To Lose It

by Naomi Gordon-Loebl

Winner, Ray Ventre Memorial Nonfiction Prize
selected by Sarah Minor

The first time my girlfriend fucked me, I hadn’t been penetrated in five years. The time five years ago was a one-off, a loopy ten-minute experiment that was both brief and unremarkable, and before that it had been an additional nine years, which means if I count by the spirit rather than the letter of the law, the first time my girlfriend fucked me, I had not been penetrated in fourteen years. And I had never enjoyed it.

The way it came about was, like the experiment of five years ago, unremarkable. We were in my bed; we’d had a couple drinks. She was on top of me, I remember that. There were other things in the bed: a vibrator, a strap-on, which I’d had in my mouth earlier but had no intention of receiving anywhere else. “You should fuck me,” I said, and it arrived just like a short sentence in the middle of a paragraph, delivered with such little fanfare that she could’ve missed it if not for the fact that it was perhaps the most unexpected request I could’ve made. Just like I know the sun comes up and goes down every day, I had said to her weeks earlier. That’s how sure I am that I have no interest in it.

“You...want me to fuck you?” she asked, certain that she must have misunderstood. And then, about six times: “Are you sure?”

I was sure, and even more sure knowing that I was lying beneath someone who knew when to ask the same question more than once. We had only known each other for three weeks. She fucked me. And then, many things I thought I knew about myself began to change.

…

I can barely remember the times I’ve been penetrated. The images appear in my head blurry and uncertain, like something I might have dreamed, or a snippet of a movie I saw a very long time ago. I know from my own psychoeducation that this might be a result of disassociation: the tendency to leave our bodies when something that is too difficult to be present for is happening. This feels overly clinical, and also unfair to my previous partners, who were all caring, and good, and concerned with my comfort. I was always in the room with them; but it is true that I felt distinct from the part of me they were touching—like I was on one rowboat, and my bottom half was on another. Perhaps this is why the memories didn’t take; perhaps my bottom half has some other recording, bobbing in a lake somewhere.

I texted my college girlfriend recently to ask when she stopped penetrating me. “Late sophomore year,” she said. Fourteen years. It was after we’d gone to a conference, she reminded me, where I’d spent the weekend with other transmasculine people from around the country. I’d been shy, too self-conscious and full of fear to talk to anyone, but I made one friend: a guy my girlfriend had met when they were the only two people smoking at the conference. She brought him back from their cigarette break to introduce me. It was a small gesture that mirrored her thoughtfulness in the years that followed. When, after the conference, I realized that penetration was something I could choose to opt out of—that there was language for this, a framework, another way I could be—she embraced the shift  and never hesitated. I realize, texting with her now, that her care extends to the fact that she is my history-keeper; memories I have lost to the other rowboat live on in her brain.

What did penetration feel like to me in the before-times? I have tried to answer this question, tried to swim into those dark dorm rooms with the twin extra-long beds, my childhood bedroom where I spent nights with my high school girlfriend when she came to visit from Westchester. At best, I remember it feeling neutral—like a hand pressing on my leg, the tightness of a blood pressure cuff as it inflates around my arm. Not painful, but not erotic at all. No connection between the part of me that is getting fucked and the part of me that gets warm when a mouth makes contact with my neck. This was most of my experience of penetration: something neither pleasant nor unpleasant to get through.

Sometimes it was worse: a feeling of squirminess, like someone was tickling me, but in a context that turned my stomach. I’m extremely ticklish; as a child, my siblings could just wiggle their fingers at me and I’d explode into miserable, uncomfortable laughter. I used to think ticklishness was an inevitable part of sex; an ill-timed hand on my hip, a kiss in the wrong place, and the same unbearable tingle would spread through my body. I realized recently that I haven’t felt ticklish during sex in a long time.

…

“If you’re exclusively a top we would probably not be traditionally compatible,” came the message on the dating app. “But if you want a hot makeout and cuddle I’m down to be big spoon.” The note closed with an emoji: the pink-manicured fingernails.

