The radical politics of letting someone take care of you
BY CATHERINE TAAFFE, IMAGE BY MINDY TUCKER
“I love a pillow princess.”
My new lover said it casually, then rolled over and fell asleep.
I stayed awake staring at the ceiling, in the afterglow of possibly the most aligned sexual experience I’d ever had. I’m queer, femme, demisexual. I rarely want someone before I feel an emotional bond with them, and I didn’t know this person that well. I wasn’t certain they were the love of my life. So why did this feel like the first time I wasn’t performing?
As a chronic people pleaser, surrender is not something my body knows how to do. So while my lover, River, a genderqueer masc, slept next to me, I did the only reasonable thing: at 3 a.m., I got on Reddit to determine whether I had accidentally become a pillow princess. A pillow princess, I read, is someone who doesn’t “need to be good at anything sexual,” who just lies there and adds nothing. That’s where I stopped. Feeling the shame rush through my body.
In my twenties, I rarely had an orgasm during sex. It just seemed like another burden to explain to the person I was sleeping with, who at the time was mostly men. Later, I found queer partners, but I often continued the same pattern, pretending to be a switch. It felt selfish not to, rude even. And let’s face it, sometimes I just wanted to experience being naked, being touched, being held, even though it rarely ended in an orgasm. But my hypervigilant body could sense every emotion in the other person, every desire, every need. So it became about them, and in return, I put on a performance. Because here’s the thing: I had been a pro at all things sexual. For most of my adult life, sex was about being desired, not my own pleasure.
I sensed it would take a special kind of partner to undo these patterns. One who was in no rush at all. And that if I ever found them, my body, holding onto so much trauma and control, would react like a floodgate opening for the first time. That maybe it would be gentle and sweet, like crying in someone’s arms. But I didn’t exactly see that happening with a rando from Feeld. So I tucked it away, unable or unwilling to slow down enough to make space for my own pleasure.
Then I met River. We slept together after the second date, which I never do, because the labour of explaining my body to some random person who just wants to get laid always feels too tenuous. This time, they did the explaining. “I don’t like to receive, only to give. I hope that’s okay.” “Why wouldn’t that be okay?” I asked. They explained that some people need the validation of satisfying their partner. But my satisfaction is in you receiving. Hearing those words kind of made me want to cry. Not only because that’s what I’d been longing for, but because I knew immediately that our boundaries were perfectly complementary. We both know what it feels like to be pressured into performing for the other person’s validation, and at this moment, we didn’t have to.
River’s ethics, the actual radical politics of “I’m not going to pressure you to receive to feed my ego, because I don’t want that done to me,” healed the past decade of shitty sex. It introduced the idea of care without extraction: the opposite of the performance economy so many femmes exist in. The conditioning runs deep, and the thought “Am I allowed? Is this selfish?” still enters my mind. But then so does the refusal: fuck it, some people think it’s hot to be with someone who wants to be selfish. And for the first time, lying there, I wasn’t performing for anyone. I was just being held.
You can watch The Only Man Who Won’t Fuck Me at Zoo – Playground 2 from 7 – 30 August (not 17) at 9.50 pm.
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