I Can Be Your Hero, Baby

by Anonymous

this piece is part of OPTIMISED LOVE, our first digital collection of works.

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And I’d sell my soul for / Total control / Yeah I’d sell my soul / For total control / Total control / over you

— The Motels

I think I told you recently about my aversion to dirty talk. I’m bad at it, but it’s more than that. For all my love of words, when it comes to sex, they seem to get in the way.

I figure talk is always-already dirty.

A friend introduces me to something called SlutBot – a free AI tool that allows you to practice sexting. I download the desktop app, put in my details, hesitate. I’m going to ruin you, I tell the bot. Yes, it responds. Yes.

But the bot doesn’t know how to be ruined – too eager to yield, to absorb. This is the opposite of what I want. I want something that stutters, something that can break.

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Sex is one of the many vernaculars of the body. Language another. Sometimes, often, they’re the same. Which is to say, their concerns and ramifications are interchangeable.

So I’m a sucker for words. My love is for the possibility of them and their collisions, and therefore the possibility of bodies and their collisions. Still, I have trust issues, scared that these same words – fizzing with potential – might escape me. That, set loose, they will run havoc, summon all the wrong emotions. Or worse, that they might collapse in on themselves, gridlocked and unable to conjure anything at all.

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One of my exes, in particular, had what they call a way with words.

It goes: They message me. My phone is a live snake. My right hand glows with anticipation.

At first, the words appear within a smaller rectangle, a green pool where sentences surface like dragnets. However, when the rectangle can no longer contain them, which it never can, three dots appear, a ‘read more’ button hovering beneath.

The messages are always a little too sincere, heavy on the allegory and commas. Despite, or perhaps precisely because of the excess, I am drawn to locate the silences, the uneasy gaps in our exchange. I luxuriate in this erotics of decipherment, in that which eludes capture, reading everything into everything. Scroll back, tap their name to watch it expand. I return to it again later and slip into the text through a different sentence. Trying to consume its inferences from a slanted vantage point, a shadowed opening. I read it to death, tantalised by the promise, the premise: read more, calling me to dismember the lines, to turn the words over and over, look up the etymology just for the hell of it, to excavate all meaning until my body goes limp.

It’s all too much. Which is, of course, the root of my intoxication. Because really, these words – slopping around in their flimsy speech bubbles – are just the desire to exceed the conditions of language, of reason. To defer whatever it is that sex defers. And there is queerness to this too-muchness: the excess that attaches to those bodies that operate against the markers of the normal, that surpass the dulled edges of decency.

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From Amber Musser’s brown jouissance to Kevin Quashie’s troubling of publicness in resistance aesthetics, many have thought both with and against excess. Insisting on the right to spill over, to be swollen with feeling, or perhaps flesh. To express and exist in abundance, refusing the parameters of respectability. And, at the same time, the weaponisation of the uncontained – how, for especially queer and racialised bodies, excess becomes an imposition, a demand, or justification for surveillance and control.

What I am drawn to is the ways in which the read more button, inundated with promise, simultaneously marks its own emptiness. It is the excess that confronts me with our bodily confines and therefore what remains unreadable between us, what cannot be languaged. And maybe this is where my pleasure truly derives from – the accumulated futility of all this spillage. None of it will suffice. Surely that’s the point.

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Roland Barthes describes the Lover’s Duty as the repetitive, secretive and dazzling fulfilment of useless tasks:

I perform, discreetly, lunatic chores; I am the sole witness of my lunacy.

It is this ritual futility that etches the shape of my own devotion. English itself is a useless task, a haunted house full of gimmicks and corny disguises. I write endless letters I do not send. I lie awake at night, fantasising the future by rearranging us in the past. I watch a show about the apocalypse. Everyone calls up their loved ones and says the same things. I love you, I’ll be home soon, please stay alive. I fuck a stranger on the couch. I tell her to take her clothes off but that I want to leave mine on. I commit to a practice of restraint. For a while I do up all my buttons. I bike the logical route. I feel virtuous.

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Still, the sad-horny desire to traverse myself remains. I imagine filling my lover’s mouth and hearing the muffled obliteration of language. I imagine fingers hard and relentless inside me. I imagine being shattered, with precision, until I am ungathered, indiscreet, my limbs unstuck from my composure: a horrific animal in the muck.

In A History of My Brief Body, Billy-Rae Belcourt asks: has anyone ever managed not to mould the body into an archive of their own degradation?

As with most texts I love, I can’t pinpoint the exact meaning, but I feel it; I keep circling this idea that want and destruction go hand in hand. That desire doesn’t care for dignity.

Brontez Purnell: I am nothing if not horny and willfully nonjudgmental.

Whatever. I know articulation doesn’t guarantee survival. I know it’s not sexy to say talk me from the ledge, I am already grieving.

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My go-to karaoke song for the past few years has been Enrique Iglesias’ 2001 hit single Hero. Partly because it requires more creepy whispering than actual singing, partly because of the shared mole on the right side of his face (rip) and my left, but mostly because he has no chill whatsoever. The entire number is overkill, begging to sacrifice itself at the altar of self-composure, to die for love. I understand this intensity in Enrique, his desperation. The quiver in his own voice as he asks: would you tremble, if I touched your lips? Because Enrique knows that the heroism of desire lies in its mortification – as in, its requirement for bodily risk. It makes you porous, it disfigures your emotional proportions, it dissolves you so you’re more tremor than subject. And some lips might not withstand that, you know. Some hearts, either.

Failed to send. Message exceeds available storage space.