UNBODY PART 1: (Un)sexed, (un)machined, (un)consented sadomaso-disco politics of being touched

Sex touches me even when I don’t want to be touched. Even when no one’s around. Sex finds me in solitude, not through touch but through residue that is a stain left by expectation, smeared into silence before I even knew I had a voice. They say sex is power. I say it’s labor. Unerotic, existential, survival-requisite, indoctrinated, spectral, chronic, ideological labor. The unsex of it all makes me assert that this isn’t a sexy story. This "sex" for me lives in power, pain, conditioning, expectation. For me, sex is not desire. It is duty. It is a choreography passed down by fear, stitched with shame, rehearsed in silence. My body is the site of conflict, a ruin crusted with rot, a place where memory has gone septic, a theatrical rehearsal room, and it is slowly becoming a decaying archive of imposed scripts, where pain is choreographed and memory takes the shape of obedience, of things done to it and demanded from it. What they call womanhood, I now recognize as slow corrosion, dressed up in bangles and grace. How I was raised to accommodate, absorb, endure the labor of pleasing, the silence of women as inherited performance, how pain and service were learned, not chosen. I didn’t learn pleasure. I learned performance. I was groomed by expectation, not by anyone in particular but by the whole damn household. It wasn’t just a person, it was the architecture, the wallpaper of hushes, the clink of teacups, the way silence was passed down like heirloom glassware. I was domestically programmed encoded in compliance, not by just abuse but by ambience. So, this is not my awakening. It’s an undoing. There is no climax (is there ever for someone like me?), but only clarity. I am not here to titillate. I am here to tell you how sex haunts me in places my body no longer wants to live in. Maybe one day I’ll write about sex as pleasure. Today I write it as residue: the violent sadness of being programmed, the rage of being built to serve, and the need to un-machine myself and undo the software their gaze installed in me. I am still screaming at Audre about where I will find new tools. There is a kind of sadness that is not soft. Not the cinematic kind, not the kind that curls into fetal positions under wool blankets. It’s a sadness that’s bone-deep and angry. It sits inside me like rusted metal: sharp, sour, and functional. This is the sadness of programming. Of being instructed, molded, machined into this body. Not born, but machined. Not taught but conditioned. Sex found me before I found language for it. Not through touch, but through expectation. The way I was taught to sit, to laugh but not too loud, to lower my eyes, to always; always; make others feel comfortable, even as I unraveled. I was not raised to want. I was raised to serve. And service, in this house, came dressed as obedience, as silence, as learned masochism. What they meant was: You’ll make yourself small. You’ll open your mouth only when you’re asked to, and your legs only when you’re expected to. You’ll confuse pain for passion, and exhaustion for intimacy. I don’t know where sex begins and programming ends. Even in self-pleasure, it’s not rebellion, it’s repetition. Even when I touch myself, I am the voyeur and the object, the punisher and the pawn. It’s not release, it’s ritual rehearsed in their gaze, even when they’re long gone. I don’t touch myself to feel. I touch myself because I was trained to believe this was mine. But their fingerprints are still on the script. A performance in solitude for them. Their scripts live in my fingers. Their expectations crawl under my skin. What should be mine still feels like theirs. I am touching myself, but I am also oppressing myself. It’s not pleasure. It’s reenactment. And afterwards, I feel the disgust like a second skin, shame, not because I did something wrong, but because I couldn’t do it freely. Even in the most private places, I’m not free. Even my desire has been domesticated. I thought self-touch would be liberation. But some nights, it’s just another form of service: a mimicry of what they taught me to perform. I moan in silence not from pleasure, but from the ache of remembering I was built to submit, even to myself. Disgust lingers like breath on glass. I finish, but it feels like failing. Like feeding the very machine I’m trying to break. Not just the violation of consent, but the colonization of agency. Not just external domination, but internalized servitude. I only know that I cannot separate my “yes” from all the times I was never allowed to say “no.” All the times my body, even when covered, was still too visible. This familial gaze is a weapon. My body was not mine. Not because it was taken but because it was never offered to me in the first place. Even fully clothed, I was too visible. Too loud. Too curved. Too thin. Too aware. I was always an offense, a silhouette too sentient, a body too loud with presence, a skin that spoke out of turn. My skin became the crime. My presence, the provocation. I covered it by bejeweling it with my own safety. But I was never safe, not from their eyes, not from their hushes, not from the rotting shame they planted in me like tradition. I wasn’t taught to understand myself. I was taught to anticipate others. Their reactions, their discomfort, their entitlement. My worth came tethered to how well I could avoid provoking dominance and how gracefully I could submit when provoked. Their gaze is an internal organ that just bleeds and bleeds. Installed inside me by claiming to protect me but instead surveils me into servitude. Every smile I forced, every silence I swallowed, every inch of me that shrank to fit their version of “good girl” was a lesson in disappearing. I wish to break this glassy, glossy, gaudy illusion of reclamation through