Sex is often modeled as a possessive transaction. It’s inescapable: from the macro-unit of the ubiquitous culture of monogamy, down to the pervasive micro-unit of our very language: You “give yourself” to the other. You “release” your inhibitions. You sensuously “take me!” (How pervasive, the mindset of possession). However, when a penis is inside me, I struggle these days not to enact a mindset of consumption. (I am a good little capitalist).
If the male engagement in P/V sex is penetration, my engagement in P/V sex is encapsulation. You go inside me, and some part of the other becomes me. It’s exactly like eating: there is the breaking down into molecular fragments, reconstituting through the permeable skin of my body to later become hair or muscle, or even a small amount of electricity which we call thoughts. The sexual union, thus, is an act of digestive absorption. When we are one, when the ecstatic distance between you and me is as thin as possible (in the physical dimension), if our spirits were stored in the fluid of our bodies as in the Greek model of humors, then at the time of fluid mixing, we are entwined because I contain you - because I am becoming you, or you are reconstituting into me. You are like an ancient prokaryote, not yet become my mitochondria.
Oral sex continues to beg the metaphor by bringing it to the site of the mouth. I don’t go to church anymore so giving head is as close to a spiritual meal as I usually get. (Do I dare call it communion?)
However, the key difference between eating and fucking is that sex is not a finite consumption (as in my using it, does not use it up). In consumptive union we “consume” to become more. To become each other. To become bigger and bigger until we contain the entire world and everyone in it. During ecstatic encapsulation, you have ascended from a member of my environment to a member of me. I sometimes pity the penetrator who does not complete the metaphor of containment.
A straight man does not experience any contradiction to the illusion of his individuality because in sex he is rarely penetrated. He sees that you are becoming him, but he does not imagine that his own fragile cell might itself be changed. Even the penis, an interrupting protrusion into the outer environment, is not made of permeable skin (in contrast to a vagina or anus). It is not suited to eat, only to be eaten. How, thus, can a penetrator imagine the pleasure of being entered? This disconnection to the spiritual consumptive union is one origin of the classic attitude of male heterosexual selfishness in bed.
But I’m not a listless complainer. I am a solutions-oriented gal; Barring anal play (though not to dismiss it), how do we encourage the straight men in our lives to enjoy sex as consumers? We must teach them, that in sex, the more we eat, the more there is to eat.
Allow me the honor to become you, allow me the joy of being part of you, changing you. Have sex with me, which is to say, allow me to devour you. Allow yourself in turn, to be devoured by me. I am hungry for you. I want to be a part of you. I long to be of you. I want to come to your house. Invite me over. Have a taste. Do you want to? Allow me the pleasure to vaporize into your blood and reconstitute through your eyes, your nose, your loving mouth. Then be exhaled into the wind from the wetness of your lung, where we will rise by the heat of your blood into the air. We’ll rise and rise, we’ll cross the tree line, then the cloud cover, a goose formation cuts through us. We will precipitate with our human acid like tears dripping down the side of a cold glass on a summer day. We will tide gently into the great ocean, joining all the other animals of the earth. Do you long for me? Do you long for me like I long for you?