This post is about sexuality. It’s pretty raw and frank. Please don’t read if you are a minor, or if you don’t want to hear about me this way.

This also has a lot to do with my mental illness. It’s not written in my usual style. Instead this style strives to recreate what I was thinking and experiencing in the moment of this incident. It’s not psychosis but it might be too close for comfort. Don’t read this if you can be triggered into an episode by such material.

There are mentions of sexual trauma.

Honestly, just don’t read this.

noli me tangere.
noli me legere.
noli me videre.*
noli me –
*non enim videbit me homo et vivet.

I thought I was over this. So liberated. So shamelessly carnal. Soooooo Satanic.

I act fucking shameless in bed. I thought I was shameless. I thought I was immune to that particular poison.

Well. This morning my boyfriend showed me a video he had made of me getting fucked.

And it turns out, it’s easy to act shameless when you don’t know what it looks like from the outside.

Sure, I’ve done porn– where I was acting. I’ve been fucked facing a mirror, and watched myself, but the act of observing myself changes the faces I make. It’s all choreographed and beautiful and fake. It does not disturb me.

I didn’t really know. I had no idea. I didn’t know how raw it is, how vulnerable– the humiliating whimpering noises that escape my throat, the way my face contorts and twists in pain and ecstasy, the panting, cringing, twitching, flinching, craven body language…

Abject. Abject. Holy Saint Kristeva, help!

I start to cry. I feel nauseous. I am drowning in shame, choking on it. Shame is the air I breathe. My lover tries to comfort me but there is little he can do. It doesn’t matter that he tells me he thinks my rawness and vulnerability is beautiful and sexy, in fact the most beautiful and sexy thing he’s ever seen or imagined. He says I look like L’ange du Mal with the expression of Saint Theresa.

I don’t see what he sees. I don’t look through his eyes. I can’t.

I flee to the bathroom, lock the door, get in the shower. I quickly find myself curled up on the floor, sobbing, whisper-screaming hoarse litanies to all my gods and demons to save me from the soul-sucking morass of self-loathing.

Lucifer, help. Eisheth Zenunim, help. Lilith help me Naamah help me Agrat Bat Mahlat help me Paimon help me Beelzebub help me Belial help me Belphegor help me Astaroth help me!

Samael, Samael, Samael, Samael! Teach me how to die and die and die and die and rise again!

Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère de ma longue misère de ma longue misère de ma longue misère de ma longue misère de ma longue misère de ma longue

O Lion and O Serpent that destroys the destroyer, be mighty among us! O Lion and O Serpent that destroys the destroyer, be mighty among us! O Lion and O Serpent that destroys the destroyer, be mighty among us!

Holy Kristeva holy Foccault holy holy Crowley help me.

Mortification of the flesh. Like some kind of Christian ascetic I suddenly want to rend and flay and tear and starve and carve my body. I’m crawling out of my skin. Bad enough to be meat, but writhing meat, as if crawling with maggots… ugh!

Disgust, disgust, disgust. I’m slapping my palms against the shower wall, still hoarsely whisper-screaming because I don’t want to scare my boyfriend. I sob and dry-heave. Yet although my body cringes, whimpers, whines, shakes, although I hear my teeth chatter, and feel the tears sliding down my face, I am not really feeling the pain that makes me behave this way. I am fully dissociated from my body, cut off. I want nothing to do with this meat. I feel only loathing for it and all that it requires. Contempt. Disgust.

Even in the middle of all this, I recognize this as a gap in my initiation, a stain on my soul that was missed. In fact, I recognized that gap almost as soon as I saw the video. Gap, hole… an abyss. The Abyss? Not quite, but maybe something like it, and I am nowhere near to crossing.

I am fascinated by the story of Aleister Crowley getting fucked across the Abyss by Victor Neuberg in the middle of a Sahara Dessert night. The magic circle with sand kicked across, the decapitated bodies of doves, a demon possessing his body and his lover inside him, possessing him as well. The howling of Choronzon, the darkness of Daath.

