Free Future Sex by Emily Witt

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    Lunch was a relieffrom the frenetic atmosphere of a room where everyone was talking about sex. I waited until my neighbor sat down with his beer then chose a seat on the other side of the room. When we arrived back at the workshop, we were all much calmer. Alisha and Rob led a discussion about the morning’s events. Suddenly Nicole stood up from her seat in the back row and came to the front. She had changed costume,and was now wearing jeans and a draping, oatmeal-colored cowl-neck sweater. She was worried, she said, that the energy had gone out of the room. She lamented that we had all returned to our usual, comfortable state of sexual repression. This was true. I felt much more relaxed. Nicole said this was a mistake. “A group of people gets very uncomfortable when things get hot,” she said. “This practiceis necessarily uncomfortable.” So before we proceeded, she asked us to go around the room and talk about our feelings some more. “The whole thing is for each person in this room to become who they are,” she announced. “The soul isn’t just connected to the heart, it’s connected to cocks and pussies.”
    We continued going around the room, sharing our feelings, Nicole periodically stopping to interrogatepeople further. A young olive-skinned man said that he loved women but felt like a different person when he was having sex. She stopped him. “Are you Italian?” she asked. He was, he said. She looked at him thoughtfully.
    “Women love to fuck,” she told him. “They have no desire deeper than to devour you.” I had started taking notes again, but at this I stopped. Her eyes now scanned the room andrested on me. “What?” she asked. “You look skeptical.”
    I admitted that as interested as I was in being in a room with so much openly expressed desire, I was feeling hemmed in by it. I said I guessed I liked to have more control about who I could be sexual with, and that unwanted advances made me anxious. As much as I might “love to fuck,” it was usually only true for one guy out of several hundred,and sexual interest from the rest bothered me.
    In response to this, Nicole told a story about a guy who was leaving lascivious comments on her website. Every day, the man wrote to her how much he wanted to fuck her, about all the nasty things that he would do to her. She ignored him for a while, but then finally confronted him, asked him for his number, texted him, and said, “Okay, let’s do this.Come on over.”
    Nothing. He did not respond. She had proven herself bigger than his desire. By inviting rather than repelling this man, she had put herself in a position of power over him. Women, she explained, tend to receive sexual desire with anxiety. When Nicole walks into a room and perceives someone’s sexual interest directed her way, she now internally acknowledges it instead of pretendingto be unaware of it or doing everything possible to diminish it. She monitors the response of her body, specifically her genitals, to the other people in the room. She will even talk about this in speeches: “At all times there isn’t a moment when I’m awake that my ambient attention isn’t anchored to my genitals,” she said in a video I later watched online. “I can tell you at any moment—not thatyou’re going to ask—what’s happening in my genitals. Right now my genitals are slightly swollen, they’re switched out a little bit, it feels like there’s a light layer, almost of like sweat or perspiration, it feels really warm and there’s a buzzing around my introitus. At any moment I keep my attention there, and if you keep your attention there you stay grounded with what’s happening. If you cankeep your attention located on the most intense domain of the body, then nothing out here matters.” Now, as a mental exercise, she makes a point of identifying who in the room she “wants to fuck.”
    This statement offended my propriety.