What price liberation

I generally don’t listen to the podcasts after we record them. The production and editing requirements are minimal — splicing in the theme music [and occasional sound effect] at the introduction, conclusion, and break after the conversation. But in doing those small tasks, I have to listen to bits of that conversation, and as I have, I’ve formed a particular mental impression of my voice, and often my judgment has been...less than favorable. It has seemed to me to be soft, reticent, even sheepish — an inevitable expression, I imagine, of my sense of guilt and mortification at the ugly conduct I engaged in, that we hold up to the light and look at. The snippets I’ve listened to, and my memory of the live recording sessions themselves, lead me to perceive that in talking, my voice lacks the volume, the confidence, the personality and vocal presence that I admire, that is the ideal I pursue in the voice acting and narration I do on the side. Those recordings are scripted, though, not spontaneous conversation, and they are, by their nature, contrived. I’m putting something on — clothing, characters, a show.

This podcast, by contrast, is emphatically nonfiction about me — about Whyla and me, recounting how we have been and being how we are. Honesty and candor are the point. And while we — Whyla we!— hope that the podcast is engaging and entertaining, and though it’s not goal-less, it should be guileless. Whyla assures me, I have vocal presence enough. I try to be present, emotionally and mentally, and I hope it’s apparent, because it’s real. Whyla has a natural presence, a comfort in her own skin, an honesty and acceptance about and affection toward herself, and this , I believe, enables her to give herself (and give of herself) as she does so smashingly in our relationship (and in all her relationships). Accordingly, her vocal presence is, as you can tell, dynamic and undeniable. It’s an inspiration. For me, presence is not only the aim in the conversations we record, but also in the entire relationship with Whyla, and in my own life, generally. Presence, habitation, inhabiting space. Having a place to live in, and living in it, metaphorically but also actually.

The previous episode was about space and its use — the dreary sex basement to which I led Whyla the first time she visited me, and the dreary (and worse) sex I to which I subjected her (and myself). As I’ve reflected further on the event, and on the discussion in the podcast, one large theme has resounded in my thoughts and feelings — so large and looming and obvious that at the time it should have crashed down on my head like the piano or safe raining on the hapless bulldog in that old MGM cartoon. I had assigned — consigned — sex to the the lowest, darkest, coldest room in my house, a room that I had never furnished in any meaningful or aesthetic way when I moved in. It had become, once I moved in, mainly a repository of furniture — chiefly a futon, that I brought with me, into the house — family real estate that had been furnished by the previous occupant, but not occupied by them for years.

The room’s chief advantage was, I thought at the time, room. There was space enough to move about, to set the futon to be either couch or bed, and thereby to have sex. And so I turned it into the sex room. Whyla was not the first woman I brought there, and with whom I engaged in sex that ended up being technical, mechanical, impersonal, largely silent, porn-derived, pantomiming a script dictated by one part of me to the rest of me, and to my sex partners. What might have been occasions for sex’s joy or zest, for a fun exercise of lust, were dampened by my (at least) dissociating often during the act, weighed down by anxiety and fear and sense of uncertainty and isolation about sudden intimacy with a stranger; though I was driving it, I felt couldn’t speak to it, or speak at it, to call for a human pause.

By the time of Whyla’s and my trip to the cold cave, I had been in the habit of compartmentalizing sex and my emotions about it, restricting them to a room with no special decor, no design for living, for I didn’t live in it — I made no use of it ordinarily. My practical residence, the place where I lived, where I cooked and served food and ate and talked and listened to music and looked out the window, was in the two floors above (including the bedroom where Whyla and I cuddled, with joy, after fleeing the dark dungeon). Outside that, disintegrated but still within the house, was the sex chamber. I went there as I thought I must, without then questioning whether I had to, or examining it after the fact. To examine my use of the room would have been to examine the what and why and with whom and even the whether of sex, and I was unable to. I couldn’t go there, but I had gone to the room. And there, I wasn’t there. It was no place.

The dreary sex basement was, then, a way of confining, of closing off, anyway of being with difficult emotions about sex — and of being humane, a human being, during sex with my partners. Since then, and with Whyla’s patient intervention, I have begun to search into my thoughts and feelings about sex — my shame about it, my needs, wants, fears, inhibitions, hopes, excitements — to shine a light on them, to identify them, write them down, voice them, learn to be with them, without treating any simply as iron commands. To form an outlook on sex — its personal and interpersonal aspects — that is sensible and humane. And to have fun with it!

Also by Whyla’s intercession — and her dedication to vibrant and personal home decor — the former sex basement is now integrated into the house as a dedicated yoga and exercise room. It’s sexual, at least subtly, with lust simmering as we spy each other performing various asanas (or as I think of them, especially as Whyla is in Downward Facing Dog, ass-a-nas).

Speaking of integration and confinement and expansion, a few reflections —at last! — on the actual topic of this episode of the podcast. The sex work scenario, as Whyla and I call that transactional frolicking, is something that we’ve done across the house. It has not been confined to any one room(though in the delightful haze of the encounters, I vaguely imagine that we’re rendezvous-ing in a high-priced hotel room). It’s regular and frequent.The offer is a standing (or, as it were, kneeling, or reclining) one, and as long as we’ve paid off Vice, it’s possible for us to meet in the sex market whenever and wherever. We do it at home, and I feel at home doing it. It’s a blast. And as I mentioned in the conversation, it operates to usefully compartmentalize, confine my worries, distractions, inhibitions — borne of shame and guilt and rejection — about my worthiness or unworthiness for sex. Such mental habits deserve to be shed and shut away, though I am not yet able to do that easily on my own. The sex work scenario does, though —it puts them in a faraway room and locks the door, and I hop, skip, and jump past them (and onto Whyla’s bones). It lets me be present. Physically —bodily as well as spatially — it’s the express elevator up from the dreary sex basement.