Poly likes other people watching her having sex.
This was what I should have said in the last entry, and it was one of the things that Poly needed to correct in the first blog. Originally I wrote that it feels “like being on a porn film set only without the cameras.” Actually it’s not like a porn film at all, she explains to me as we’re working our way through a brunch the other day.
We’d found a nice cafe nearby and she chose the most open spot there to sit and talk, and I find myself wishing that our table wasn’t so close to all the other people eating their stacked bacon and eggs or smashed avocados. This closeness to other ears only serves to amplify what I perceive as judgement from the social norm
The way Poly describes the sex she is having is much more erotic and wholesome than porn. It’s a fully embodied experience, a fundamentally grounded connectedness.
Of course, I struggle with this at a personal level. For me personally, any sex I had (oh so long ago) was always a disconnected and blocked thing. It was enjoyable, but it had very little of this “connectedness” thing that Poly talks about. For me it’s actually too much arousal. It’s too much desire, so that I tend to fragment and kind of fall apart mentally and emotionally. There is no ‘real me’ in the act of sex. No-one to simply connect with. A large part of this comes from a profound fear that if someone did connect with the real me, they wouldn’t like it. That is, they wouldn’t like me. And that would be devastating.
Sad right? Yeah well that’s what guilt and shame did to me. I’m just being honest about it.
Society on the other hand is probably not being honest.
You see, as Poly is telling me about having lots of sex, and I’m wondering if the nearby cafe patrons are being a bit judgy. It’s as though I can hear what the social norm would say about having a truckload of sex and it being “fundamentally grounded” this or an “embodied experiential” that.
So what does normal society think. Well, I could have just turned around and asked the other patrons, but I didn’t.
Instead let’s just anthropomorphize normal society and call him Norm (it helps if you imagine a conservative white middle aged male who knows enough about psychology to be just slightly annoying.)
I can hear Norm speaking at a sex addicts meeting, saying that sex is just a physical thing that in a way keeps us from being really intimately connected with someone, and that like any drug of addiction, it needs to escalate and become more and more erotic in order to ‘up the dosage’. I can understand Norm, but I’m starting to question this thinking. I know addiction is often related to dopamine, and I get that there is a strong dopamine release which comes with sex, and that there is a strong oxytocin release during the creation of an intimate bond. So why can’t you have both?
What’s more it seems that opportunities to talk about this stuff just don’t seem to be available in the broader community. No doubt there are numerous dark corners of the web where this stuff is voiced, but that’s the point, they are often just “dark corners”. What about having a real conversation about it, in the real everyday world? Like in a cafe with lots of people listening.
Anyway, in terms of upping the dosage, this may have some truth to it. The big sex/swingers party is still a few weeks away, and Poly says she “can’t wait”. Having sex almost daily if that’s around, and masturbating once or twice a day if it’s not.
However the complications are also growing. Firstly there are the very real physiological complications and Poly explains that after brunch she’s on her way to the doctors to get a STD check. I acknowledge her practical no-nonsense approach to this, and she informs me that most people in the ‘scene’ are very careful with this aspect of play. Funnily enough its actually in ‘normal’ dating world where this becomes more of an issue. Oh yeah! That’s right! Norm’s all too quick to hand out advice about sex addiction but he won’t go and get that rash looked at.
And then there are the growing emotional complications. Polys recently ex’d lover James has agreed on the surface that they are still friends. That is before he then tells Poly that he’s in the process of making a decision with his primary partner Susan, about whether or not to have a vasectomy. And of course he wants to tell Poly about this. And of course this creates distress for Poly.
“Why is he telling me about this?” She exclaims.
To make things worse, James also works in the same building as Poly, so whenever she sees him its yet another reminder of what is falling apart.
Disclosure about the vasectomy can work like a hook, and he’s thrown it out to try and catch Poly. This hook is cleverly baited with enough intimacy to lure her in. Poly bites by suggesting that it would be foolish for James to have a vasectomy if he is young and has not had any kids.
Thinking about it now, I reckon that James has said this before to women and this was the response others had given him. He used this on Poly in order to illicit the same response and thus reopen that intimacy. To reinforce the old connection, he also starts to detail what having sex without viable sperm makes possible. Again there’s that escalation for something more and more erotic. That full on, out there “wham” of instant arousal.
Poly is still coming to terms with the end of her and James. She feels let down, disappointed and plain hurt. Poly then discloses “you see, James knows the ‘raw’ me.”
When Poly tells me this I’m intrigued. “What do you mean by the ‘raw’ me.”
The raw Poly is the unfiltered version, which is weird because most people who know her would say “What? There’s more to unfilter?” because she is pretty direct and says a lot of things most people wouldn’t bring up in everyday society (you know, just around the corner from where Norm lives).
But the raw Poly is when she really lets someone into her head and how she really thinks and feels about things. In all of her previous serious relationships she would have to tone down aspects of the raw self because when she tested it out here and there, it was never received well.
There is no ‘front’ to the raw Poly and in contrast her barriers come down and reveal a somewhat softened creature who gets turned on by how she is connecting with someone else’s ‘raw’ self.
And because that ‘raw self’ to ‘raw self’ is unique with each individual, this creates a fundamental driver for being polyamorous. Because the possibilities are infinite, why would you want to be limited?
So even though Poly is trying to let go of James, and even though he keeps trying to reel her back in, she talks excitedly about the upcoming sex party, and even though they have broken up…
“Yeah BUT, I’m still going to be fucking him in a few weeks”
She exclaims a bit too loudly,
in the too crowded cafe,
that just went a bit too silent.