Dear Reader,
I feel like I’m always apologising with how far behind I am with this project. It’s always challenging to make art consistently amidst the social, fiscal, and educational requirements of life. Nevertheless, I’m glad to be chipping away at this, telling beautiful stories about individuals and their journeys. This particular piece was contributed by one such individual and friend based on a conversation we had on 23 Oct 2018. They have chosen to remain anonymous and shall be referred to as Euca. The photographs presented were inspired by this piece of writing, selected from the photoseries — ‘Longkang Kangkong’.
The topic of sex has always divided many people, often along religious and political lines. Everyone’s entitled to a different level of comfort when it comes to sex — whether that’s an extremely casual view, a celibate-til-marriage-view, or somewhere in between. What they are not entitled to, is to judge the respective comfort level of others. As a sex-positive person, I find myself saddened yet unsurprised around the increasing research surrounding a relatively unexplored form of non-suicidal self-injury [NSSI]: Sex as self- injury [SASI] (Zetterqvist et al., 2018).
How often have we heard the commonplace but woefully inadequate advice to cure a broken heart?: ‘just get rebound, a summer fling, something to take your mind off your ex’ — even if it makes your insides twist and has you feeling empty the next day. Casual sex can be enjoyable, sure — but ignoring the emotional and physical cues that your mind and body tell you when using sex as a coping mechanism can be detrimental to your health. Without further ado:
Content warning: Physical intimacy, Self-harm through casual sex
The following excerpts are not verbatim, but edited to flow in a single narrative. However it still very much encapsulates Euca’s voice. They have approved of the following document and confirmed that they have been accurately represented.
Euca
I think everyone has experienced, gone through, or considered self-harm to some degree, but not everyone may identify with it as a term, and initially neither did I.
There were definitely some behaviours I engaged in that many would categorise as ‘self-harm’, but I guess when I thought about taking part in this project, I was worried that the harm I was putting myself through just wasn’t significant enough to share about — which is strange now that I think about it.
Sometimes I find myself dismissing the severity of these behaviours in my own head too — like I’m inclined to chalk it up to just me being emotional or dramatic. I think this act of dismissal might be why self-harm is so prevalent. When I was processing these thoughts through journalling it felt like I was recounting fiction, but that recounting was what allowed me to realise that there’s no reason for me to feel like it’s too insignificant to share about.
Walk me through your process of using sex
or physical intimacy as a coping mechanism
It began with the end of a 3-year relationship. Even though we loved each other deeply, it always felt like a tenuous bond. I think most of the issues stemmed from an imbalance; he felt he didn’t have strong enough feelings for the relationship to be categorised as something more serious and this butted up against what I was feeling — we had different expectations and capacities for emotional commitment.
At the end, after months of frustrations, taking breaks, and constantly talking about the end of our relationship, we broke up right before the summer. I remember the night that he said he wanted to talk; I turned to my friend whom I was with at the time and joked that this might be the end, and it was.
It felt like all the frustrations I had been feeling for more than a year culminated into this single moment. But my initial reaction wasn’t grief; it was disappointment and anger. I felt I was never in control during the relationship, and I felt the same now again at the end.
I felt so small and unwanted. That feeling pushed me to download Tinder even though I had no real desire to be on a dating app — and had never had any interest in dating in general for almost my entire adult life. But I knew dating around was something he had wanted to try, and as a response to my anger, I wanted to "beat him to it." My insecurities in this relationship made me want to lash out at him, even if it meant doing something that I didn’t want to do.
I remember the first time I hooked up with somebody after the break up. I matched with someone and within the hour, I was at their house. It was definitely unwise because I had barely talked to him, didn’t know him at all, and just decided to go to his house at 2am in the morning. The sex was honestly so terrible. I had previously associated sex as something wonderful, joyful, and pleasurable. And for some reason, I thought that the act of sex in any context was just going to be that way — that it wasn’t going to be bad or painful, but it ended up being both.
When I went into it, there was very little communication, very little chemistry, and very little respect. The whole thing was just painful, and I went along with things that I didn't enjoy. I remember returning home feeling disgusting and cried for the first time in two weeks; this was my first time crying after the break up. I felt so truly lonely; all the grief that I hadn’t ‘felt’ when our relationship ended just flooded me in that moment. Unfortunately, that was also the beginning of me making that connection in my mind that shitty sex might be cathartic — that it could lead to this emotional release — and it was the beginning of me processing my grief in this manner.
