Deguiltification – An Experiential Essay by Chris Ifso
Beata and Matís runluhmen d’arc, a company founded in Berlin that creates “spaces dedicated to the manifold aspects of intimacy and desire.” In September 2019, the duo participated inSchmiede, a 10-day maker festival held at the Old Salt Works in Hallein, Austria, featuring over 100 artists, musicians, digital creators, and writers—including me. Beata is also an academic; her dissertation topic is The Art of Sex Education: Contemporary Aesthetics as Idiosyncratic Interventions in Hegemonic Sexual Discourses. As part of their research for this, luhmen d’arc was there to interview a range of participants about their attitudes toward sexuality. Interviewees were also offered an introductory bodywork session.
A mattress sits in one corner of this large, barn-like wooden studio, behind a flimsy curtain hung on a rope between pillars. I take off my shoes, lie face down, and close my eyes. Beata and Matís proceed to give me a massage that is by turns tender, arousing, rough, funny, and relaxing. I’m fully clothed, and they’re gentle—but crucially, there’s no rule against getting turned on. To prove this, vibrators, rope, and masks are scattered around the space for those who want to experiment further. I purr, laugh, wriggle, and groan as I’m cradled, gently pounded, and stroked. I open my eyes; they turn on the tape recorder and ask me what the session brought up for me.
There I am, a 63-year-old man, relaxed and radiant, lounging next to a young man and woman I like and trust, with whom I have absolutely no reason to feel self-conscious. I am among friendly strangers in a foreign country, with no need to hide or prove anything. I find the words tumbling out, and what follows is based on what we talk about.
First, a memory from my boyhood that has been on my mind: when I was given another unexpected massage, this one by a man 20 years older than me. It was 1970. I met him at an open-air concert in a London park, and we talked—as everyone seemed to do all the time back then—about spiritual enlightenment and personal liberation. He invited me back to his small upstairs apartment, which was filled with books on Eastern mystics, poetry, therapeutic practices, psychedelics, and the like. After much talk about liberating psychic energy and Wilhelm Reich’s intensely physical form of therapy, he convinced me to strip naked for what he called a bio-energetic massage—at the end of which he, too, was naked. Afterward, he pulled me onto his bed and clumsily and briefly groped my genitals. I walked home, unsure whether I had been liberated or abused. I was 15.
At the time, I felt I’d handled this experience pretty well. The man—an eccentric local poet—didn’t scare me. He giggled a lot, was self-deprecating and silly—like a big kid, really—but a needy and insidious one who soon befriended my mom and would drop by for tea and cookies when I came home from school. I was excited to have met someone connected to the literary and philosophical circles that fascinated me so much; I was eager for alternative adult experiences of just about any kind, and I knew that now he’d found out how young I was, he wouldn’t dare touch me like that again.
For a moment I wondered whether letting him touch me at all meant I was gay, but I decided it didn’t. After all, I found this man’s flabby, hairy body deeply unattractive. In those days, homosexuality was widely demonized but covertly tolerated in places such as the boys’ school I attended. Parents also took it for granted that male teachers might have some kind of carnal interest in their students. Although I knew it wasn’t sinful to be homosexual, the fear of being “queer” loomed over growing boys, fueled by constant jokes and taunts. Whether or not I was gay worried me far more than whether I had been illegally preyed upon. And there was no way I would have even dreamed of telling my liberal parents about anything like this. I knew I was under the legal age of consent, but that law seemed more like a restriction on burgeoning desire than a reassuring protection against pedophiles. The establishment hated sexual activity of all forms, and I was anti-establishment. The generation gap was an absolute reality back then.
Recently, I came across an obituary online for this “lovable eccentric bard.” In a comment below the article, one man angrily accused the deceased of being a serial abuser who preyed on innocent young men, and recounted his own story, which was very similar to mine. All these years later, for the first time, I allowed myself to think of my younger self as a victim. And I was overwhelmed by a flood of protective feelings for that teenage boy, alarmed by the weight of moral responsibility I’d shouldered at the time, trying to justify to myself what had happened while keeping it secret from my parents. The obituary led me to wonder how that encounter might have damaged me. Abuse often leads to hypersexuality, defined as a “dysfunctional preoccupation with sexual fantasy.” Did I have that? Didn’t we all? Weren’t we all messed up by society’s attitudes toward sex? There were plenty of media role models encouraging obsessive male sexual appetite, from James Bond to Benny Hill.
