technologies of love

Crazy in Love →

Not only can they not participate in society, often unable to work for long periods, or to be charming, or to smell nice, and so on, but they are an implicit critique of the infrastructure of working, the charms and nice smells with which people survive the painful world. So loving a crazy person forces you beyond all conventional measurements of worth or meaning. That is why it often falls to women, who live partly outside measure, and often drives them crazy too.

The body in pain is a deviant body that defies expectations, refuses the easy boxes of sick and well. I am trying to figure out how to love a body in pain, or feel desire with a body in pain. The fibers of my muscles ache, and the muscles supporting the joints tense up around the pain. My skin often feels like it is burning, and that is not merely skin as symptom. That is the same skin that welcomes or repels touch. I have only one body to use, inside the doctor’s office and out. My body remembers old embraces, skin-to-skin contact from before as well as now. Now there is a barrier between myself and other bodies: this pain.




Desire is a different substance now, a process requiring attention and effort. It is no longer a thoughtless release. Pain sex is queer sex, strange sex, wrong sex. Even in the comfort of a therapist’s office, the assumption is that everyone must be having sex and must produce the requisite amount of desire. I have been encouraged and maybe even shamed a bit to get up to a normal level of sexual production because “sex is good.” I agree with this, and it is important to feel connected to my partner in this way, but sex and desire are very complicated for people whose central nervous systems scream at them. Sex is a complex and fraught dance, an intellectually draining circus to run. After I manage to have sex, I often collapse for a few days from the effort of being in my body and sorting the signals of pain and desire. Yet I am continually pushed to conform. It’s not that I don’t want to have sex; it’s that my partner and I are in the midst of tentatively creating what sex looks like for someone with chronic pain and her partner, and I don’t see this image of desire anywhere—not in movies, not in what I read. As Lazy Rane writes on the blog Guerrilla Feminism: Global and Intersectional, “I believe that a body in pain, is a body which is particularly hard to love, and scarily easy to hate. What is worse, the pain can make this hatred of your own body seem not only reasonable, but inescapable, so blatant in its normality that it can take a long time to challenge your own feelings.” Desire and love have to grapple first with reconstituting themselves in a body that has been altered to its core.

Sonya Huber, “Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System”

The Half of the World That Doesn’t Make Out →

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We looked at 168 cultures and found couples kissing in only 46 percent of them. Societies with distinct social classes are usually kissers; societies with fewer or no social classes, like hunter-gatherer communities, are usually not. For some, kissing seems unpleasant, unclean, or just plain weird. Kissing is clearly a culturally variable display of affection.

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