THROAT: On Being Filled

THROAT is a serial about sex written by Sydney Allen-Ash. Sign up to get THROAT delivered to your inbox.

The woman wants to be filled. She is tired of holding herself sturdy and upright. Tired of being her authentic self, tired of thinking before she speaks, tired of thinking and speaking altogether. She daydreams of being stuffed. Scaffolded by a cock like a hand in a puppet. This desire feels, to her, like subterfuge — a necessary betrayal of her independence. A respite from the exhaustion of being capable.

The woman is, of course, a brilliant woman (there are no dumb women now). She is smart and charming and accomplished. She has experienced pain — the divorce of her parents, the rape, the suicide attempt by her mother — which she discusses openly (a requisite) and is more interesting because of it. She has worked many lucrative meaningless corporate jobs, paid off her debts, gone to therapy, journaled, worked out, and maintained (most) friendships. She has been mistaken for 30 since she was 18 and believes this is mainly due to the childhood trauma and her cup size. She buys her own condoms, lasers her pubes, and pursues her own threesomes. She is professionally ambitious and uncompromising, and has been derided by both men and women as being headstrong, pushy, and a bitch. The latter makes her laugh. She is a strong woman laughing. She is a great feminist role model.

The woman lies in bed most mornings before she goes to work and watches porn on her phone. With one finger she sets her phone to horizontal mode and watches intently in full screen as a kind of ugly hairy man pushes the tiny head of a garishly beautiful porn actress into the ground as he fucks her. Spit dribbles from the porn actress's mouth and the woman studies her face trying to detect an ounce of real pain amongst the fake pain the actress is performing. The woman determines there is no real pain to be found, disappointed and slightly embarrassed, she silently closes the window. (She will not admit to herself that this is why she closed the window but she will note the muffling weight of rectitude smothering her arousal like a damp mothballed slut-crushing blanket.) The woman critically reviews the video in her head. “Sensation without feeling,” she imagines saying, overenunciating every word as she tsk-tsks the actress. The woman imagines she is Lydia Tár invoking Audre Lorde in an X-rated Director’s Cut, “Your performance displayed sensation without feeling.” (The woman imagines Audre Lorde rolling in her grave.)  

The woman knows that she should not want the actress to feel pain if the actress herself does not want to feel it. The woman has, on occasion, turned off a porn video when sensing that maybe the actress doesn’t really want to be there and that the set looks a little too low-budget to possibly be compensating her fairly. (To the woman, this baby boycott feels sort of noble, like evidence she would share in a trial adjudicating her feminist credentials.) Nevertheless, the woman believes pain helps pleasure really get there. When blood rushes to the bruising handprint of a lover on the woman’s ass she finds a heightened sensation blossoming from the pink and purple. It reminds her, per Lorde, of her “capacity for feeling.” Sometimes the woman doesn’t know how much she wants something till she has to beg for it.

The woman watches a video of a lover masturbating and feels mildly repulsed, bored, and vaguely turned on. He has sent her this video before (how does he not remember this?) and this makes her wonder what kind of video bank he has of himself and how transactionally he views their sexting (because she never makes this mistake). She focuses on his hands (he has great hands) and tries to blur his penis from her vision. He has a great penis — 6 inches with a defined head, very visible veins, and a proportionate girth, the right size to fit inside her mouth or elsewhere — but, on the whole, a penis looks to her like a pulsing, writhing vulnerable creature that was ripped from the inside of a body too early (she cannot help but also think of the ginger root baby in Pan’s Labyrinth). She thinks it's silly to believe that Eve came from Adam’s rib when a penis was so clearly carved from the inside of a vagina and then plastered onto the torso of a man like a Ken doll. Put it back inside me, she thinks, that’s where it belongs.

And so, the woman wants to be filled. She is tired of being self-directed and feels her aching emptiness most acutely when she craves to be a vehicle for someone else’s desires. Trying to navigate the politics of this feels like climbing an M.C. Escher staircase: 

She is emboldened by feminist autonomy (up the stairs!) 

To ask her lover to use her (down the stairs!) 

Because it makes her feel wanted (up the stairs! But also down the stairs, because she thinks she probably shouldn’t aspire to feel wanted??) 

To completely serve his needs (down!) 

Which, ultimately, also satisfies her needs (up! Up! Up we go!). 

Her ex was worried that choking her was too close to the sexual assault she experienced when she was younger. She assured him she wasn’t choked when she was raped (which is a strange thing to assure someone of) but beyond this, she struggled to convince him of the enjoyment she felt in mild asphyxiation. (She also thinks it might just be a generational thing. Like, why do all the 20-somethings she knows love to choke but those pushing 40 are terrified?) Luckily, she and her current lover have a tacit understanding of the way kinks manifest as a funhouse mirror of their real lives. Still, the woman struggles to navigate the meaning of fucking like this. 

As she walks the upside-down staircase the woman ponders the impossible physics of desire. The things that she hates in most contexts are also her carnal fixations (chewing sounds: no, spit sounds: yes). She believes that the apex of pleasure is where it reaches upward towards pain, towards God. That being messily throat fucked is a type of catharsis. That being overwhelmed with sensation is where her brain finds release. The woman believes disgust and desire are two sides of the same coin. In her day-to-day life she is repulsed by a do-nothing bitch who constantly looks to powerful people for approval and yet, in bed, the woman is a caricature of this, craving clear instruction and ample praise. 

Most of the time, the woman feels animated by this tension. Contemplating her sexual proclivities and contradictions feels like a kind of intellectual edging, a way she can live in her head without forgetting her body. She thinks that, at her most prescient, she could be a millennial Mary McCarthy or Chris Kraus, except instead of loving Dick into a 280-page best seller, she is — by virtue of media consolidation and the impending economic collapse — relegated to loving dick(s) into a series of self-published blogs and horny tweet-like sentences self-righteously typed into the Notes app on her phone:

“How many times is too many times to take my cum-stained wool blanket to the dry cleaners?”

“Horny feng-shui is just putting a mirror within view of the bed.”

“The firefighters are ahead of me in line at La Colombe. Suddenly, I am open to the idea of being gang-banged.”

But, other times, the woman has a sneaking feeling she is being had. She wonders if the mainstreaming of kinky sex is just her generation’s “beauty myth.” Like all these ethical non-monogamy dating apps, VC-funded audio porn, and smut-Tok videos are just a distraction from more legitimate markers of progress. After all, she doesn’t really believe her “deviant sex” is actually that deviant. Haven’t all the possible types of fucking already been fucked anyways? Surely there isn’t a new fuck under the sun… The woman recalls how she and all her girlfriends seemingly started saying “Daddy” around the same time. Their grinning sheepish admissions over drinks were supposedly indicative of something taboo but, later, the woman felt this was just an eventuality, an unspoken right of passage. After long-term boyfriend came “Daddy,” threesome, a brief never-spoken-of-again experience of group sex with Katie and Shawn, then engagement, marriage, pregnancy, and so on.

The woman is unsatisfied. There is no category on Pornhub capable of discharging her sexual ennui. She opens Feeld and flippantly suggests to a man named Dirk that he and his hot friend (“Fourth photo, on the right, perhaps.”) take her out for a date. He responds too quickly. He sends her a dick pic. The woman closes the window and starts getting ready for work.

THROAT is a serial about sex written by Sydney Allen-Ash. Sign up to get THROAT delivered to your inbox.