the way cishet people talk about sex is so fucking depressing. anal sex is kinky. oral is foreplay. i think if you told them sex doesn’t have to involve genitals at all they’d explode
i’m not sure if i’d be able to find it bc i don’t think i saved it but i saw a tiktok a few weeks ago of a trans woman talking about her experience of having sex with trans men, and she brought up that specifically she refuses to see it as ‘penetration’ or ‘penis in vagina’ because she doesn’t feel that way, she doesn’t understand why the penis takes the dominant role. Instead, for her, it’s more like being engulfed, swallowed, surrounded. And i’ve been like. thinking about that constantly ever since. I don’t think that referring to it as penetration is bad, but i think that theres an assumed importance of that certain aspect of sex, that the most important factor to whether something ‘counts’ is the dominance assumed by the role of penetration, with fingers, a toy, etc. In a lot of ways, as a trans man, i’ve learned to distance myself from my body. I am able to feel through peices of plastic better than my actual nerve endings. I feel that the act of transitioning sometimes upsets this hierarchy of sex. The idea that someone may use their body in a way seen as traditional sex but not view it through a traditional lens can be just as terrifying to people as someone not having traditional sex at all. It’s really difficult to articulate. Sex can be a lot of things to a lot of people, and i find it so frustrating when people limit the ways they are able to describe and connect with their bodies because of assumptions that something is not ‘real sex’ because it doesnt involve a certain act, or that penetration is inheritly more accurate or important than alternate views, such as the one i described before.
There's actually now a neologism for the obverse of penetration: circlusion!
"I wish to propose to you a new term, one that has been missing for a long time: “circlusion,” or, if you prefer a purer latinate, “circumclusion.” It denotes the antonym of penetration. It refers to the same physical process, but from the opposite perspective. Penetration means pushing something––a shaft or a nipple––into something else––a ring or a tube. Circlusion means pushing something––a ring or a tube––onto something else––a nipple or a shaft. The ring and the tube are rendered active. That’s all there is to it.
This word, circlusion, allows us to speak differently about certain forms of sex. We need it because penetration still rules supreme over the heteronormative imaginary and its arbitrary division of bodies into “active” and “passive.” The verb to penetrate evokes a non-reciprocal or at least unequally distributed process. The one who is penetrated is implied to be passive. More than that, being penetrated, like being screwed, is automatically imagined as disempowerment." — Bini Adamczak, as translated by Sophie Lewis in The New Inquiry
