Sex
Without
the Sex

By Jessica Lake

Same Word, Different Referent

I have been remediating words. Not all of them. That would make my writing difficult. I mean questionable words.

Everyday words like:

Memory.

Love.

Choice.

Want.

Sexual fantasy.

They are great words. Potent words. It’s just that they are annoying. Given that a word is a reference that refers to a referent. My referent diverges enormously from the neurotypical.

The Neurotypical Exemplar

In my paper Little Lost Angel, I proposed that I had spent a lifetime using the wrong exemplar. I called her the Girl next door (GND).

The GND is peachy keen.

She relives her autobiography.

She misses those who are absent.

She has wants that she pursues.

GND?

Picture a house.

Remember grandma.

Choose a boyfriend.

The GND loves. I love too. Only my love is not here. Same reference—different referents. You’d think someone would have noticed.

Once I grasped the word meaning mismatch, I reexamined everything.

I grabbed an everyday word.

What does this mean to me?

What does this mean to you?

Boy, was I surprised.

I had to define neologisms just for me.

The First Anomaly: My Fantasies Made No Sense

Sexual fantasies.

Everyone post-adolescent has ‘em.

A private fantasy that is sexually arousing.

X wants to do A.

X wants to do A to Y.

X wants Y to do A to X.

You want X to Y to you.

Z wants to watch (X, Y) do B.

I am odd. My fantasies were odd. They did the job. But made no sense. I wanted to understand why we were odd. So, I wrote them down.

Here’s the gist.

A straight boy has sex with men while being forced to become a girl. He never says, “No.” Finally, the girl forgets the boy. Maybe incest.

The End.

What did it mean?

It took me fifty years.

But I figured it out.

I am quick that way.

The sticking point was I was holding my fantasy to a NT exemplar.

I thought I was neurotypical. So I assumed the ordinary explanation of the word must also explain me.

What follows never happened consciously. If it did, there would be no problem.

I sort of stumbled my way toward my arousal story. My unconscious led—I followed. Next thing you know, I’m twenty-something, and I’m trapped. Sex of any kind required my strict adherence to a ritual.

Establishing the Function

Sex. Let’s begin with something simple. Masturbation. I am a clueless teen. I have an erection in the shower. My erection wants something.

But what?

After some false starts I get in a groove.

It feels good.

I continue in like manner and it gets interesting.

Orgasm.

I make a note of the orgasm. But how do I get to the orgasm whenever opportunity knocks?

Arousal Fantasy.

Just starting out this poses a problem.

What arouses me?

I knew how to handle the erection.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, most everyone seems to have sexual preferences.

They could think about someone.

Becky.

Brian.

Becky & Brian.

Someone?

I had no one.

To this day, I have never fantasized about having sex with any person living or dead. There are no faces in my fantasies. There aren’t really people in the ordinary sense. There are roles. Something bad happens to them.

That was divergent.

The Problem: Arousal Without a Person

So, I’d have to improvise.

I needed a reliable short story as a prelude to orgasm.

What do I sexually desire?

Not Becky.

Not Brian.

Let’s look outside the box.

What story might interest me?

The Missing Equipment

Unfortunately, my mind came poorly equipped for the conventional sexual fantasy.

I have SDAM.

No memories.

No movies.

I have Aphantasia.

I cannot summon Becky.

I cannot strip her naked.

Sorry Becky.

I can make up a word story.

I know things.

I have knowledge.

I know I like this kind of woman.

I know I once liked this.

Good to know.

But no help.

So I had an engineering problem.

I knew the destination.

I lacked the ordinary route.

Redefining the Problem

What I needed was:

Arousal Short Story.

Most people expect that a sexual fantasy presupposes that genre and substance must coincide. Sexual arousal presupposes sex.

I am not most people?

The short story has a job to do.

Get me from limp to blimp, quick.

Discovery: Leave the Sexual Realm

Now we had progress. If not sex, what else?

The sexual realm had nothing more to tell me. So I left it.

What feels really good?

Of course, problem solving.

Destabilize.

Obsess.

Perfect.

Adapt.

Stabilize.

A Candidate Emerges: Adaptation

What are my greatest pleasures?

That moment when the solution emerges.

That moment in adaptation when I cannot go back.

What happens when a teen looking for a reliable route to arousal discovers the above?

She combines them.

Of course she does.

Make the problem impossible.

Make the adaptation outsized.

Make before and after unmistakable.

And finally—

Fundamentally irreversible.

The Missing Constraint: Irreversibility

Irreversible was the part I missed for decades. Every story zeros in on that same instant.

Not sex.

Not nudity.

Not intercourse.

Not orgasm.

I can never go back.

That is my money shot.

Before:

This can’t be happening.

Please, no.

Please.

After:

That wasn’t so bad.

It was nothing.

I am liking the new me.

And suddenly there is the largest possible Δ.

