UNBODY PART 2: (Un)wanting my eros in exile, my sex in war, my pleasure in pus(sy?)

Sex doesn’t liberate me. Sometimes it just bloats me. I’ve had orgasms followed by gas pains and self-loathing. I’ve stared at the ceiling wondering if this was healing or just pelvic cardio. My body finishes, but my brain stays behind cleaning up after the mess. I don’t know how to want. Not really. Not without asking first. Not without scanning the room for permission. Not without rehearsing how that wanting might look on someone else’s face. Because somewhere along the way, my “want” stopped belonging to me. It became a safety hazard. A negotiation. A side dish to someone else’s hunger. They tell me I’m allowed now. They whisper, “You’re safe with me.” And my body? It glitches. It doesn’t know how to process kindness without bracing for cost. It wants to trust, but somewhere deep in the code, the algorithm screams: Obedience is safety. Obedience is love. Obedience is the rent you pay to exist. I want to want. But I don’t know where to put that want. I don’t know if it’s mine or just another auto-filled form handed down from culture, family, gods and groomers all dressed in the same well-meaning smile. Desire doesn’t come to me as hunger. It comes as a checklist. A calibration. My thighs chafe when I try to straddle. My skin collects stories in patches: razor bumps, dry elbow maps, a mole that grew like a rebellion. Nothing is smooth. Nothing is silent. Even my ankles are opinionated. No aphrodisiacs. Just flatulence and unshaven thighs and existential interruptions. My stomach folds in ways that feel like betrayal. Sometimes I suck it in out of reflex, then forget to breathe. My belly isn’t bashful, it softens like protest. It folds like grief. It gurgles in rooms meant for whispers. My nipples don’t perk up on cue: they’re indifferent, moody, sometimes numb. “Sometimes one reacts and the other just... clocks out. Like a mismatched pair of employees. My left boob is always ahead of the curve. The right one's passive-aggressive about attention. Sometimes I wonder if my vulva’s lips are uneven. One labia’s a philosopher, the other’s given up. My body isn’t symmetrical. It’s a democracy in chaos. My knees crack when I shift positions. There’s hair where I was told there shouldn’t be. It grows like vengeance. Like inheritance. I don’t wax it away. I’ve stopped apologizing for follicles. My toes curl not from pleasure, but from trying to hold it together. Nothing fluid. Just joints and folds and tension. It comes as a pelvic-floor calculation. Will it hurt? Do I smell okay? Is my breathing too animal? Do I look alive or just available? Is the bra cute enough to leave on, or will it ruin the performance? Sometimes I rehearse moans in my head, not because I feel them but because I’ve been taught to. I think about how my face looks from the side. Whether my breasts fall in the right direction. If my stomach is flattening enough while I’m on top. My clit isn’t some wild, pulsing portal. Some days it hides. Some days it sulks. Some days it screams so quietly I can’t tell if it’s hunger or mourning. Sometimes it’s just... missing. Like it checked out mid-scene. The body is not a movie. Mine forgets its lines all the time. Sometimes I cough mid-kiss and snot gets involved. Sometimes I queef so loud I have to pretend it was the bed. I’ve had to stop mid-sex to pee. I’ve yawned during oral. I’ve giggled at the wet sounds. I’ve panicked at the dryness. I’ve whispered ‘I think I’m bleeding’ and not in the sexy vampire way. My body is not a climax machine. My arousal is not aesthetic. It stains. It sticks. It smells like me and I’m learning not to flinch. It’s a meat puppet with stage fright and IBS. Is this safe? Is this acceptable? Is this too loud, too wet, too much? Is this going to make me lovable? Am I earning intimacy or inviting punishment? (Here. Touch it. Not to fix it, but to feel how sharp it really is.) Do I angle my body like porn stills or wedding photos? Do I arch or curl? Do I fake the sigh because silence feels too real? And, love? Love after trauma is like teaching a bomb how to cuddle. They hold you and you flinch, not because they hurt you, but because you’ve never been held without it costing something. And you feel ridiculous explaining this. You know they aren’t your father, your uncle, your society. But your body doesn’t care about genealogy. It only knows that soft hands have come before with sharp shadows. It only knows that “you’re safe now” is the most dangerous sentence of all because that’s what they said before they taught you how to break beautifully. And then there’s freedom. God. That hideous, glittery masquerade ball. They sell it to you wrapped in hashtags and lingerie. Freedom, they say, is dancing half-naked on a rooftop, moaning louder, arching bolder, “owning it.” But I don’t want to