it's ok to want more [ginny cook]

pleas - ure : noun : a feeling of happy satisfaction or enjoyment

Growing up in a blue collar, Southern household, my experience of pleasure was extremely limited. Pleasure was a particularly good pot of pinto beans with cold ketchup. It was a cold Busch beer during Monday night football. It was the unshakeable knowledge that my parents loved me and cared for me. This is privilege, but this is not pleasure.

The women I know and love, and patterned my own behavior after, have a very complicated relationship to pleasure. I learned that pleasure should have an outcome, an aspect of productivity. If you lay around and masturbate all day, what have you accomplished? Your clit is sore, your mind has hopefully moved away from whatever was weighing on it and maybe you’ve become more adept at masturbating. Unfortunately, in my experience, the need for a ‘product of pleasure’ really fucks up the feeling good. And how important it is to find pleasure and sensuality in the way lips feel against a cats ears. In the way cold water feels running down your throat first thing in the morning. The way your tits yell with glee when you release them from a bra at the end of the day. These purposeless, fleeting moments are so necessary for joy and goddamn, we all need more joy.

So, I embarked on what I hope will be a lifelong journey to experience purposeless pleasure.

When I’m alone, I smoke cigarettes and listen to D’Angelo. I let hot things linger on my skin so long that a typhoon runs up my spine and spills into the base of my skull. I prefer things to be so soft I can barely feel them…When I was little, I liked to watch the dogs hump stuff because it was clear that it just felt so motherfucking good.

I didn’t analog masturbate, with a hand and no toys, until I was 29 years old. What led me to my first experience was a bout of extraordinary horniness while on a road trip and I didn’t happen to have a vibrator on hand, so I very quickly figured out that hands are literally built to pleasure other parts of your and others’ bodies. Which led me to think about hands and how everyone has hands and suddenly remember that women know what to do with their hands because women are better at everything.

Sometimes you meet someone that makes it OK to want more than what you’ve known.

This person knows what to do with their hands. They knows how to touch every surface of your entire body, top to bottom, inside to outside, front to back, with the delicacy and urgency of boiling water or some solar event that burns so low and loud that you don’t even know it’s burning you alive because it feels so good. They touch with a knowledge only given by knowing exactly the worship to provide because it’s the worship they have received at some point. They flip and slither and look up from tongue fucking you with the biggest, bluest eyes that tell you that this is sustenance they require and expect, not a service they are providing that has an inevitable conclusion. This person will eat pussy until their tongue is raw. And y’all, the thing about queer sex it that there is no clear ending. You can come over and over again until your thighs forget their job and they no longer hold you. Until your mouth is so parched from your repeated gasps that your upper lip sticks to your top teeth. Sometimes, we turn to the mirror and I watch their tattooed hands slide across my round stomach and disappear between my legs like watching a dry erase marker glide across a smooth tablet.

The time before is the same delicate nectar as the between and after, and it has a sameness because there is no delineation in a perfect circle. When every single millimeter of your skin is a playground for exploration and sensation, there is truly no end to what is possible. In my 30th year, I feel like I’ve made incredible strides towards GETTING FREE and FOLLOWING PLEASURE and listening to the whispers that actually do know exactly what it is you want. Sometimes you fall in love with a man, sometimes a woman, sometimes a person who transcends what you have understood of either gender until this point. Sometimes you’re lucky enough to win the affection of a person you didn’t know you deserved and sometimes you’re lucky enough to be able to love them back. This is privilege, but this is also pleasure.