I recently read an essay by Iain
Morland on Intersex. What caught my attention about the essay and became a
snowballs roll down a large hill was the point made on the difference and
intersections of being touched and what Morland refers to as “tactility” (the
act of touching). This brought up a whole plethora of questions for me, none of
them about Intersex (Sorry). Namely of which was: is liking to touch not standard? Apparently it's not supposed to be.
It seems that the cultural
expectation of heterosexual sex is that the female is passive and enjoys the
active touch of the male. [i.e. vaginal penetration] (in this scenario there is
an equal exchange of touch and tactility among the partners, both genitals
touch and are touched alike.)
The separation between the
enjoyment of touch and tactility becomes more apparent when we look at the
cultural conceptions surrounding women giving blow jobs. Women, it would seem
are not supposed to enjoy the act of giving a blow job. Though it does afford
the woman more agency than she is typically given in the stereotypical vanilla
hetero pairing. I’m not sure why they’re not thought to enjoy it, perhaps the lack of genital contact, tied up in the myth of
the vaginal orgasm, who knows.
But the blow Job affords us an example of
tactility in the extreme, if a woman were to get off on she is deriving
pleasure from the pleasure of her lover and that physical body alone, instead
of the stimulation of her own body.
The woman
getting off from giving a blow job is seen as an atypical display of eroticism
in the heterosexual couple. Pleasure derived from tactility alone, especially
from women is seen as kinky and even abhorrent. This could be because of the
shift in agency, in the scenario of the blow job obviously the woman controls
the pleasure of the man instead of the man controlling the pleasure the woman receives-
because of this active agency the man seems to play the more tactile role in
heterosexual intercourse as cultural norms would have us believe it
exists. But let us not forget that in
this act, despite agency, a dick gets touched, and that’s what pleasure is
derived from. Though the cultural mentality is that the dick touches the
vagina, that’s a big difference; though it may seem semantic, it’s a detail of
agency and reveals the way tactility and touch appear to be intertwined with
it.
But enough about straight people. Enter
the stone butch a lesbian who refuses to be touched and instead derives sexual
pleasure from the act of touching her partner.
Excuse me while I take a sledge
hammer to everything society thought about how pleasure is derived. While
obviously varying from person to person, the idea of the stone butch suggests
that pleasure can be found not in agency, because lets face it, for
many power isn’t all that appealing and if it were just the agency
wouldn’t domination come into play? Stereotypically the role of the stone butch
is that of care-taker, not necessarily a dominant position. The femme will make
clear her needs to the butch and the butch will execute. From where I stand,
that seems pretty damn submissive.
She kind of kicks normative sex in the balls,
no? It’s not about power, it’s not about getting touched, it’s about really liking
your partner and their parts, I can’t make it any more sensible than that. So
what is this act of touching? And how does giving pleasure to another and
perhaps more paramount experiencing their body non-genitally transmit into an
orgasm? I do not fucking know, but I
encourage you to try it with a willing participant.
