Chapter 11: On Eroticism - Who Is Wellness For?

The tambourine begs, Touch my skin so I can be myself. Let me feel you enter each limb bone by bone, that what died last night can be whole.

—Rumi

At the time of writing this, I will have been celibate for over two years. From my late teens into my mid-twenties, I identified as a nymphomaniac. I guess that’s what happens to so many of us who are sexually repressed. We can get obsessive and unruly, consumed by craven ways once we taste it. A lot of this, I believe, leads to aggression within realms of sex, as well as murky understandings of consent. Sometimes, in order to allow sin, you believe in your badness because the possibility that you could be complicated was never something you were allowed to be. I wonder how much of my oversexualization had to do with an identification with badness. How else could I explain myself to anybody? I was ashamed of my actions. That festered and made me sick. Cyclically, I kept getting into bad sexual situations, I kept leading myself into the dark because I couldn’t see a way out.

Obviously, a lot of this comes down to being a child sexual abuse survivor. When your body is exposed to nonconsensual desire at a young age, it’s confusing to then deny yourself any arousal that feels true, honest, even if it’s horrifically tied to memories of abuse. Memory is layered, and it evokes so much. It makes sense to me now, in retrospect, that I was a body constantly aching for some mythical touch, believing it could redeem me from my lust by satiating my hunger. As I sit with how my body was compromised as a child, I also think of the rampant ways that children are discarded and forced into child prostitution in Bangladesh, the lands of my ancestral lineage, and realize how the macro always connects to the micro—how the denigration of a child’s body, a woman’s body, is a societal sickness and a conduct that is accepted, then allowed and then fostered. Even though Muslim societies like Bangladesh are notoriously conservative, sexual exploitation within a stratosphere that polices sex to a sociopathic degree is still rampant. What does that say about Muslim societies? As Faty Badi tells Leila Slimani in Sex and Lies about Morocco, “Our society is still very prudish and conservative and . . . totally obsessed with sex.”^[1]

It’s no surprise that in private, a variety of my Muslim friends—of all genders and of all races—have shared their abuse at the hands of Muslim schoolteachers, Qur’an teachers, men who are supposedly close to God but end up molesting young children. Funny how that keeps happening in circles of devout men. If it’s not that, we’re molested by our Muslim family members—parents, cousins, siblings, grandparents. I was always taught to fear what the outside world could do to me, which is what kept me locked in doors, where I faced the extreme abuse I was apparently being protected from.

I’ve seen a lot of Muslim women struggle to understand their sexual appetites because many of us were raised in spaces where eroticism is diffused, denied, or forced to be hidden. Yet it is still palpable in the way Muslims watch and surveil other Muslims. “Idealised and mythologized, virginity has clearly become a coercive instrument intended to keep women at home and to justify their surveillance at all times,” Leila Slimani writes. “So we find ourselves in cars, in forests, on the edges of beaches, on building sites or in empty lots.”^[2] I lost my virginity to my Hindu Indian boyfriend on the outskirts of the Sydney Botanic Garden as a teenager. Just because I was told not to have sex didn’t mean I wasn’t going to. And after what had happened to me, I didn’t feel as if I owed anyone an explanation.

By the time we Muslim women have any agency over our bodies, we are either hiding from dark pasts or denying our true desires. Needless to say, we are also not a monolith, and I don’t think anything can be put into a binary, but many if not most of the Muslim women I know intimately have sexual health problems. For me, it was the constant bacterial vaginosis (BV) I kept having with one partner that broke the proverbial camel’s back. Though I assumed our pH levels were unbalanced, I also later realized that my partner never went down on me and always wanted to enter me immediately, as if I didn’t need arousal. At the time I wondered if part of the problem was that my body was responding to my needs not being met, but I also didn’t know the language to ask. It’s moments like these where I know my life force was lacking—I was frozen in subservience, my own needs far and distant.