For a truly shocking glimpse into the attitudes my generation grew up with, just listen to those mainstream BBC sitcoms they replay on BBC Radio 4 Extra: shows like*Doctor in the House*, *Marriage Lines*, *Not In Front of the Children*…Wives conspire to trick their domineering husbands into doing their bidding through lies and flattery. Sexy women abound, but their male writers fail to give them even minimally coherent characters. Men cheerfully threaten to give their children and their wives “a good hiding.” Mocking homosexuals and the absurd harassment of women were the norm. Rampant, if clumsy, male lust was permeated by a fear of women and of true eroticism.
Friends who suffered serious abuse growing up find it hard to pinpoint exactly how those events have affected their lives. Some never fully recover; others manage to move on. I didn’t think I had anything to get over. I went on to lose my virginity at 16 with a girl who seemed just as eager to shed her innocence and move on to adulthood, then had a string of girlfriends—some awkward one-night stands, some heart-wrenching romantic longings, some angst-ridden love affairs—which gradually led to my involvement with 1980s sexual politics, anti-sexist men’s groups, communal living, and an open relationship with the woman I’ve loved ever since—with whom I have two children and now three grandchildren.
At Schmiede, I tell my new polyamorous and pansexual friends that in my twenties I also had a few sexual encounters with men. I really enjoyed those experiences but didn’t crave more. Since then, I’ve come to think of myself as straight rather than bi. Might I have identified differently in less homophobic times? I don’t know. I stopped after an encounter with an older, married man for whom our exploratory relationship clearly meant far more than it did to me.
In the 1980s, my partner worked for the local Rape Crisis Center; she was part of a women’s consciousness-raising group, and I started a Men’s Sexuality Group that met weekly to discuss topics such as masturbation, fantasies, monogamy, and its alternatives. One evening, a visitor to the group began talking about the sexy games he engaged in with his girlfriend and described them in a way that became quite arousing. We, who fearlessly and earnestly critiqued the patriarchy, became uncomfortable when faced with what was actually erotic. The Women’s Movement at the time urged women to explore their bodies and themselves, to be whoever they wanted to be—unless this involved behaviors and desires that were deemed unfeminist remnants of sexist conditioning.
I’m married to the woman with whom I was in an open relationship back then. At the time, we both idealistically rejected monogamy as a patriarchal trap. Now we’re mutually monogamous, but a key to the long-term success of our relationship has been our willingness to accept that no single person can fulfill all of another person’s needs. I also can’t ignore the toxic aspect of the secret sexual scorecard I kept in my head, which led me—rather than her—to keep seeking out flings.
After the hippie “free love” of the 1970s and feminist experiments in non-monogamy in the 1980s, the tide turned in the 1990s, and any sexual activity outside of conventional couples tended to be dismissed as “cheating.” More recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in open marriage and polyamory. Podcaster and therapistEsther Perelargues that desire “draws its powerful pleasure from fascination with the hidden, the mysterious, and the suggestive.” How can married couples be expected to keep wanting what they already have? “When we validate each other’s freedom within the relationship, we may be less inclined to go look for it elsewhere,” she writes.
On the mattress at Schmiede, I can easily talk about personal fantasies and kinks, which, in the bright light of that warm Austrian day, seem utterly predictable for a middle-class Englishman of my generation. In this setting, they even seem downright pleasurable. Although my partner and I enjoy similar turn-ons, that pervasive myth about sexual desire being a fundamentally male drive persists. I sometimes feel as if I’ve shouldered the moral responsibility for our fantasy playground.
Luhmen d’Arc and I discuss how, although it’s great to affirm the joy of consensual sexual play and to recognize the difference between sensual spanking and genuine pain, there is still something problematic about the common desire to tie someone up or be tied up, to hit or be hit. Of course, a fantasy isn’t reality—except that, when acted out, it sort of is. I’m reassured to know that people who run flogging and bondage workshops for a living share these concerns.
Lying on the floor in the Salt Works, I talk about getting older, and how, for me, the elements of sexuality are separating in an unsettling yet stimulating way. Once upon a time, fantasy, attraction, arousal, flirtation, foreplay, and consummation were all part of a single, seamless erotic flow. Now there’s a gap in between. Desire doesn’t necessarily lead to an erection. Beata suggests that, as time goes by, male pleasure may come to resemble women’s—less clearly discernible, more subtle, and more responsive.