The woman who sent the message was short, with dark hair down to her ass and tattoos of naked girls and barbed wire on both of her arms. She had a tongue ring. She was holding a black cat and eating a slice of pizza in one of her photos. In another, a drop of spit stretched down from her lips, soon to land on the person who was presumably taking the picture. Her profile, like mine, was brief—but like mine, it emphasized a particular word: “top.” Topping (and its other half, bottoming) is one of those words that means different things to different people, and yet we use it often without specifying which definition we intend. For some queer people, the top is simply and purely the person who penetrates their partner. For others, the top is the “doer”—the person who is doing the touching, fucking, licking, sucking—and the bott om is the receiver. And for others still, top refers not to a specific action but a power dynamic: the top is the person in control.

When I met Ashley, I had been a top in all senses of the word for the vast majority of the time I’d been having sex. I liked the way I felt in my skin when I was in charge. Having someone beneath me, trusting me completely to take responsibility for their unarmored body, turned me on. The sex I had throughout my twenties and early thirties was mostly like this: me, fucking someone else with a cock or a finger or a fist, taking them into my mouth, directing them when to lay back and when to flip over. When I was with someone submissive, I was more dominant—partners who wanted me to hold them down, hurt them, make them feel weightless in their lack of control. I loved that. But I liked it, too, when topping manifested more simply: I was the one who was doing the fucking.

I studied the message from the woman with the black cat. I had no problem with a hot makeout with a hot person. We could figure the top thing out down the road. What did I have to lose? I told her I was in, and a week later we met at a bar in the East Village on one of the coldest days of winter. It was the height of a pandemic that had forced all of us outside even in the most unlikely of circumstances—like having drinks in mid-January—so we sat in the bar’s makeshift outdoor seating: a long and narrow shack, divided into individual booths, each one with a glowing space heater suspended above the table. We ordered: me whiskey, her tequila. Last call was soon, so we made them doubles. We fought over the bill; I won. At her apartment, true to our initial exchange, we spent the night making out and wrestling for control. “Like one long night of edging,” I told my friends later. The date had made it clear that we were indeed not “traditionally compatible”: I wanted to fuck her, she wanted to fuck me, and we had batt led all night over it. But it had also made clear that neither of us was ready to give up on the possibility. I had never made out with someone who was so desperate to overpower me. She pinned me on her bed and bit my neck; I was bruised the next day, my first hickey in years. At one point, she clocked me on the side of the head, and I understood then why they call it seeing stars—as I discovered, it’s one of those rare idioms that turns out to be literal. But the tug of war between us, however unfamiliar, was not unwelcome. We planned a second date.

…

My sister and her partner have a sixty-pound pitbull, Diva. She’s a brilliantly trained dog: she’ll roll over, play dead, bow, shake with her left paw, shake with her right paw. She’ll even army crawl. Like any intelligent soldier, though, sometimes she tests the limits. She pulls on walks when she knows she’s not supposed to. Protecting my sister, she lunges in the direction of other dogs. My sister’s partner explains it this way: in order to feel safe, she needs to know that someone is in charge. That the person on the other end of the leash is capable, powerful enough to protect both her and themselves. If she feels protected—if she trusts the strength of the human in control—then she can give in, submit, place herself in the hands of another being, knowing that she will be kept safe.

I thought of this description of submission often in the days after Ashley first fucked me. Why had I asked her for it that night in my bed, completely unpremeditated? What was it about Ashley? I am a person who is obsessed with control; it should be clear by now that I am not impulsive. And yet something had moved me in that moment, compelled me to ask for something I had never wanted. A new channel had been laid, some neural pathway rerouted. The sex was good in a way that I did not think, but feel. In bed with this relative stranger, several inches shorter than me and 105 pounds on the tail-end of a large dinner, I felt like I could finally stop pulling.

…

“What do you call the animal that, finding the hunter, offers itself to be eaten?” writes Ocean Vuong in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

A martyr? A weakling? No, a beast gaining the rare agency to stop…

Because submission, I soon learned, was also a kind of power. To be inside of pleasure, Trevor needed me…I lower myself. I put him in my mouth, to the base, and peer up at him, my eyes a place he might flourish. After a while, it is the cocksucker who moves. And he follows, when I sway this way he swerves along. And I look up at him as if looking at a kite, his entire body tied to the teetering world of my head.

I showed the passage to my last girlfriend before Ashley. Sex with her was a little like playing in a puppy pile, and I mean that in the best way. Her interest was not in power, not in topping or in bottoming, but in pleasure. We rolled over and under each other, seeking only what felt good. It felt light; it felt easy; it felt oddly innocent for sex. Are you ever into power? I asked her. Like topping, bottoming? Does that turn you on? She was impatient with the language. I like it all, she said. Why call it anything?

