you’re not really looking for sex, are you?
written by jeremy o’brian
sex.
sex is interesting. like. in my experience sex is honest and truly hardly ever about sex. it’s about the desire for all the things attached: closeness, vulnerability, exorcising metaphorical demons, the ego, close-talk, intimacy.
you can see it in the way any given participant lingers after having climaxed. in the way he lies next to you, wearing the questions about whether or not it is now time to go. you see it in comments like, “you’re trouble,” after hopping up to get dressed because maybe one of you fell asleep in the other’s arm. or… in the forging of a kiss after having mutually and actively agreed not to.
if you haven’t guessed by now, this is a question of hooking up and what our silences and idiosyncrasies during these moments reveal. it’s a question of whether or not our desire is genuine to have “fun” and get laid. it’s a question of what we avoid.
in my estimation, what many of us are holding space for is the desire to be sustained while having a practice that isn’t sustainable. the very nature of hookup culture is that each person, every kiss, every nut is fleeting. in the last year alone, i’ve learned so much by watching people who were looking for intimacy but settled for sex.
myself included. and speaking from the i, i know that the fear of intimacy is one that is real. because intimacy demands that you sit for a while, be it with yourself or the other. intimacy works like mindfulness almost. in having to sit, in having to be uncovered, you have to face yourself and many of us aren’t willing to.
but to use sex as a way to manipulate your way into intimacy is a false offering that digs deeper despair and illusions. what tends to happen is we use alcohol, drugs, and other tactics to make ourselves into sex machines for illusions of intimacy in order to acquire and sustain fictional accounts of having been seen or actualized. when really we were two people avoiding ourselves by enabling the other.
sex and intimacy aren’t synonyms. when we attempt to cheat intimacy, there is still wanting. still a hole. we become insatiable, because really what we are pursuing (intimacy) demands a reconciliation of the carnal and spiritual. it demands self-work. it demands we face ourselves and mourn our ugly. and there are no cheat codes.
