David Davis 40

Unbelievable as it sounds, there are aspects of my personal life that never make it to the internet.

I understand why this may be surprising. For one thing, the general conflation of public and private for feminized people means that my fiction is more closely associated with the real me than it is for other kinds of people. For another, my candidness on Twitter and IG likely lends to the impression that no filter exists between my life and its digital render. Of course, this is an illusion with which all of us who have social media must negotiate. To exist on an increasingly privatized internet is to be a product (one that can never be totally self-managed) to be marketed, whether or not we ourselves are selling something (though I certainly am, and not just subscriptions to this very enriching and charming newsletter).

Open as I may seem, I am calculating about what I share with you here, whether it’s about my sex life, my natal family, or my art. It would be a lie to say that my calculation isn’t informed by my bottom line, but for the most part it comes down to a question of my own, perhaps idiosyncratic, notions of vulnerability. In this world where my nudes are online, my sex change has been documented, and my identity, likeness, shopping habits, and location are available to the highest bidder, my idea of personal may be unorthodox, but rest assured it’s intact. It includes my romantic relationship with my lover, or the parts of it that comprise what’s most precious to me (and likely most boring to you).

Still, the boundary between public and private is not impermeable, and occasionally crossing it can be helpful in illustrating a point.

Lesbian processing is an extreme sport. This occurred to me after a recent conversation with Jade about sex, leather, and our relationship; in essence, about how we talk to each other. The conversation was a successful one, but due to its duration and intensity (and the makeup sex that followed) it was a good example of what we usually mean by lesbian processing, an epithet informed by stereotypes about women in general being overemotional and queer women in particular placing a hysterical, unscientific, and unsexy level of importance on communication; this being set in opposition to normal heterosexual relations, which happen without anyone having to think, without there even needing to be consent, because these relations are natural and unchanged and unchanging since forever.

When you’re a dyke, your fate is to always be seen as either utterly ridiculous or an ugly threat. I’m old enough now to have a sense of humor about lesbian-specific things—from bed death to dyke nods—that I’m supposed to feel ashamed of. As with the other stereotypes, lesbian processing is something that we dykes often poke fun at ourselves, but I think that the humor limns what should be a goal for all intimate relationships: regular and honest communication among equals. When done correctly, processing, lesbian or otherwise, is a tool for deepening connection and intimacy. Having the opportunity to say yes as well as no, to negotiate and to compromise, to share as well as to maintain private. Outside the four walls of a corny joke, lesbian processing is a cog in a communication style, one that fosters the trust that Jade and I need in order to do a lot of fun things together and separately while also being, as a friend said recently, the “most monogamous non-monogamous couple” they know.

The physical and mental exertion. The sweat and the tears. The gender non-conformity. Lesbian processing is an extreme sport. This is not an original thought. It’s probably on a snapback somewhere, or on a bumper sticker in Portland, or scrawled on the bathroom wall at Eli’s in Oakland or Ginger’s in Brooklyn. But platitudes are platitudes, and as it bubbled up, it collided with another thought that I’ve been mulling recently: that the social activities requiring the most communication, willingness, and consent are the very same that straight culture and its institutions take great pains to forbid us¹.

It’s tempting to follow this thesis to its converse, especially for someone who, like me, abhors a power vacuum. I could suggest that the social activities requiring the least cooperation—the ones that are executed in a manner that’s unthinkingly rote at best, that are promoted, normalized, and ultimately socially, economically, and legally enforced—are actually the least consensual. I could locate the coercion in the acts themselves, rather than in the dynamics wherein they take place. I could position the mechanism of heterosexual sex as inherently violent, as if it were a static, graspable thing instead of a fluid intangible, much like we like to say about our own genders and sexualities.

But for my benefit as much as yours, I will insist on an alternative: that there is no sex act or actor that is inherently safe or dangerous, and that an outsider looking in cannot know better than the insiders do.

In my first book, the earthquake room, one of my characters echoes an observation that I’ve long held close for myself: “if straight people have something to say about us at all, they’re probably wrong. in fact, the opposite of what they say is probably true.”