She was right, of course. Why call it anything, especially when none of us can agree on what “anything” means? And yet there was something about that image: the person on his knees, drawing his partner along like a kite. When I sway this way he swerves along. It did not occur to me until long after I first read the passage that I might have been equally imagining myself as the kiteflier and the kite.

…

I’m embarrassed to admit that despite every queer theory text I ever ingested, every feminist meeting and action I attended and organized, every scathing lecture I ever delivered on the inherent misogyny of associating penetration with feminization, one of the reasons I found penetration triggering was that it made me feel gendered—and in particular, gendered as a girl. Seeing my partner as different from me was vital if I were to maintain any hope of not disappearing during sex. Penetration was something I did to my femme partners. Penetration was something that distinguished us. When partners penetrated me, I felt an uncomfortable mirror between our bodies. Suddenly, I felt no different from the person I was in bed with. And since the people I was in bed with were girls, that meant I was a girl, too.

The year after I graduated college, I got the hood of my clit pierced. The shop was in the East Village, on Second Avenue—as it turned out, just one long block from Ashley’s apartment, where I wouldn’t arrive until some twelve years later. Time is funny that way; how could I have known how differently I would feel about my body, twelve years into the future, just a block from this piercing studio? How could I have known that one day, twelve years from then, I’d find myself biking past this exact corner on a Sunday morning, my recently fisted crotch tender against the bike seat?

On the day I got pierced, I lay on my back as a woman named Autumn quickly pushed a needle through my hood. It was only a pinch, no more; the easiest, most painless piercing I ever had. I peeked at it in the bathroom; it already felt different. Th is clit did not look like my partners’ bodies anymore. This clit, pierced, marked, metal, was mine.

Body mod folk wisdom holds that clitoral hood piercings are among the fastest piercings to heal. The skin is thin and the area’s blood supply is plentiful. The pain lasted only a day or two, but I almost wished it would stick around, a welcome reminder of the change my body had undergone. Whenever I pulled my boxers down and saw it, pleasure surged upwards, a reversal of its usual path. This new me was still there; it wasn’t going anywhere. For once, the anchor that kept me tethered to my body didn’t feel like a tenuous series of mental gymnastics that could slip from my grasp at any moment. Th is anchor was made from stainless steel. It was unmistakable. I could see it, and so could anyone else who looked at me with no clothes on.

A friend took a photo of me standing outside the studio afterwards. My hair is scruffy, cut in a way I haven’t kept it in years. I’m wearing a burgundy shirt I don’t even own anymore; the leather jacket in the picture long ago fell apart. It could be any other photo of me from that time, looking down, smiling at some joke that the person behind the camera has made. Except it is not any other photo—a shift  has happened, and I recognize the peace on my face. In a way, it is the beginning of what has brought me here now.

…

One night, Ashley and I ran out of ice. By then, we were regularly topping each other. We frequently found ourselves alternating, though we told ourselves it was not so rigid; we topped each other based on the mood we were in, rather than who had topped the other last. Still, it often turned out that I fucked her, then the next night she fucked me, control a natural ball traveling back and forth between us like a dirty game of catch.

This particular night, Ashley had topped me. The sex on those nights was like no other I’d ever had. My job was not to discern what felt best for her, to fuck her until my fingers cramped, and then keep going. My job, in fact, was no job at all. Sometimes she grabbed onto my head and I found myself literally in her hands. I had nothing to do; I had nothing to give; I felt filled, overwhelmed, overcome. Rather than floating away from my body and down onto Houston Street, I felt burned into it; I could never leave the bed as long as she held me there. Sweat sometimes soaked her long hair so thoroughly that it looked like she’d been caught in the rain. I knew what she was feeling: exhaustion, yes, but an inextinguishable will to keep going. She was holding me down, but she was also serving me. My eyes a place she might flourish.

After we finished, a drink; but the bag of ice in the freezer was empty.

“I’ll go,” I said from my place on the mattress, unmoved from the moment she had rolled off of me.

“I will!” she said. She closed the freezer and began to search for her wallet and keys.

“I want to go,” I said. “Just let me go.”

“NO. I’M GOING.”