I tell Beata and Matís that in my fifties I developed a mild form of a condition called Peyronie’s disease, which causes a hard plaque to form in the penis, bending the shaft and making penetration difficult. It also numbs sensation, but that’s not something people talk about much, even though the tingling in one’s genitals is, when it comes down to it, pretty vital to one’s sense of sexuality. Joints get stiffer, bodies less perky and supple; I feel less sensation in my penis during penetration, and my partner finds it hard to climax without penetration. But we make it work; in fact, our sex life now is a wonderful blend of tried-and-true positions mixed with familiar turn-ons and new fantasies to keep things exciting. I love our lovemaking in later life more than I ever would have believed.
And I remain interested in sex as a topic beyond simply wanting to have it. During my weekly trip to the gym back home in London, I’ve been listening (on headphones) to Dan Savage’s Lovecast , in which this charismatic gay advice columnist responds to calls from people with every kind of kink, orientation, and polyamorous preference. Savage approaches them with a level head and a clear moral framework. He’s adamant about consent and respect, while embracing every kind of desire with a sex-positive attitude. His worldview is refreshing for someone raised at a time when so much sexual discovery seemed to inevitably stem from illicit and furtive fumbling.
As my session with luhmen d’arc draws to a close, Matís points out that I’ve used the word “guilt” a lot in our conversation. I wonder again if that early experience with the predatory poet contributed to a sense of the sexual as a compelling but dark space—and a lonely one. In William Blake’s poem, hisGarden of Lovehas “thou shalt not” written over the door, and priests in black robes “binding my joys and desires with briars.” My garden is also overgrown and tangled, but thanks to Beata and Matís, I’m pruning it to let in more light.
We end with hugs and a reminder that, while it may not be easy or appropriate to share all thoughts and feelings on the topic, my sexuality is not a hidden, shameful secret but a vital and positive part of who I am. I leave my session at Schmiede feeling an incredible weight lifted from my shoulders, a sense of release unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced. The combination of physical well-being, therapeutic disclosure, and intellectual engagement is overwhelming. I’m also thrilled when Beata and Matís say they found it fascinating to explore with me the differences between sexual politics then and now.
Since the interview, I’ve been thinking that I’d love to talk to more older people about what sexuality means to them. By that, I don’t mean whether, with whom, or how often they do it, or if and when they watch other people doing it on the ubiquitous screens. As one online definition puts it, “sexuality is about all your sexual feelings, thoughts, attractions, emotions, and behaviors.” As I enter my twilight years, I’m adding it to the list of essentials for my self-esteem and quality of life—things I demand the right to hold onto forever. We must refuse to let our sexuality be “othered” away by younger people who can’t handle the idea of sexual desire among the wrinkled.
Pleasure activist Adrienne Maree Brown calls on all those marginalized by society due to gender, race, age, and disability to revel in self-pleasure. Evidence suggests that people lacking money and/or status—whose bodies do not conform to societal norms—in fact, those most in need of free, safe, solo forms of sensual joy—are less likely to give themselves orgasms than privileged, straight, white male masturbators. What a waste.
Sexuality is a word that sounds wholesome but encompasses much that is still shrouded in embarrassment. Moral panic over access to online erotica dominates the current debate about desire, but we need to frame a much more profound conversation about real human feelings. What can and should sexuality mean to women, men, and everyone in between, as we grow up and grow older? Sex isn’t a product to be consumed but a deep-seated energy that flows through all stages of life. And yet we don’t hear older sexuality described as a positive attribute, only as a lack: of firmness, of wetness, of desire and desirability, of frequency—and of tact in broaching the topic at all.
As we grow older, do we lose interest in sex, or are we shamed into pretending to? Over time, sex changes; I feared it might fade away, but after my session at the Salt Works, I’m beginning to think it’s evolving into something far more interesting. Beyond the relentless drive to get it up, in, and on, sexuality remains a rich and enduring part of being human and alive.
Chris Ifso, October 2019
Chris Ifso is a writer of fiction, songs, and transmedia, and the author of *WhatDidn’t Quite*, a novel of Nearlyology.
His website is www.nearlyology.net.
