On Sex, Flirting and Mind-Mapping

Posted on October 23, 2006.

Mindmapping is a way of structuring information in a non-linear way beginning with a seed idea. I’ve always advocated it cause I think in streams of consciousness and associations, in simultaneous threads of thought. Sometimes I hate that a conversation thread can only follow one. But if you pick up on a “string” I believe it eventually unravels to the core of the whole fabric. The seed. The unsaid. The center, The origin, The trauma. Mindmapping simulates how the unconscious works.

I discovered in the mind-mapping workshop we held in ISIS that I have a
serial killer mind. No, just kidding. That’s just what my boss told me
‘cause the mindmaps that I do are so much more complicated than
everyone else’s. While others had kiddie drawings of schools, spirals,
sunshine trees and little boats, mine was filled to the brim with
though balloons. Apparently, people do not always think in storms and
explosions of words.

“Lit person ka talaga,” she added. Words only give birth to more words. The eternal deferral. The never enough. The almost but not quite. And “Desire is like Language” Butler says.

It only begets more desire. “It is infinitely insatiable precisely because it depends on the suspension of pleasure; of being at pleasures’ opposite end.”

In the workshop, a beach short of being a retreat-seminar, I also discovered that people at work think I am a flirt. (2x!) A Flirt!? I mean sure, I meet tons of lesbians in exclusive parties and cyberspace when I campaign, but I swear, I do it with a one-track mind. I do it for advocacy. And in the sense that advocacy involves persuasion and persuasion often involves a little charm, yes I agree. I do flirt. But I do not tease. I do not promise something I can’t deliver. My material promises lies in political action, not bodily seduction.

Another belief that people like harboring about homosexuals is that we are always horny and sex hungry. I am neither confirming nor denying that. It’s true though that we’re often a lot more honest and comfortable about our bodies. Were certainly better at comparative anatomy. (Logic from "The L word" why we’re quite dangerous that way: “We know and own the same ‘equipment’ as our lovers.”)

And sure, I like the occasional sexual innuendo now and then, but it certainly doesn’t equate to being an animal that can’t curb its instincts. Besides, try spending a day in a room full of gay men. You’d master the art of making even the most innocent sentences sound dirty too. “Hey, what would you like to eat, I mean, food?”
“I love fried tomatoes.”
“Oh my, what nice big shoes you have!”
“Is she coming? No? Perhaps she was distracted? Maybe you should try harder…”

Recently, I’ve faced a very important crossroad/s. I had to choose between effortless, meaningless pleasure or effortful uncertainty with possible consequences of prolonged celibacy. And call it stupid or call it the romantic-masochist in me, but I saw the promising bed of opportunity, and it just didn’t call to me. I felt no urge to ruffle it. I guess I’m just not the type that would engage in something that is purely surface-oriented. Against the unbearable lightness of being, I still believe in depth, in weight and in painful longing.

Even though I may not look it, my closest friends agree: I can’t do “fuck buddy.” (Not that there is anything wrong with it.) I’m just too intense for it. For all my discourses on multiplicity, I’m still pretty single-minded. Like mapping. Despite an explosion of desires, it can be traced to a seed Word, a core language that decodes everything. (a name?) It’s a curse sometimes. I’m more faithful than I intend to be. Still, I’m grateful for certain chains that bind and ground me.

“There is no use loving someone you can only wake up next to except by chance,” Jeanette Winterson says. And just as cuddling and sleeping and the rituals before and after the fact is just as important as the “point” itself, I agree. The whole thing IS the point. You CAN love somebody you can only wake up next to by chance of course, but then, there would be NO USE. Sex is more than just a sum of its parts. And In a world which does not chastise eroticism as a threat and a taboo, sex would include everything from breathing together, to hands touching, to soft kisses beyond the phallocentric just-get-in-and-get-out modus operandi. You just can’t get that with some random man on the street. You need connection for it. And connection, we find as we get older, is hard to come by. Harder still to rekindle and preserve.

In a world that’s defined through lists and goals, beginning middle end, and recipe orgasms– particularly male orgasms—dictating that sex revolve around the penis –the lesbian in us calls on us to be more creative. This is actually something lesbians specialize in: Erotic Extrasensory Perception. Not only do you not need a penis to be erotic, you don’t even need a body. (I also espouse the wonders of telepathy. But that’s another story altogether….)

Just like mind-mapping if you do it honestly, things just pounce on you and surprise you. Spontaneity and simultaneity is key. Like the fact that I so did not totally expect to write about sex in this entry. (But what the hell, whatever turns you on,right?)

Sex should never just be goal-oriented– targeting orgasm "just to take the edge off." This is because, just like mind-mapping, eroticism is the kernel that invigorates our lives. It’s the seed word from which all things stem and are driven. The Life-drive. The Bio-energy. The force. Prana. Aura. Chi.

As Audre Lorde has said:

“. . . [O]nce we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. . . .

During World War II, we bought sealed plastic packets of white, uncolored margarine, with a tiny, intense pellet of yellow coloring perched like a topaz just inside the clear skin of the bag. We would leave the margarine out for a while to soften, and then we would pinch the little pellet to break it inside the bag, releasing the rich yellowness into the soft pale mass of margarine. Then taking it carefully between our fingers, we would knead it gently back and forth, over and over, until the color had spread throughout the whole pound bag of margarine, thoroughly coloring it.

I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience.”

In the workshop, I kept telling people how the mind-map was feminist because it was circuitous and yonic. “It’s like the vagina! It’s the nub from which all things are born! And it can be orgasmic that way, promise!”

And with that, I end my whirling advocacy for Mind-mapping. Enough said.