Subscribers—
This latest edition to Demon Time is late. Apologies. On Friday, a migraine stopped me from finishing a few essays I have queued up for this column. And the weather finally broke on Saturday here in Chicago, and so I decided to play in the pollen instead of writing. Anyway, as a reminder new Demon Time posts will be up every other Friday — but to make amends, I have a special post to share about talking love and sex with my African hair braider that will go up later this week.
-Jameka 😈
Look. I’m a weirdo. Not a pervert. But certainly a bit of a sicko. Not because I’m teeming with uncontrollable fantasies I want desperately to embody, but because I’m too curious for my own good. I wanna know what everyone else is up to when the lights go out and we shed our plastic human masks. And since the day my parents brought a desktop HP and a dial-up connection into our house, I’ve been scarred for life.
I know some of you are weirdos, too. You like to stay up late scrolling the paraphilias page on Wikipedia. Just like me. You, too, lose sleep wondering why any person prefers sex with the dead instead of the living. Or, you clear your browser history once a week because you’ve been doing some unsavory “research.” Have you ever seen dragonflies having sex? Do you know why the most popular fetish is for feet?
I just need to know. I’m fascinated by most everything — the chillness of capybaras, the origins of limburger cheese, the history of slave revolts in the Caribbean — but I’m most fascinated by sex. Sex can reveal so much about our absurdity as a species, and how we’ve constructed societies in which to confine (or move beyond) what is acceptable for human life and what is even possible for us sexually.
Since the dawn of civilization, we’ve made rules. We’ve defined what is normal even as we live newer and more bizarre experiences — call it social evolution. For the most part, rules are arbitrary, but there must be a reason why Europeans married off their daughters before the girls got their first periods. Or why some isolated tribal communities in Africa have pre-pubescent boys fellate their male elders. The answer is sex, right? This mysterious condition of our being that operates within us chemically and biologically and psychologically. A condition we so desperately try to keep tamed. But to say sex is the reason why some of our more puzzling social contracts and traditions were drawn up in the first place is an incomplete answer. The drive of sexuality is not enough to explain why our ancestors neglected the devastating effect child marriages have on the mental and physical growth of girls (which hasn’t stopped this practice globally) or why we struggle to understand that boys fellating their elders is not about lust in that culture, but is a ritual of childhood transition, like a bar mitzvah in Western culture.
Sexuality is strange. It’s hard for me to define it any better. Or maybe I should say people cognizant of the power of sex are strange — illogical, emotional, power-obsessed, obtuse. There are any number of answers as to why we as a species have spent billions of dollars, or outright murdered our own kin to suppress natural elements of our human sexual experience, but in turn neglected to solve the downright inhumane. And all of the answers fascinate me (remember: I’m a weirdo). For example, homosexuality is something we share in common with nonhuman species, and yet over the course of millenia, various cultures have evolved to deem this natural expression of sexuality as a threat to society. But, in the same breadth, will argue at the federal level that the sexual subjugation of women, or the demonizing of Black male sexuality, is beneficial to maintaining social order.
Or maybe you as an individual simply don’t care about sex’s role in larger formation of cutlure. It’s not that deep. Sex is supposed to be a pleasurable pastime as well, that many people prefer to not treat like a graduate level philosophy course. Which I vibe with. But, unfortunately for me, I like to look. Which means I like to over analyze. I can’t turn away from sex and how it presents itself in every profound or stupid way culturally, and what that might mean for the betterment of ourselves and others.
Why do we rape? Is sex safer if it is only done for procreation? How do children know when something is “sexual” if they don’t have the language to articulate what they are processing? How do persons with genital difference navigate various sex acts? Questions regarding human sexuality can’t simply be addressed by looking at the science of biology or chemical makeup. Sex is much more than the physical and quantifiable — it is a set of behaviors experienced within context and through movement.
At the heart of sex is a mystery we can only begin to solve through the subjective experience, and ultimately, allowing ourselves to be truly present. Sex in our culture is a part of our human need to make meaning. We have a pathological desire to understand why we do the things we do, and how to benefit best from our behaviors. And when I think of benefits I mean the basics: how to stay alive, or how to make money in order to stay alive, or how to keep our progeny from being wiped out. But, in addition, sex itself is a tool we use to give structure and guidance to our individual lives, our communities, and nations as a whole. Humans have used sex, and wielded power because of our deeply misunderstood sexualities, as a means to create royal alliances, or keep so-called “undesirables” from populating coveted land, or sex has been used to commune with God or gods.
Sex, even if you’re not having it or don’t plan to have it, is still very much a part of shaping the perceived identities and actions of swaths of human beings. Believe it or not, your sexuality can affect all aspects of your existence — your job or strangers or how your body is perceived or even the goddamn economy. The answers — taboo, discomforting — are most intriguing because these answers can possibly show us how we reconnect with one another (in all the ways that matter) in a world increasingly made more disconnected and shallow by disaffection and exploitation.
I’ve mentioned just a few cases of the ways sex has warped our societies for the worse. But imagine, if with perceptive curiosity and openminded interrogation, we could rescue sex from the ills of our human nonsense. If not for the betterment of the world — honestly, we don’t have time to save the globe, we got bills to pay — but for ourselves and the people we love and can outwardly effect in our immediate communities.
And that’s why I like to look at the sick, the taboo, the absurd. My looking is in service of a better future version of myself, who can articulate my beliefs concerning my own sexuality, and how not to abuse sex (and the stigmas and contexts around it) as a way to steal power or to undermine someone else’s rights to bodily autonomy and liberty. But, also I'm a human being, like the rest of you. And like all of y’all, I have a filthy mind. So, don’t get your minds out of the gutter. Down there, we all might discover the unbelievable.