This idea has been a sort of anti-internalization spell since I was a young gay, and I still rely on it all these years later. When I’m told that lesbian SM is patriarchal, or that drag queens are groomers, or that fisting is violent—ancient, rust-jointed canards you’ll hear just about everywhere, from liberal LGBT types to right-wing politicians, from radical feminists to Christian fundamentalists—I have trained myself to first consider the source before deciding to believe. I don’t even really need to be told these things. They’re felt and known in the body, the way you’d feel the current of a river if you walked the floor against it.

Because not only are SM, genderplay, and queer-coded sex not inherently violent², but when done successfully they require total collusion from all involved. Vaginal fisting, for example, is a queer-coded sexual practice that is widely regarded as risky, and even dangerous, when—as with other kinds of penetration with other objects and holes—risk and safety depend on a constellation of factors, one of them being the bottom’s level of sustained arousal³. It's often framed as an edge case, as inaccessible to most “normal” people, even to gay people, when it’s actually an activity that I think many, if not most, can participate in (as tops if not as bottoms) with just a little knowledge, practice, and patience—and not even that, sometimes. As I tweeted a while ago, the first time I fisted someone vaginally, it was almost by mistake, because some people can be fisted easily, even as others struggle to take the average-size penis, or dildo, or even a finger or two.

But as we observe in contexts where sexual censorship meets capitalist commerce in a culture that hates women, gay people, and pleasure, fisting is positioned as inherently obscene, unsafe, violent. Just ask anyone trying to post content on sites like OnlyFans that use vague or subjective language to circumscribe activities like fisting, roleplaying, or gaping, which not only further stigmatizes sex work and consensual sexual activity, but relies on normative definitions of extremity to pick and choose which content creators are censored, and therefore economically deprived.

Just as prostitution is made dangerous by criminalization, or our society ableist because it’s designed to be inaccessible right down to the handlebars and street curbs, the sociocultural conditions in which we find ourselves are intentionally hostile to life, meaning they’re intentionally hostile to connection. The more time, effort, and attention a sex act requires, the more difficult it is. I won’t say that a kiss (or a blowjob) requires less connection than a fistfuck, but it does require less overhead (to use a capitalist term), and that’s before we even factor the identities of the kissers (or whatever) involved.

Lesbian processing is an extreme sport. Being both gay and non-monogamous puts me at heightened risk of being annoying. Like vegans or those who use they/them pronouns, the non-monogamous have a reputation for sanctimony and condescension meant to conceal the flaws in a less-than-peachy romantic relationship. I’m not interested in pretending that Jade and I don’t have to deal with jealousy, or insecurity, or hurt feelings, not because I mind lying but because I think it’s silly to aspire toward perfection that doesn’t exist (especially because its puncture is more humiliating than the failure to reach it in the first place). But I don’t think romantic relationships have to be hard, or any harder than any other kind of relationship, and my relationship with Jade isn’t hard at all. It makes my life better and easier. That’s why I’m in it with her.

When our friend made the cheeky comment about us being the “most monogamous non-monogamous couple,” it was a kind of joke. Like the notion of lesbian processing is a kind of joke. A relationship style, like a communication style, takes place over time. It can be cherrypicked for absurdity or failure or even a punchline, but when it becomes its own kind of normal, farce loses its steam. I guess what I’m trying to underline here is the difference between normal and everything else, and how very rarely we take the time to examine why one is one and not the other.

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1. Straight here is, as I use it, understood as more capacious than mere heterosexuality. Straight is white supremacy, imperialism, carceralism, and capitalism. It’s anti-queer and trans, anti-woman, -child, and -elder, anti-black and -indigenous, anti-whore, anti-sick, anti-crazy, anti-poor, anti-migrant and -refugee.

2. I recognize that some of us in leather have reclaimed the idea of violence, in the same way that some of us have reclaimed slurs; for the most part, I’m one of those people. This is not a rebuttal of that reclamation. What I’m trying to do here in tandem is re-examine the conflation of violence and violation, to decouple a range of sensations from retrograde notions of consent. Just because something feels good doesn’t mean it’s consensual (see the footnote below); just because something causes pain doesn’t mean it isn’t. As if pain and pleasure are even that easily delineated, anyway!

3. I should note that arousal does not necessarily constitute consent.