Testing the Model: Presley

One story makes this almost embarrassingly clear.

Presley.

I remembered thinking about writing it. The conceit was irresistible. A small boy Presley subjected to every conceivable abuse and exploitation for decades.

There would be abuse of every manner, sexual trafficking, pornography, and incest. It would end with Priscilla, the perfection of outer beauty and inner vacuity.

Thirty years later, going through my unfinished work, I found it.

I opened the document. It was finished. Apparently I had written the entire thing. Unsurprisingly, I had no recollection.

Much of what I read was a surprise. It was everything I had imagined.

That’s SDAM for you.

But Presley is unusual for another reason. There is almost no Presley. The story begins when he is very young. Before there is much of an established identity to defend.

He is, for lack of a more elegant phrase:

Up for grabs.

Other people change his environment.

Loop {

Destabilize.

Obsess.

Perfect.

Adapt.

Stabilize.

}

Until eventually the question is no longer:

Is Presley gone?

It is:

Is Priscilla human?

The Final Constraint: Proof

At the climax, Presley, now irreversibly Priscilla, has sex with his father.

One might reasonably expect this should be the sexually charged culmination of a sexual fantasy.

It isn’t.

For thirty years I could not understand, “Why incest?”

Now I think I do.

The final sex is not about climax.

It is a test.

The final taboo reaches backward through Priscilla to Presley and asks one last question:

Is Presley irredeemably gone?

The ultimate reveal is that the father is inept. And Priscilla feels nothing.

That is the point.

Not the act.

The proof.

The transformation is complete.

The arrow cannot reverse.

Maximum Δ.

The problem has been solved.

Recruited Material

I had a problem with my stories. The outcome is foregone. The boy cannot say no. And the villain drives the plot forward. And—

Boring.

Without a counterforce from the boy there is nothing to overcome. No difficult adaptation. No excitement.

Only the boy cannot resist.

But he can suffer.

Shame.

Humiliation.

Fear.

Resistance.

Submission.

Everyone loves degradation.

Am I right?

I wanted to become someone else.

I was loathsome. Worse, I would not take a hike. I could not fix me. I could not escape me.

But in fantasy I could.

Overwrite my configuration with somebody else’s.

Problem solved.

Becoming a woman was a major paradox.

There were two mighty truths in me:

I have to be a woman.

I cannot be a woman.

No.

I cannot resolve it by wanting it.

No can do.

As soon as the question became moral—

What would Aristotle do?

Becoming a woman always lost. I believed what I wanted would betray my family, and everyone who depended on me.

But in a fantasy I had the solution.

Don’t blame me.

I was forced.

Now both truths could survive. I had not chosen to become a woman. And becoming a woman? It happens.

And what does the boy do once he is stuck?

Adapt.

So the fantasies pushed and pulled.

Mortification pulled us back.

Becoming someone else and becoming a woman pushed us forward. Two birds with one stone.

And the fantasy could make the solution irredeemable.

Problem solved.

What Happens After Convergence

And then?

Nothing.

That’s the joke.

The most extraordinary moment is over. The solution has emerged. The previous configuration cannot return. There is no remaining discrepancy.

The architecture stabilizes.

And my pleasure begins to decay.

Exactly as it does when I solve any other problem.

Yesterday:

How can this possibly be?

Today:

Obviously.

Knowledge.

The time axis collapses. The discovery becomes semantic.

And I need another problem.

Return to the Original Anomaly

So I return to the beginning.

Did I have sexual fantasies?

Certainly.

If by sexual fantasy we mean:

A mental scenario used to maximize sexual arousal.

Did I fantasize about sex?

Here, I made the same mistake I made throughout my autobiography.

I thought I was neurotypical so I projected the culturally appropriate explanation onto things.

Marriage meant love.

Persistence meant wanting.

Knowledge meant memory.

Sex fantasy meant sexual desire.

The word was true. The assumed referent was wrong.

What the Fantasy Was Doing

I am not embarrassed by these fantasies. Well, maybe a little. Even though some of them are appalling.

Their construction is typical of my architecture.

Take the greatest pleasures available.

Combine them.

Amplify them.

Strip off the training wheels.

Create the largest discrepancy.

Demand the greatest adaptation.

Produce the greatest autobiographical change.

Make the new configuration emerge.

Make the change irreversible.

For one incandescent instant:

Destabilize.

Obsess.

Perfect.

Adapt.

[ BANG ]

Stabilize.

The fantasy had accomplished its purpose.

Not sex.

Arousal.

Like everyone else I spent my life wondering what my sexual fantasies said about my secret desires.

Forced feminization.

Shame.

Humiliation.

Ridicule.

Submission.

Rape.

Incest.

Erasure.

Gee, I hope not.

Those were props.

What turned me on?

Adaptation.

They may say much more about how my mind solves problems than perversions.

I thought I was fantasizing about sex.

I wasn’t.

I was getting off on solving a problem.