“What happens when I am touched intimately? What feelings occur? Who is the person who has made contact with my body? What do I want from that touch? How should I respond to that touch? Do I act and react the same way as they do in movies? What time of day is it? Will my beliefs allow it? Where is the person touching me? Do I like it? Do I hate it? Do I say something? Should I allow it? Should I stop it? Where am I? Can you stop? Why does it hurt? Ughhh...? Am I being rude now? I think I like it. What did I eat in the morning? Does it feel right? Why does it hurt?”
Desire, need, aversion, disgust, enjoyment, pain, dissociation, and more and more of these feelings occur when I am in the middle of a sexual act. There is an overwhelming surge of emotions far apart on the spectrum of feelings. How can one like it and not like it at the same time? Is it human to feel this way? One thing is for sure: That is definitely not how they show it in the movies. Analysing my past experiences with sex, it’s definitely an icky act, but an important one as well, at least to me. How does this feeling differ for other people, I wonder? Do they also feel the same way? Does any-
One understands it, or are they just doing it for those few seconds of “Phew-ha” it leads to? As an exploration to understand my feelings, I tried to put myself back into the past experiences of a sexual act, imagining what it felt like in that moment with different partners and analysing what I was feeling back then. I have created a set of staged images where I have set up a bed as a stage, and I am the actor playing myself, trying to recreate a few emotions and feelings in a moment, gathering what I can of what I felt while in the midst of the act.
The first thing that comes to mind is pain and disgust on a surface level; perhaps it is because we tend to think of “negative” emotions more than “positive” ones. It is not that emotions are inherently good or bad; they are simply emotions. However, this has helped me uncover a new layer of the project that needs further development. Going forward, I would like to work on more emotional aspects of intimacy. Hoping to understand myself better this way.
