it, can make them come as well. Hot incredible sex can happen that doesn’t involve anyone’s bits…to me, that’s stone sex for sure.”
In Leathersex, Joseph W. Bean’s 1994 epic and timeless book on all things leather, he says that “Sex is not necessarily a genitals-only experience.” He says of piss play, “Urination, adequately eroticized in advance, can be like coming. No, not like coming. It can be coming, the feeling of an orgasm going on and on, controllable and extendable in a way that no other orgasm can be.” Baby dyke me who just wanted to fuck would never have understood these concepts, let alone imagined this for myself.
Growing into my identity as a sadist who uses power and pain to facilitate sexual arousal, my interest in anything remotely close to what might be characterized as vanilla sex all but disappeared. The way I understand my sexuality is not defined by what I don’t do, but by my deep hunger. Desire is a creative process of embodiment that’s begging us to focus on what’s pleasing and juicy and erotic to us in the moment. Desire is the craving for pleasure, and pleasure is ultimately subjective. Especially with alternative sexualities, sex has always been a game of subjectivity. As queer people doing the devil’s work, we’re already challenged to locate our definitions of sex outside the idea of penetration. Then, as leather queer people, why stop there? Why not try skin fucking like Xan West, or a piss orgasm like Joseph W. Bean? A tongue on this boot is S-E-X!
Enjoy this skin fucking scene I wrote in honor of Xan and the influence their writing has had on my becoming:
Snapping my pink nitrile gloves on to my hands is a rush, they’re just transparent enough that I can still see the color of my long fingernails. The smell of rubbing alcohol fills my nose as I aggressively clean the unsuspecting flesh of my prey. I look at the skin cells on the paper towel and shame her for being so filthy. She wears pink frilly socks and matching pink panties, just the way I like it. I choose the pink capped 18g needles because aesthetics always matter and pink matches so nicely with crimson. I unwrap the needle carefully, exhaling as the bevel is revealed, the metal shines under the hospital lighting of my room. I inspect and pinch her breast in a few different places, searching for the first bite to my satisfaction. Ready? I say as a warning and my mouth curls into an evil grin and my eyes get wide with lust. I glide the point of the thick needle—1.5 inches of pure stainless steel—through her tight skin. In one side and out the other, cuts like butter. My prey moans as she sails to her happy place on the endorphin high.
I fuck her flesh with as many of my needles as she can take, one after the other, until her chest is covered in silver crosses while she prays to God that it never ends. I use my pink-gloved fingers to force the needles in unnatural directions, twisting and pulling her skin to my design. She squeals as I stare her in the eyes as I press down on each needle to remind her that it’s still there, that I am still inside of her. Eventually I start to remove each needle one at a time, slowly so that the bevel scrapes her insides as I pull out. The second I see the little blood drops rise to the surface, all my attention shifts to the anticipation - How much will she bleed for me today? By the fourth needle removal, there is blood everywhere. She is hydrated and I tell her she’s doing a very good job at bleeding. She wiggles with pride.
When all the needles are removed, we both admire the sticky, red wetness on her chest. My lustful gaze is heavy on her, and she meets my eyes approvingly. I use my pink gloves to play with it and draw designs across her flesh. When my hands are covered in her blood, and the room smells of metal, I hold my hand up close to my face and inhale deeply. I hunch over her body and devour her, licking the blood off her nipples and biting down hard. She writhes in ecstasy, my little snack, who lives to feed me.
a little blood snack