own it. I want to disown it. I want to unlearn the blueprint that told me sex is a performance and wanting is a product. I don’t want to perform my healing through erotica. I want to be turned off, unmade, unplugged. I don’t want to smell like vanilla lotion and regret. I don’t want my orgasm to be a staged event: neat, clean, almost spiritual. I want to not care if I drool or fart or lay there like a malfunctioning wire. Sometimes I fake trembles because the real ones feel too strange. Sometimes I itch mid-thrust and don’t scratch. My thighs cramp. My jaw locks. My skin breaks into stress hives that don’t look seductive in candlelight. I’ve had discharge that looked like glue. I've left sweat stains on his chest. One time I sneezed mid-orgasm and pulled a muscle in my lower back. The smell of latex and lube doesn’t turn me on, it reminds me of hospitals and cheap motels. I can’t always breathe through my nose when I’m on top. Sometimes I burp. And it’s not cute. And when it’s over, I wipe with toilet paper that sticks to me, rolls into sad little confetti at my thighs. Is this what they call post-coital glow? What does freedom actually look like? Not fireworks. Not fishnets. Maybe it looks like boredom. Maybe it looks like saying no and not being punished. Maybe it’s sitting still without shrinking. Maybe it’s not having to exfoliate before being seen. Maybe it’s not needing a playlist to kiss someone. Maybe it’s unsexy lighting. Maybe it’s cotton underwear and mismatched socks and no script. Maybe it’s silence that isn’t suspicious. Maybe it’s desire that isn’t urgent, isn’t curated, isn’t for sale. The culture that “liberates” me through aesthetics still demands obedience: just repackaged as empowerment. Same pot. Different stew. They say: Be free. But look hot doing it. Be sexual, but not needy. Be empowered, but not angry. Be soft, but not stupid. Be healing, but always presentable. And I’m standing here, naked in every way, asking: What if I just don’t want to be edible anymore? What if I want my desire to be ugly? What if I want to want like a malfunctioning script? What if freedom means never being understood? So, I am not ashamed of my malfunction anymore. I am investigating it. What does it mean to “want” when your want was always filtered through someone else’s comfort? I was  taught to anticipate others, not access yourself. My body isn’t aroused by pleasure. It’s triggered by compliance. The desire I was handed? It wasn’t mine. It was manufactured in their shame factory. I was taught to want like a good girl: quietly, neatly, in the dark. I crossed my legs so tightly in childhood I forgot how to uncross them as an adult. My inner thighs feel like locked gates. I hold tension in my hips like old family secrets. Even my vaginal walls brace like they’re about to be told to behave. There’s no ease in entry. There’s only apology. Even when I was alone, the dark had eyes. I adjusted my panties like I was on camera. I touched myself as if someone might still be grading me. Desire, for me, is not a spark. It’s an algorithm. This household is the microstate of that system. "Nice" bodies  who “never hit me” but trained me to flinch with tone. Well-meaning bodies who passed on silence like recipes. Institutions that applauded my silence as virtue. Healing spaces that still demand me be palatable while “liberated.” I was broken by trauma. I was formatted by tradition. Then, there is love with its teeth bared. The guilt of not feeling “safe” even when they’re kind. Wanting to love but my nervous system is still in alert mode. Being loved without being expected to shrink: it confuses me. I try to love back, but sometimes it feels like self-betrayal. I confuse tension for passion, withdrawal for seduction, discomfort for destiny. Love shouldn’t feel like waiting for the other shoe to drop, but my shoes were always weapons. Even his kindness feels like a trapdoor. Even his softness is suspect. I scan his voice for volume, his hand for pressure, his breath for pause. My body watches him watching me, never present, only analyzing. And, it pushes me into rejecting both oppression and its neon makeover. Hypersexuality as their redemption arc of trauma, acting like the "saviourship" is their holy career. Even rebellion gets packaged: fishnets, red lips, moaning as manifesto. But what if freedom isn’t sexy at all? What if it’s quiet, dry, still, a little boring and that’s beautiful? They shamed my body because it wasn’t theirs to script. They told me my body was too much and not enough in the same breath. Too loud in its textures, too quiet in its curves. Too present. Too resistant to polish. Too resistant, period. I learned early that softness isn’t granted, it’s manufactured. And I was born unfinished by their standards. Untamed in the places they preferred glossy. I carry the kind of skin that history has punished. I grow the kind of hair they pretend doesn’t exist. I inhabit a frame that refuses their choreography. This body wasn’t built for your spotlight. It was built for survival under surveillance. And the most radical act? To want it anyway. To worship it not because it defies them but because it betrays their fantasies. My skin doesn’t glow, it absorbs. It remembers. It bites back. They trained me to think of myself in parts: too thick here, too flat there, too dark to be delicate. I wasn’t born for softness. I was born bearing the myths of ‘fixable.’ They never wanted to touch me. They wanted to edit me. I don’t want to be delicious. I want to be undigestible. I want to want the unsexy in me. To press my mouth against my own mess. To not just accept the folds and the funk and the failure, but to lust for it. To see the sweat patch and feel holy. To feel the ache in my knees and say yes, this is mine. Wanting the unsexy in me, wanting the unsexy on me, is the most radical thing I do. Because it means I am not here to be consumed. I am here to be claimed: by myself. I want to want myself when I’m bloated. When I’m bleeding. When I’m blank. When I’m unwashed, unwaxed, undone. I want to run my hands over the parts of me that never made the catalog. And still feel heat rise. Still feel home. And still... God, I wanted to be wanted. Not fixed. Not prettied up for display. Not lit with soft lighting and asked to pose. I wanted their want in the raw. When I was unruly, unplucked, unslicked. When I hadn’t prepared a face. When I hadn’t starved for it. I wanted them to reach for me when I wasn’t marketable. When I was bloated with rage, streaked with acne, or still sticky from crying. I wanted their hands not to cleanse me, but to tremble at me. I wanted their gaze to flinch not because I was grotesque, but because I was realer than what they were trained to desire. Because I had dared to want while unbeautiful. That wanting became a wound. That wanting became my leash. Because they didn’t want me. They wanted the obedient version of me. The edited version. The after-photo. And I still don’t know what aches more: being used, or being ignored. And, what if freedom is ugly? Slow? Undecorated? What if healing doesn’t taste good? It is freedom in the absence of performance, absence of prettiness. And, I feel like a fleshless ghost leaving the machine. I don't want to be a better performer. I want to stop performing. I want silence without being suspicious. I  want space that doesn’t demand an apology. I want to be able to stand in an empty room. Unwatched. Unexpected. And still not knowing what to do with my hands. I no longer want to ask to be understood and demand to be left unfixed. I’m not here to be healed. I’m here to misfire, malfunction, and make it impossible for your machine to run smoothly again. My desire is no longer yours to narrate. My body is not your audience. My moan is not your metric. Let me be unsexy. Let me pull underwear from between cheeks and still feel worthy. Let me itch my scalp mid-foreplay. Let me have dandruff. Let me be sacred in lint and leg hair and laundry-day bras. Let me smell like stress sweat. Let me fall asleep mid-touch. Let me laugh when I’m supposed to moan. Let my thighs jiggle with no apology. Let my armpits stink. Let my back sweat in patches. Let me have toilet paper stuck to my ass mid-kiss. Let me queef and not apologize. Let my mascara smudge and crust. Let me laugh with food in my teeth. Let me smell like last night’s fear. Let me be repulsive and still real. Let me fumble, twitch, freeze. Let me forget the choreography. Let me not want to be touched at all. Let me be whole in my stillness. Let me be loud in the wrong moments. Let me want nothing. Let me want everything. I want to kiss the crease in my body where shame used to live. I want to want the pimpled, the patchy, the peeling. The part of me that smells like real life, not rosewater. The part of me that jiggles wrong and aches right. I want to want the body that capitalism told me to Photoshop. I want to worship the sag, the scrape, the scab. I want the softness that doesn't sell. I want the hunger that isn't hungry for validation. Wanting the unsexy in me is not passive resistance. It’s an erotic uprising. Let me glitch. Let me wake up with a puffy face, a pimple in my cleavage, and morning breath that smells like existential dread. Let me wear granny panties on my period and still call it lingerie. Let my sex smell like copper and sweat and disappointment. Let my arousal not be cute: it’s swollen, confused, and full of air bubbles. Let it be holy in its awkwardness. Let it be divine like thunder, not delicate like lace. Let it be prayer and pus and pulse. Let it be mine.

- 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.]

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.]