You did something that felt wrong to you on so many levels — it was unpleasant, physically harmful, wasn’t good for your mental health — but because it allowed some sort of emotional release at the end, you decided to repeat that process again and again. To me, that sounds like self-harm to a T.
The whole summer I was justifying it within the frame of sex-positivity, like I remember thinking “there’s nothing wrong using sex as a distraction and jumpstarting myself into single-hood. Who knows, it might possibly even be healthy.” But by the end of summer I realised that all my encounters were just hook ups, and even if I met someone cool — someone that I’d typically be interested in, there wasn’t any space for chemistry or spark at all. It just felt very methodical, like I’m going on this date to have sex at the end. Which often ensured that the sex was bad. Out of all my meetings with people, there were four moments that stood out in hindsight as clear signifiers of self-harm.
Besides the first encounter I spoke about just now, another instance I remember vividly was with this guy who was just such an asshole — the asshole of assholes. The sex ended up being very degrading (and not in a nice way) but it ironically ended up ‘feeling good’ because it was degrading in a harmful way. Because of that, I decided to meet up with him again — wanting to chase that feeling of hurt and disgust.
The next instance was when I was sleeping with this guy who was really nice and respectful, and on top of that we also got on really well. But somehow, I was just never interested and felt like I had no energy to be interested in somebody. I was never able to get turned on — sex was always really uncomfortable because I wasn't ever really present. But the physical pain of sex while I was unaroused triggered the emotional pain that I had managed to numb myself against; it just brought it all to the surface. I broke down crying as he came inside of me in the dark.
At the time I thought it was sadistically hilarious. Now looking back on that summer I can say for sure that I was self-harming — using painful and disconnected sex to trigger some sort of emotional catharsis and release.
The final moment that I remember was after a date. We had a pleasant dinner with good conversations, but the sex after that was so confusing that I’m not even sure if it could qualify as sex. It lasted for three hours and he kept wanting to take breaks to cuddle. At the time I thought it was so ridiculous, but looking back on it, it was possible that he didn’t even want to have sex but maybe he felt pressured to do so based on cues that I might have been giving off. And this was what upset me the most, that I might have hurt someone or disregarded their needs and discomfort because my ability to read someone was so compromised by this desire I had for physical intimacy — although no part of it ever felt intimate — it was almost as if I was using them as tools to heal myself.
Aside from the emotional release, it also felt like being able to sleep with these mediocre men allowed me to regain a sense of control that I didn’t have during my relationship. It wasn’t healthy, but these men were easy to read and even if it wasn’t pleasant, it felt like I was in control. I felt so effortlessly desirable, which was something I wasn’t used to feeling in my relationship. I approached dating with zero care because I approached myself with zero care. I wasn’t respectful or good at intimacy with another person because I had so little regard for my own needs.
4 years later
Having been single for a while now, how do you feel about your grief and heartbreak now, as well as your current dating habits?
I turned down sex on a date recently, which was a pretty significant moment for me because I felt wary of repeating this pattern again. Using sex as a way to process grief was harmful to me and unhealthy, and it was very specific to the feelings I was experiencing at the time — that loss of an intimate relationship where sex was part of something sacred. Because I was so upset, I wanted to defile that idea I guess.
How do you think you have grown since then?
After that whole experience, I realised that it’s very unlikely for me to have pleasurable sex without a strong emotional connection. I’ll need to care about and understand my sexual partner to some degree for me to enjoy exchanging so much energy with someone. I love physical touch as an activity to deepen connection, and I think sex is such a powerful way to communicate — I do not want to squander my energy on dissociative sex again.
Now I know better about what factors it takes for me to have pleasurable sex, but sticking to that approach can be challenging when I'm struggling with relational grief. I still find myself falling back on those inclinations to engage in harmful encounters to shock myself into catharsis. But I keep this in mind when I consider my motivations to meet someone new, especially when following disappointments or frustrations.
Being sex-positive doesn’t excuse myself, or anyone, from putting in the time and effort to discover what works for you and what doesn’t, to understand yourself and the person you’re engaging with.
Because I’m worth it. And you are too.
That’s all I have for today, until next time.
Sincerely,
Jogoh & Euca
References:
Zetterqvist, M., Svedin, C. G., Fredlund, C., Priebe, G., Wadsby, M., & Jonsson, L. S. (2018). Self- reported nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) and sex as self-injury (SASI): Relationship to abuse, risk behaviors, trauma symptoms, self-esteem and attachment. Psychiatry Research, 265, 309–316. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2018.05.013