LTTR #5 - Positively Nasty

This is a short story about how hard it has been for me to be accepted,not just as a person in general, but as a someone trying to live out a suppressed identity in a suppressed and marginalized community.

I was born an intersexual; that means I was born with the genitals of both sexes. The good ol’ Penis and the good ol’ Vagina.

This was in the late 70s and today I guess the doctors would have waited at least four or five years before the surgery. But in my case, they came up with a decision about my gender together with my parents and decided for me to be a girl.

My parents wanted a girl, and well, now all of a sudden they had the opportunity to decide what they wanted.

And now, being adult and everything, I’m no longer totally sure what I am.

At the time I was going into puberty, I felt different but did not know in which way.

At the age of thirteen my parents told me that I had gone through a surgery as a baby, and I immediately understood the consequences of this tragedy.

I didn’t develop breasts, so at the age of seventeen I started taking hormones.

And I got breasts. Oh My!

Actually I’m quite fond of being a woman, even though I’m a manhole inside somehow.

I have always been of the opinion that sexism can be countered simply by individual men and women changing the way they see the world, without the need of structural changes in the organization of society.

When I was younger I believed in androgyny and was reading a lot of Sandra Bem on this topic. She described androgynous people as independent and affectionate, assertive and understanding. I always used to love her almost Utopian vision that the androgynous person will come to define a more human standard of psychological help.

Later I found it difficult with Bem’s unquestioning acceptance of traditional male qualities, such as the qualities of aggression, competitiveness, leadership and so on.

I’m perhaps most critical of the way the androgynous concept allow-ed psychologists to ignore the power relationship between the sexes.And I had lots of these mannish emotions.

I remember my sexuality as really intense when I was around six or seven years old.

At the time I had a few friends, and I was in love with some of them. Sometimes I would accompany them home or linger in their neighbourhood until they appeared, and then I would turn up as if by accident to make them find me mystical and lovable.

I longed for physical contact but was much too shy to make a move. I remember I once shrank back when one of my classmates, a good-looking and fiery-eyed boy, reached between my legs; it made me totally shaky. I will still masturbate while thinking of this episode. I was really lonely as a kid and I admired girls from a distance and imagined rescuing them from sticky situations.

I also remember a lady who lived close to our house whom I saw every morning on my way to school.

She was pale, mysterious, and beautiful, about forty years old; I remember she was the helpless and unwilling slave of an evil man with a cruelly thin mustache. I hated this man.

I dreamt that one day she would approach me, tell me her troubles, and I, with an elegant gesture, would reduce her tormentor’s power and set her free. I would dive into her hair and make love to her like no one ever had done before.

But once, when I was hiding behind a bush, sneaking up on her from outside her bathroom window from where I could see her taking showers, going to the toilet etc., she discovered me, opened the window and laughed at me. She said I was a foolish little girl and that I should go home to my dolls or something. I can’t remember exactly what she said, but my world collapsed and I started to hate her. In fact, I started to hate my surroundings.

This was my first experience with such a strong feeling of hate toward my own body and other bodies.

The contradiction is that I realised that this feeling of disgust against me and the outer world turned me on; my hate towards this woman and her man was a hate strong enough to make me desire them even more.

This feeling of misanthropy has followed me until today.

As I grew older I started to accept that I was a woman and that I was sexually attracted to both sexes, but I knew I was kind of gay cause I liked men, but preferred to have sex with women.

The last five years I have tried every kind of sexual activity one can possibly imagine.

But the last year I’ve been dedicated to celibacy and that’s why I decided to write this short story as a contribution to the LTTR for readers over-seas.

My current situation is at a very balanced level.

Mentally and emotionally.

I will come back to this in the end.I will tell a story about a boy I met in Thailand, and how it made me change my egotistical and self-centered way of interacting with other people.

Because at this time I had no particular deep relationships with anyone, but I had over fifty sex-partners.

Looking back at it now I was undoubtedly one of the last manwoman/womanman of my generation to love myself sufficiently little to be able to love someone else. There is no love in individual freedom, nor in Independence. This is quite simply a lie, and one of the crudest lies you can imagine. Love is only in the desire of annihilation, fusion, the disappearance of the individual, in what sort of could be called an oceanic feeling.

I became attached to Sveku Relti during the two months I knew him. A young man of twenty-five, father from Laos, mother from north of Thailand. I met him one hot evening on the steps of of the Rama IV Monument.

He was a curious mixture with his apparently conventional moral values and deep personal unhappiness.

Every time we met we fell into an extremely intense pattern of arguing. He said he wanted money because he was poor and I was a rich Farang. I said are you a money-boy then? No! How could you think such a thing, he said.

I tried to tell him that I was also from a poor family, they had also been ordinary factory workers. It was clear he could see no connection between the experience of a foreigner in Bankok and the life of his own family in a wooden hut on a small piece of land in the little village of Sanamchaiyaket.

