Crowded

I don’t like going out. It is fraught with anxiety about the things I can’t see and pulls my focus in a very anti-social way to the details of how people speak and stand rather than what they say. I don’t get the attraction to it… but I can see the social necessity.

Many girls diagnosed with autism manage social communication until the moment puberty hits. Sex makes the world go round and it is so complex. Fraught with layers of social context and power. No one teaches personal desire or tells you it is ok not to feel it. I think things are changing, but from the magazines that were the basis of social learning when I was a teen, I knew in some technical detail how to give a blow job but had no idea why I would want to. There is so much we are afraid to talk about and a lack of both the information I needed and the space to analyse it rendered me blind.

It was easy to imagine the picture would never resolve. Being presented with a Picasso and a Dali, when what you need is a mirror and a window.

When every step is an act of trust, or more accurately, faith, in the people around me to help me navigate the world. I have learnt to trust people who communicate openly and honestly about their motives and pleasures, whether or not that motive is broadly socially accepted.

I find this both within the sex positive community and the shallow waters of my personal kinks. I love the communication. The boundaries. Without the social necessity of guilt over having sex or not having sex, with the openness about consent. The permission for sex to be fun and pleasurable, or to be a much more complicated conversation.

What I discovered through reading the blogs of the people I first met at Eroticon '17, is that open communication seems to flow out from sex into other areas of their lives. Perhaps I see that as practicing bravery at a distance enhancing bravery in interpersonal interaction. Maybe only the inherently brave talk about sex. Maybe that is why Eroticon is such a lovely, inclusive experience. The social rules that govern the bullshit other take for granted on gender, disability, sexuality and the general power and social construct of the body, is taken apart. People listen to what is said explicitly, words are not drowned by pre-conceptions. Perhaps that is why we lament the shortness of the weekend in a million tweets.

I grew up believing you met Prince Charming at a ball, your future beloved in a nightclub. I tried to learn the language and when I couldn’t I thought I would be alone. But I met him. He was on a night out. I was in a more structured role so I could be with people and yet be apart. Hiding behind the bar pulling pints.

And then to keep him. To build a relationship where you don’t even understand the building blocks. I guess that was the initial attraction to a more explicitly negotiated relationship. More on that as I become more comfortable I guess.

So… more poem than story.

              

A night out.

A frenzy of visual noise. 

Posture. 

Mannerisms. 

Motives hidden behind social convention.

Attention on detail: venue, timing, the crowd. 

People are chaos. 

Social code an alien language. 

Every last second of communication analysed and processed. 

Camouflaged intentions.

What are they hiding?

Crowded, bodies mash against mine, 

Hard muscle and soft flesh 

Interchangeable in their casual intimacy. 

But your fingers, 

Solid and determined, 

Rest in the hollow of my spine, 

Burning through my clothes, 

Touching naked skin. 

Connected.  

Later, 

In the silent circle of arms, 

Breath, sweat and scent mingle. 

Cunt and cock kiss and dance, 

Honesty in the wet tracks spilling onto arse and thigh and sheet. 

Equally vulnerable, we put faith in quickened pulses and leaking fluids above words.

It is night out.

I am safe at home.