I’m fascinated because years before I became an occultist, I wanted to get fucked into the abyss. That was how I thought about it. Those were the words I used in my head. I wanted to lose myself, lose my ego, feel like I was dying. I wanted to be annihilated by cock. Sometimes, when it’s really good, I seem to feel the breath of the void on my face, but not quite. Never quite yet.

So I was fascinated but also skeptical. Crowley was no stranger to sodomy, in the many years before that transformative desert buttfuck. I found it hard to believe that a little ass-pounding would be enough to break that monster ego, to force that self-absorbed little queen into a place of rending revelation.

Now I wonder– did he see himself? Did he float from his body and look down on it? Is that, finally, what was enough– seeing himself animal, demonic, bucking and writhing and snarling and screaming and mewling and drooling?

That’s what watching the video felt like– a technologically-induced out-of-body experience, no less horrifying for its strange banality. What I saw was not what I wished to see. I looked ugly to myself, hideous. Spasmodic, twitching like a grub. Shame, humiliation, mortification, mortificatio. Looking at it, I felt viscerally unworthy of love, respect, or even sexual desire. I felt like less than nothing. My gibbering noises echo the incoherence of Choronzon, idiotic, meaningless and evil.

I’m not saying I crossed The Abyss. Maybe an abyss, but only a small one, and I’m not even sure I’m across.

Or maybe, more accurately, I was gazing into the abyss, and the abyss was also gazing into me, and I was gazing back into myself with the eyes of the abyss and seeing sex mixed up with death and disease and insanity and despair and emission of all kinds of awful effluvium, and it was like an endless hall of mirrors vanishing into blackness. I couldn’t accept it. It was downright Lovecraftian.

And the worst part, the worst part, the part I least want to think about– some of the people who have seen me looking like that. Did I look like that to my rapists? Did I look like that to the disrespectful fools who used and dismissed me? How many people have seen this soft, cringing, craven underbelly of mine– really seen it? Did they feel this disgust I am feeling now? Is that why they abused me? Do I deserve it for being pathetic?

I haven’t thought of being fucked as being vulnerable in a long time. I have a cast-iron cunt and the heart of a whore. But then again, I haven’t seen what I look like, really look like, until now.

Not sexy pornographic wantoness. No, I utterly lack that quality Laura Mulvey called “to-be-looked-at-ness.” I look like something that is not to be looked at, not to be seen. Something that shouldn’t be seen. This is short iPhone video is not the definition of visual pleasure and narrative cinema. And I am not a sex object, and emphatically not the subject. Neither subject nor object, sex abject. Ora pro nobis holy Kristeva and holy Mulvey, now and at the hour of our death.

When I grew calmer I prayed to my body to forgive me for my ignorant disgust, and I prayed to my God to help me forgive my body. And then I wrote this. I’m still not really OK.

It’s so irrational, so stupid. But looking at myself in that video I felt I was looking at every unclean thing. I responded to the image of my naked enjoyment as if I were seeing and smelling raw sewage. That’s what this horrible culture will do to you. Does this sound insane? Does it sound like an overreaction? Yes it is and yes it was. But it’s also exactly how the world has told me I am supposed to feel.

So, I know what I have to do. I have to watch that video again and again until it doesn’t bother me anymore. Then I have to get fucked again, and let my lover make another video, and watch that one. And do all this again and again until I am truly immune. Until I look as good to myself as I look to him.

Mortifying? Yes! But be mortified means to die. I have to kill this shame, kill this part of me. I want to strangle it ruthlessly. Destroy the destroyer. Hate what makes me hate myself and kill what’s trying to kill me.

Complete freedom from sexual shame is not enlightenment, no, but it’s a species of partial enlightenment, and it’s the absolute minimum of the spiritual growth that I want for myself in this lifetime. In my vanity and foolishness I thought I was there. I was wrong.

Fuck this. Fuck that. Fuck me. Fuck.