He had never been loved. He felt his mother had been given an ultimatum between his father and had chosen her husband over her son. He knew neither how to give nor how to accept affection.

He quarreled with all his friends. He got good jobs, but left them because he would fight with the manager, the boss, anyone with authority.. .

There was a deep sadness in him. Sometimes when he telephoned, his voice, which was very beautiful, betrayed an inner desolation that moved me and made me want to see him.

On other occasions he would come to my room and sit absorbed in frightful TV films like Predator 2 dubbed into Thai. Then he would say you forget me, forget my name! If I see you again, do not speak to me!

There was a strange ambiguity about his sexuality. For a long time we did not discuss it. He hardly touched me, just a brief normal handshake when we met. He always sat at a distance. On the bus we always sat apart.

In the restaurant he joked that perhaps he would prefer another table. He said you do not understand Thais. They think bad things. EVIL THOUGHTS.

We are haunted by demons. You do not understand. You’re a manhole!

I laughed at him. I’m a straight bad motherfucker Thai-bastard. Often did we used to have such funny disputes.

He was often very tiring to be with.

I would feel drained and exhausted by his emotional silences, his sulky resentments, which were not really directed at me, I understood that, but were aimed at the absent humanity of his deprived childhood.

One time we met he was troubled and unsmiling. He said I have a problem. I assumed this was a prelude to a request for money. But I had misjudged him, not for the first time. He spoke hesitantly. He said I do not know what I am, if I like men or women. I cannot do sex. I thought he was referring to impotence. In fact it turned out, he had a very tight foreskin which would not release the head of the penis, so that sex was impossibly painful for him. This secret, together with his feeling of exclusion and having been unloved, had only deepened his sense of inferiority and fed his defensive aggressiveness.

I felt very close to him and was very touched. I said to him, you know this isn’t really a problem. It can easily be set right. A small operation. It will take only a few days, and you’ll be fine. He said How can I spend money on such things. I offered to pay for the operation. I will come to the hospital with you. No, he said, I shy. He frequently pretended his English was inadequate when he was embarrassed. He clearly regretted having spoken, and wouldn’t discuss the matter any further.

The day after we met he told me that he had decided to leave the city. He would stay with his mother and work at the Wella Shampoo factory for 80 bath a day.

I laughed at him saying that he wouldn’t be able to practise his English there. He said I am bored, unhappy and lonely here. You do not understand Thai people. My mother needs me. She is old. She cannot see. Tomorrow I am leaving on the early bus.

OK, I said nonchalantly. Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow. I smiled. He said sleep well.

I never saw him again.

HERE’S AN EXTRACT FROM MY DIARY WHILE I WAS IN THAILAND.

22.12.01

Thinking about my first girlfriend’s mother and her opinion on porn. She always said that if true equality between the male and female is to be achieved, we cannot ignore the threat to equality resulting from exposure to audiences of certain types of violent and degrading materials. God, she was stupid.

I’m so tired of Sveku Relti. He’s tearing my inner soul out. It’s too much post trauma for me to cope with.

I’m still affected by my adolescence, the smell of guttle, the madness, the total insanity, the craziness, oh my! Damn, this a mad situation.

I’m outside the other self. I’m a whisper, a tiny piece of matter. A particle.

Can we not become gods you and I since we’ve been killed, slaughtered, raped an destroyed, harassed and patronised.

Hey why should I give a fuck when they don’t... um.

Well, as I see it it is all a question about inner peace. Hehe, you laugh. It has a bad sound to it.

Well, I’m just the voice of good ol’-dirty-fuck-you-you-are-manure-fuck-you-forever.

When pigs fly, the patriarchal stereotypes, the lesbian wash it all away orgy, the oyster festival, the pseudo-male, the animistic and narcissistic body, all the tendencies I see around me, can’t you see it. It’s the problem of our over qualified Marxist vortex aftermath.

What in myself and in Sveku and in everyone else I see is the mannish lesbian, the butch lesbian, the dyke, while they, (the bitches) deliberately ignore the the femme lesbian, the woman whose body in no way presents itself to the straight world as different or deviant.

The abject, the stereo-typed mannish/ animistic/ auto-erotic lesbian/ homosexual body craving like restless children away from home to transgress the border of gender socialization, luring other women or men to its side, tempting them the promise of deviant pleasures.

The size of the clitoris.

The self-reflecting mirror.

Oh, my. Who am I and why do feel so desolate. When love touches me I tear it apart. When love touches me I can’t reach it cause I don’t exist. I’m darkness.

I feel like they are telling me, screaming at me, hey bitch, listen

If you gonna do this for real you better cut off your hair, better wear sand shoes, jeans or boiler suit, flannel shirt. You better reject every form of makeup.