We debated, me trying to get up from the bed and her pushing me back down easily. In the end, she won. There was no way I could have gone, anyway. I felt empty in the most pleasant way, like something had been unloaded from me and I was weak with the unburdening. While she was gone, I lay on my back, aware of nothing but the sweaty sheet beneath me, not even bothering to reach for my phone. I have always been a person who loves to be tired; exhaustion quiets the busywork in my brain. In that moment, on the bed, as Ashley went for ice, nothing sounded off inside me. I heard only a low, calming buzz.

When Ashley returned, she told me she’d sprinted the few blocks to the bodega.

“I just felt so energized,” she said. “Like I could run forever. Topping makes me feel that way.”

“You should’ve let me go,” I said. I knew it was ridiculous. But still.

“Are you kidding? You just got fucked for an hour. You could barely move.”

She wasn’t wrong. But still.

“I’ve never been the person who lays there while the other person goes to get ice,” I said.

“Same.”

“I’ve always been the person to go get things. It’s just my job. I like being the person to do things.”

“Same!”

“Okay, but it’s uncomfortable for me,” I said.

“Get used to it.”

…

Useful. Merriam-Webster defines it as 1) serviceable for an end or purpose 2) of a valuable or productive kind.

Useful: The feeling you have aft er you take a woman home from a cocktail bar and make her come in her apartment filled with plants and beautiful art. On your ride home, she texts you—“Okay, so when are we doing that again?”—and the sensation that washes over you is not unlike the one you experience when your boss compliments your work. You can relax now. You can eat cheese fries in bed and watch a terrible Netflix show. A mutual friend tells you, weeks later, that the woman is confused by your distance. “She says you had mind-blowing sex,” the friend says. “She doesn’t understand why you’re not up her ass trying to hang out again.” You feel bad, and you also wonder what it’s like to experience sex as “mind-blowing.” Useful: A way of feeling valuable, irreplaceable.

…

Ashley and I started a “question list”—a shared note in our phones that we both regularly added to. Late at night we’d sit on the floor of her kitchen— somehow we always found ourselves there, despite the counters, despite the chairs—and take turns asking. What did you want to be when you grew up as a kid? What do you pick up at the grocery store, carry around with you, and always end up putting back? What’s the thing you regret most in your life? How did you celebrate your birthday when you were little? What do you think is your grossest habit? What did you think of me when we met?

“What’s your top psychology?” Ashley asked me one night, reading from her most recent addition to the list.

“My top psychology?”

“Yeah,” she said. “You know…why are you a top?”

I had been dreading this question, without knowing it was coming. Because: I had been thinking about it. Bottoming had scrambled my entire sexual identity, sent a blizzard of contradictions into a space that previously been so empty, so clear. I liked bottoming, there was no doubt about that. I liked the feeling of fullness when Ashley had her whole hand inside me, liked the spot she managed to find, about three inches in, that intensified my orgasms—a place my previous partners had tried to touch but which had felt numb in the past, perhaps because any wires between my brain and my lower half had been severed for most of my life. I even liked, and this was a different kind of pleasure but nonetheless a related one, the feeling of being owned by her—the sense that she was using me.

If I liked bottoming, then what did I like about topping? Sometimes, of course, topping also led to physical sensations of pleasure—there was a particular way I could position my cock against myself that would make me come almost instantly when fucking someone, and there was no question that going down on my partners made me wet. And yet: most of the time when I topped, I did not have an orgasm. In addition to the disorientation of giving up my identity as a pure top, bottoming had introduced a new discomfort to my life: the feeling that by laying there and allowing myself to get fucked, allowing myself to be the one in the room who was coming, I was being selfish. Topping, despite its possible appearance as a self-serving act, never made me feel that way. This, after all, is where the term “service top,” a phrase I have always identified with, comes from: the person who tops for the purpose of making their partner feel good.

“I think I like feeling like I’m good at something,” I told Ashley. “Good at fucking someone, good at making them come, good at being a top. It turns me on.”

“Sure…but I mean, we all like feeling good at something, right? Who doesn’t?”

She had me there. So why was I a top?

“I think I can’t really eroticize my own body because I feel so disconnected from it.” I could not say where the words had come from, but I knew as they left my mouth that they were true. “So the next best thing is to eroticize what it can do.”

