Dirty socks

The 19th century word for “penis,” in one very well-written red-light district instruction manual for a battalion stationed in Moscow, is “instrument of physiological longing.” Or so is my best translation.

“It,” the document states, “is supposed to be examined right before and after a visit to a brothel by a physician to ensure continuing health of the soldiers.” Women were examined too and held close to ensure no one “used” them in the period between the examination and the military’s arrival.

I learnt that from a guided tour of the 19th century Moscow red-light district on a Saturday morning. Prostitution was legal and regulated then. It was snowing and my feet were cold.

There were three official levels of brothels. First – for high ranking men in power. They preferred skinny foreign ladies from the nearby lands, Poland, Latvia… Second level – for merchants who loved BBW. And the third – for everyone else, including indentured servants. They got what they got.

I have never actually seen a single Russian “instrument of physiological longing” in my life despite having lived there for quite some time. I got poked at by two, on two different occasions, with my permission. And by one more on a bus, when I was a teenager, without. I never took a peek at any of them. One felt crooked. I always wondered about that.

The skinny ladies were required to only command very basic Russian so they couldn't understand high-powered conversations that would intentionally or unintentionally erupt in their presence.

When I was in a hospital once, a much older Russian woman, who was there for a surgery related to, as they say, some woman's business, told me about her annoyance with the complicated maintenance of all those organs in a woman's body down there, and with her husband's needs and his snot, aka his semen. It sounded as if she was complaining about his dirty socks. She was tired. She was kinda done. It filled me with sorrow I couldn't understand.

There were group sessions in level one brothels in big rooms surrounded by mirrors. One could pay to participate or to watch.

When I started posing nude, after coming to the US, I accidentally got over my body insecurity. I had an ovarian cyst by then, the one I'd be later in a hospital back in Russia for, and it made my tummy look like I had swallowed a giant ball. Or so it seemed to me from above. Posing for painters, I didn't have enough energy both to worry about what my body looked like to someone AND to hold a pose for a prolonged period of time so I dropped one of them. Due to my strong work ethic at the time, it was the body that got dropped.

Sex with my lover was very painful with an ovarian cyst. But my work ethic helped again.

Women in level three brothels served 32 men a day. To be able to do that, they would drink in the morning to disassociate.

When I started learning about sacred sexuality, I brought the woman I studied with flowers and cried.

I tried to think of a less cheesy word than “sacred” but “divine” sounded even worse.

Pooping dog

At the time when I didn't know anything about anything, I came across two words: “relaxed sexuality.” There was no definition or much context. They were just offhandedly mentioned together in an article about something else entirely.

Google had nothing to say about it then. And thinking about “relaxed sexuality” eventually led to a dead end, as I had never actually felt at ease in a sexual context, on the inside, and didn't quite know what to search for.

So when I was getting ready for my first one-person show and still gathering “material,” I sat everyone present at an informal work-in-progress sharing in a circle and asked what they thought or felt when they heard “relaxed sexuality.”

Honestly, the main reason I did that was because I was too scared to show more developed parts of my show for fear of criticism. Doing “a survey” with the word “sex” in it instead felt potentially more immediately gratifying.

I was mostly interested in the first reactions – physical, emotional, mental.

Relaxed sexuality –

Someone said the muscle near her pubic bone went “Ahhhh.” Someone else said: “I want that.” There was a person who mentioned something about “the comfort of being the person you are.”

“Cuddling with a friend or a lover.”

“So I wake up in the morning, roll over to my lover, we have sex and then fall back asleep.”

“There is no goal.”

“Not this, not that, beyond definition.”

“A child is looking at poop coming out of a small dog's ass. A dog's tail is horizontal and trembling a little along with the ass. Poop's slowly coming out. A child is not disgusted by it.”

“I could talk or I could fall asleep. Both are equally good.”

Later, for the show, I physicalized all of the responses. I wiggled on the floor in sluggish pleasure for one bit, sat Buddha-still for another, laughed and cried at the same time (as per this cool acting exercise), and became a dog on all fours by the end. There were some silent parts, like the one where I demonstrated my neck releasing with my back to the audience, and an improvised moment as a cool Man’s Man searching for words to describe a great night with a lady friend, stumbling around, his fingers suddenly transforming from making a “let's rock” gesture to moving like ocean waves and flying birds.

The irony of performing “relaxed sexuality” doesn't escape me.

At the time when I didn't know anything about anything, I shared a bed with a boy for the first time. The bed was very narrow and the boy was very eager. That's all I remember really. It's a blur. It feels like the long gone past. Like something that happened in the 11th century and to someone else. Except for this one moment that is so clear sometimes I think I invented it. When a blanket slid off of me during the night, and I tried, and failed, as hard as I could to wake myself up, on the inside, to move, to make myself warmer, a body next to me rose up and very carefully, so as not to wake me, pulled the blanket over me. Then quietly went back to sleep.

A dog was pooping somewhere in the world.