A bit of the other

A common reaction to this blog is that the sex-scenes are boring, the other elements - the lazy musings of a philosophical philanderer - mildly interesting. I am encouraged to write about my feelings, and those of the people with whom I have sex; I should personalize. These responses reinforce my confidence that the blog is right just as it is, that it functions as I want. It is a journal of my sexual adventures, rich enough to jog my memory but not so rich as to let anyone else get off on it. It affords me a frisson of excitement, akin to public sex. It gives me a place in which to think out loud, in a disorganized way, about things I find extremely interesting because closely connected with me. My feelings I do not find interesting, nor those of others, except in so far as they can be examined in a detached fashion - and then the fact that they happen to be my feelings or those of the people I have sex with drops out as irrelevant.

The blog is not meant to give anyone a sense of what sex is like for me. I dispute the idea that there is anything that sex is like (though of course I also regularly suggest analogies for it as well). Whatever sex is like for me, I cannot capture it in words. I cannot explain it even to someone I am fucking, even while I am fucking them. Nor can I know what sex is like for the person I fuck, not even when every experience is the result of what I am doing with my cock, my arms, my mouth.

The privacy of sexual experience, a half-brained (though fully-trained) philosopher will tell you, is not unique. All experience, sexual or otherwise is private. I cannot know how orgasm feels for you, but I can't know how bacon smells to you either. But this is, precisely, half-brained. I can't smell with your nose, or see with your eyes, or feel with your hand or your lips or your cunt. I can't taste with your tongue. But still, you and I recognize the smell of bacon - we know what bacon smells like, the both of us. We know the same thing. What more is there to be shared than that, in the case of bacon? The privacy of sexual experience is special just because all the barriers to joint experience are down, union is as complete as it can be, the loops of response and reaction are drawn as tightly as possible - and yet the other still remains obstinately other.

Other, but not necessarily separate. Fucking can be extremely companionable, friendly, close - like working alongside each other on a shared task, with shared tools. It can also be intense, driven, ecstatic - like a physical struggle. Yet no matter how close and tangled we get, I cannot feel what you feel. I can feel from my side of the divide whatever it is that you are feeling from yours. But we cannot feel the same thing. There is nothing I can feel before or after you, or that we can feel together, for there is nothing to be felt by me but you, nothing to be felt by you but me.