Essay: Woman in the Sex Club
On desiring desire
A quick note: many of my Substack essays are free, however, this is a paid post due to the sensitivity of the topic and the vulnerability in which I write it. Paid subscribers also receive a monthly field assignment and quarterly workshops with me. xx
"We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way."—Audre Lorde
My sisters got the “sex talk” before I did. They got a lot of things first: periods, acne, boyfriends. And naturally, the infamous sex talk— that illuminating conversation that supposedly altered consciousness and revealed divine secrets. It was the information that my six-year-old self supposed would sticky glue everything else in the universe back into place.
Imagine my despair when my parents, a language teacher and a surgeon, finally sat me down and showed me a series of anatomic drawings. That day, I learned the words ovary and intercourse and vaginal cavity. As it turns out, there were no strange spells, no illuminating bolts of wisdom, only stick figures doing what I’d seen the dogs do for years out in the field.
To this day, I’m still not over the disappointment.
So now, it’s Saturday night and my friend
and I descend upon a local sex club in Portland. The theme is gods and monsters, and I’m dressed as a sun goddess. I’ve come armed with a tiny naughty notebook called Pleasures where I plan to write down everything throughout the evening, big or small, that I enjoy. Early on in the night, by a stroke of luck, a man mishears my name as Ray and subsequently introduces me as such to every person I meet. The first thing I write down in my notebook is: Being called Ray in small cursive letters.
I’ve been gathering my courage to visit a sex club as part of this essay series for quite some time, and now that the night has finally arrived, I feel sheepish. I worry readers might judge me for the title of this essay, though I suppose as an ex-evangelical, I’m slightly turned on by other people’s judgement.