Tomboy. Come on bitch, lets frame the lesbian fashion.

The leatherdyke community. Can’t you see it? It’s everywhere. I see it everywhere.

I’s so hard to be honest. The same day I first met Sveku I bought a book at a stand beside the Rama IV monument. It’s a book called From The Laws of the Sun and it’s written by Ryuho Okawa. I have no idea who he is, guess he’s some kind of a nihilistic Buddhist monk. But I like his definition of spiritual love.

“Spiritually nurturing love is an intellectual love, a reasoning love. Only a person with high intellect can understand the true state of humanity and society; only a person with superior reasoning can understand all the problems, take the necessary steps to resolve them, and truly guide others. People who embody this nurturing love must sometime use it with the burning passion of the true teacher to save the spiritually degenerate and lead them back to the right path.”

Why can’t I find this spiritual love. Shit. I have hated mankind for as long as I can remember. Yes, I have hated it since the beginning, and as misfortune makes one nasty, I think I now hate it even more. For me spiritual love is masturbation. Because masturbation is to make love with someone one truly loves. But even here I fail.

THIS LITERALLY EXPLAINS MY CONFUSED EMOTIONS AT THE TIME.

I have sex with all sorts of faggots, and I’m WomanMan lesbian. And you think you’re confused?

How did this happen to a manhole, a lesbian, a man, a woman who maintained a spotless record as a militant lesbian separatist for eight years, a manwoman/womanman who only had sex with three menwomen/womenmen (once a piece) before coming out.

And Coming out was a bit different since I was not just a man; inside I was gay.

Hey, I said to myself, fuck it I’m worthless, that’s where it is. That’s where it is now.

You and your practical metaphysics, you’re the neopositivist and you’re eager to establish a context-free truth about reality “out there” by following a research protocol and getting responses relevant to it, minimizing researcher influence and other sources of “bias.”

Fuck the canon of the interview.

It’s rather time to discuss what perhaps most people understand as the core issues of social research.

Which is what?

My sexual-life what is that and why is it so that I went with some friends of mine to a club called Club Rectum.

I felt a bit lonely after my friends had been picked up by some other people. A handsome man came over and presented himself as Sharon and asked if I could fist him.

I answered that I had no experience with such a performance and that he had to show me what to do.

That was fine by him.

We went down to the basement and encountered something that looked like Catacombs.

He laid down on a couch and wrapped his arms around his thighs and held them apart. My first handful of grease melted right into his ass.

It was like feeding a hungry animal - an animal that talked back. He gave me such careful instruction about when to push and when to pull back that I came into him easily, I can’t remember how deep. It seemed like miles. I came to at one point and realized just how vulnerable he was, this big man clutching his thighs and groaning uncontrollably because I was so far inside him. The wall of his gut hugged my hand and forearm, smoother and softer and more fragile than anything I’d ever touched before. I know I got wet.

After this I’ve been a regular at hand balling parties.

All of my combined experiences have resulted in a lifestyle that doesn’t fit the homosexual stereotype. (If anything perhaps the transsexual).

I have lived with a woman for four years, at the same time I have had lots of casual sex with women. Once in a while, I have causal sex with gay men. I had a three year relationship with a homosexual man who doesn’t use the term gay. And I call myself a lesbian. And I’m a man?

Why just not identify as trans-bi? That’s a complicated question. For a while I thought I was Trans-bi phobic.

I see myself today more as a trans-fag hag.

A person I met at a hand balling party used to say Today fag hags and dyke daddies are as likely to be gay themselves as the objects of their admiration.. .

I see every relation to the immanent world as a relation to everything of the Higher Cosmic power. The Logarithmic Spiral. Yin & Yang.

In my approach to any subject, object and abject, I’m in a constant state of “The two mind-interview.”

The romantic I say. The romantic and its essence advocating a more “genuine” human interaction, believes in establishing rapport, trust and commitment, between interviewer and interviewee in the interview situation.

This is a prerequisite in order to be able to explore the inner world (meanings, ideas, feelings, intentions) or experienced social reality of the interviewee. The typical ambition of interview studies is to accomplish “deeper fuller conceptualisation of those aspects of our subject’s lives we are most interested in understanding.” Words like deep, full experience, definition, meaning, view, and inter-subjective dominate these ideal interviews.

We must make the interview more honest and reliable, because it treats the respondent as an equal, allows HimHer to express personal feelings, and therefore presents a more realistic picture that can be uncovered using traditional interview methods.

The question of what just constitutes a given intentional state is still poorly understood.

I think there are semi-empirical problems in the foundation of cognitive science concerning the notion of trans sexuality/homosexuality/ambi-sexuality.

And I don’t care about hearing them say that we have had an impressive progress of the physical and cognitive sciences because they have not shed significant light on the question of how and why cognitive functioning is accompanied by conscious experience.