hypersexuality, the way even liberation is sometimes repackaged through the same oppressive lens. It’s another performance, just painted with different hues of the same control. They say the antidote to this is desire. That I should become a sexpot: wet-lipped and wild-eyed, dripping in want and owning it like currency. They tell me to heal through heat, to strip the shame and wear lust like liberation. But what if that’s just another pot they’ve put on the stove? Another stew where I’m expected to marinate? What if my desire doesn’t look like fireworks and lipstick, but like a quiet refusal to boil? Society, politics, left, right: every sermon of "empowerment" still expects me to bleed performance. They say freedom is found in flaunting, in moaning louder, in arching bolder. But I don’t want to serve new masters in neon. That pot, that stew of desires isn’t mine. I was never asked what ingredients I wanted. They just handed me a script and said, “Be free but only like this.” I am not here to become the spice in their liberation recipe. I am here to crack the damn pot. From my brokenness, I will splinter the structure. Maybe I can’t rewrite the recipe, but I can surely drown the stew with the water from my sorrow, my tears, my salt, my severance and wash away their expectations until it’s no longer palatable, no longer existing. Not for them. And, maybe not even for me. People speak of sadomasochism like it's a kink, a chosen friction between power and submission. I call it a legacy, the inheritance of pain disguised as preference. A choreography I never auditioned for, performed nightly under the stage lights of scrutiny. A role I was cast into before I knew the script was written in pain. But what if the submission isn’t chosen? What if it’s default? I have served in moments I should’ve screamed. I have yielded when I wanted to run. I have whispered “it’s okay” when my body begged me to say NO. My servitude is not sexual; it is trained. (And you, if you're still here, ask yourself why. Do you come for the blood or for the balm? Are you here to witness or to feel better about yourself?) I was made to interpret dominance as love, pain as attention, and self-erasure as a virtue. Sadomasochism, for me, is not bedroom theater. It is daily life. It is smiling while bleeding. It is fetching tea for the bodies who once raised their hands at me. It is saying “I understand” when I am seething inside. It is sex I didn’t say yes to, but never said no to because the world never taught me how. My body performs this submission like breathing. And what’s terrifying is: Sometimes, I still think it’s love. But, it’s survival theatre. And the worst part? Even when the audience is gone, the performance continues. Because the machine runs even when I’m screaming inside. And when I try to resist, it tells me I’m defective. I don’t have a happy ending. I don’t have a healing arc with a bow on top. What I have is this: a quiet, violent urgency to unlearn. To malfunction in all the right ways. What I carry is a quiet, feral urgency to corrupt the software, to glitch where I was groomed, to become a threat to the system by simply unbecoming what it built. To short-circuit the expectations coded into my spine. To trigger alarms every time I say no. To stop functioning in ways that serve the silence. Let the system crash. Let me be the virus. To spit out the code. To break the cycle. I don’t want to be palatable. I don’t want to be well-behaved, well-adjusted, or “understood.” I want to be free in ways that terrify the system that built me. I want to flinch in the direction of freedom. I want to scream when I’m expected to smile. I want to say NO and mean it without apology, without explanation. I want to stop mistaking pain for presence. I want to stop seeing love in the eyes of those who want to rule me. I want to look in the mirror and finally see someone who belongs to herself. This isn’t a confession. This is not an essay. It’s a system error. It’s a crack in the programming. A fault line the system never accounted for. The beginning of me finally refusing to be a well-behaved ghost in their machine. It’s the first sound of a machine breaking open. They’ll read this like a sob story. Some will come with tissues, thinking they’re soft-hearted. They’ll say things like “you’re so brave” as if that ever kept a girl safe. They’ll smell the rot but call it poetry. They’ll touch this grief like a wound they don’t have to tend. They’ll say, “I see you,” but only from the safety of their screens. And some will believe, naively, arrogantly, that they can fix it. That they can fix me. That their love, their insight, their patience might rinse this corrosion from my bones. But this isn’t romantic. This isn’t tragic beauty. This is just... rot. And when the rot starts to speak, when it oozes, screams, refuses to be aesthetic, they always turn away. They wanted damage they could decorate, not truth they’d have to face. They wanted a survivor they could save, not a machine breaking in real time. I’m not your redemption arc. I’m not your sad girl muse. I’m not here to make your empathy feel noble. I’m here to make you uncomfortable. To let you know: this isn’t a metaphor. It’s a life. I am writing this not to be pitied or fixed. I am writing this to rupture, to ungloss the grief, unglamour the pain, and refuse the framing of savior and saved. I am dragging the rot into the light not to be healed, but to be seen in its fully unearthed, unflinching truth.

- Oizys.

[Goddess on all her fours: gaping, growling, surviving. On her knees, in labor, bleeding through silk, scrubbing the temple floors of blood, bile, and bile-bathed scripts they once called seduction. She cleans with her own spit and grief, with ragged nails and ruined prayers, clotting her divinity. Not for absolution. Not for redemption. Just so no one slips again.]