…

Useful: Something you can be as either a top or a bottom, depending on who wants to use you.

…

Which worried me—because what, I began to wonder as the months wore on, if bottoming was just another way of feeling good at something? Of eroticizing what I could do? Ashley always looked content—blissed out, even—aft er we had sex. But I saw the way she looked at me on the nights when she topped: like I had done something mystical that she didn’t totally understand. “I made the mistake,” she once told me about someone who had broken her heart years earlier, “of meeting the perfect bottom. She could take anything I gave her. It ruined me.”

I could relate. I too felt euphoric, unsteady on my way to the bathroom, after a person had opened their body up to me—after they had taken it all, hand, cock, spit, aft er they had invited me to pour and bore into them. Maybe that was what I liked about it.

Sally Rooney in Normal People:

He likes to get very deep inside her, slowly, until her breathing is loud and hard and she clutches at the pillowcase with one hand. Her body feels so small then and so open. Like this? he says. And she’s nodding her head and maybe punching her hand on the pillow, making little gasps whenever he moves.

I remember reading that passage one night, lying in bed with the puppy piler. I had to stop reading; no one, I thought, had ever described the pleasure of topping so perfectly. When I sway this way he swerves along. There is no feeling, is there, like holding a kite. Or being a kite. Making little gasps whenever he moves. We think of topping and bottoming as opposites: “diametrically different, of a contrary kind.” But maybe they are just two ends of a taut string—each steering the other, each dependent on the other to generate force.

…

Useful: Sometimes after she fucked me, Ashley would lie on her back and tilt her head to the side. She’d lay a hand on my stomach, palm up, and stare at my body like it had just performed some kind of miracle: like she had just watched me heal a cut in someone’s flesh or turn dry feathers into a live, flapping bird. On those nights, something looked like it had been exorcized from her face. Sometimes it felt like something had been exorcized from me too. Maybe we had used each other. Maybe the next time we would too, in reverse. Maybe that was okay.

…

When I touch myself, there are two images that never fail to push me over the edge. One is of a person straddling my face, pressing her clit into my mouth. And the other is of a person also straddling me, but this time it’s my lap. We’re making out and I’m fucking her, my hands on her hips. Sally Rooney: He likes to get very deep inside her.

A close read of my own desires: I love eating pussy. Sure. Why this image specifically? Anyone I’ve ever dated knows my favorite birthday present: to wake up to someone sitting on my face. Ashley would say, Classic bottom behavior, Naomi. You want to get face-fucked.

But I think it’s more complicated than that. There’s my intrinsic desire for the act itself—a desire whose origin I’m grateful to leave to the social constructionists and the essentialists to slug out. Then there’s the position: hand on the back of my head, pressure against my tongue. Like it’s something she needs—like it provides so much pleasure that she can’t help but use my mouth. There it is again: useful. Maybe it stems from my own lacking self worth, but it still makes me come.

And then the second image: I’m topping someone. She’s sitting on my lap. We’re connected everywhere. For all of my tangled loops of inquiry, there is no doubt that from the time I knew what it felt like to be turned on, I wanted to fuck. Th at is the other answer to Ashley’s question, the one that does not yield fruit under interrogation because it is teleological: I am a top because topping is what I like. The hands on the hips are the part that send me. I am in control.

Finally, a third, new image. It shows up on some days: Ashley, gripping my head with both of her hands. Her teeth, bearing down on my shoulder, because whatever is happening to her inside me is too much for her to take— some of that energy must be expelled, somehow. I cannot move—I squirm, and that only turns her on more, opens up the throttle on the energy that has nowhere to go. I let her bite me. I let her make me come. She pins me to myself and it hurts and feels good, all at the same time. I let go.

What turns me on? To be useful, yes, whether using someone or being used. To be in control. And sometimes, now, to lose it.

Naomi Gordon-Loebl is a writer whose work has appeared in Harper’s, Esquire, The New York Times, The Nation, and elsewhere. They are the recipient of residencies and fellowships from the Puffin Foundation, the International Women’s Media Foundation, Lambda Literary, Monson Arts, the Studios at Key West, and the Vermont Studio Center, and they hold an MFA in creative nonfiction from Washington University in St. Louis. They were born, raised, and still live in Brooklyn, where they are the deputy publisher of Jewish Currents magazine.