*  *  *

Beauty is a privilege, of course it is—and of course, like all things—there’s a darker, more sinister side to those whose beauty is spoken and defined for them. As a child sexual abuse survivor, I had only ever seen myself as disgusting, so accepting my beauty came with trial and error. It felt impossible to be both—beautiful and disgusting—one had to be truer, so I opted for the latter. I realized, by my twenties, that I had a certain kind of pull, that people were drawn to me. I wasn’t sure what it was about me, but it was like honey. I was ripe, and people wanted a taste. This was lethal, as I began to feel like maybe through sex (and my redefinition of it) I could claim what I felt had been missing. I wanted to believe sex could feed me in a way virginity hadn’t, and I hoped that it would make me accept myself more. In reality, the sex I had was often punishing, and mostly not in a good, redemptive way. I realized I wanted to dissolve into another human, become their flesh, saliva pooling from body to skin to mouth to collarbone, spit like a trail of hearts, I wanted to be consumed. While also being loved, adored, protected.

Acknowledging my sexuality and its dimensions was an important distinction I needed to make for my own liberation. It wasn’t until I started to understand my sexual abuse, however—to exist within that prism, that knowing, that utterance—that I began to understand why I kept getting shattered. It wasn’t always bad—there were times when I fucked that I was freer than I had ever been because I wasn’t running anymore, I was in the pain, I was in the pleasure, I was alive with the yawn and heat of what it meant to be next to another body and have it enter you. I can tell you that I craved touch like I prayed for mercy. With a deep, agonizing scream. When I finally had sex, it was rapturous, never for the other person’s efforts sweating alongside me, but for my ability to seek such heights. To be in the folds of another person felt like being home. It was an arrival. But, at a certain point, I couldn’t just keep arriving and never transforming. I was delaying myself, distracting myself through the suffocating satisfaction of being plundered. I began to feel like my body itself had traveled far from me.

Being a femme person in this world comes with so much unsafety, especially when your body and you are blamed for other people’s misdeeds, but instead of having solidarity against the limitations of the patriarchy, you are punished for a beauty assigned to you. When the way you were born to look becomes a cruel catalyst for an unsolvable sin, who can you turn to? Who protects children like me? Does God forgive me for the things that have been done to my body because it didn’t matter if I said no?

For most of my life, I was so deep in the darkness, in the trespass, that I couldn’t fathom that I could have a relationship with sex, with these human parts of me, these tangible parts that longed to be touched. Yet when I could forgive myself for desiring desire, for wanting to get lost in it, something miraculous happened—my body began to heal. It needed permission, but also an acknowledgment of the truth. My body’s testimony is what brought me to the light, what brought me back to myself. It was believing that I was a complex being, and that a God who had made me so, who had given me my particular struggles as well, would forgive me. “The paradox of the situation: having so long considered women to be dangerous provocateurs, people whose sexual appetite must constantly be kept in check, we undermine the very concept of this purity we’re seeking to preserve. I felt guilty before I had even sinned,”^[3] writes Slimani. And yet, as director Nabil Ayouch tells the Moroccan-French writer, “We’re forgetting that it’s we Arabs, we Muslims, who shocked the West with our erotic texts in the fifteen century. We invented the realm of the erotic. We’re suffering from collective amnesia.”

And this is, as always, where the plot thickens.

*  *  *

Muslim feminist and scholar Asma Lamrabet writes, “From the ninth to the thirteen centuries, when Islamic civilization reached its apogee, literature and the erotic arts flourished.”^[4] Quoting Tunisian author of Sexuality in Islam, Abdelwahab Bouhdiba: “To rediscover the meaning of sexuality is to rediscover the meaning of God. Sexuality properly performed is tantamount to freedom assumed.”^[5] Bouhdiba believed that restrictive, puritanical, gloomy view of sex was contrary to the very spirit of Islam.

To me, this makes sense. The sort of violent abstraction of sexuality in the Muslim world, or even within a land like South Asia—that produced the Kama Sutra and tantra—especially as I’ve come to find that both the Vedic texts and the Qur’an speak to pleasure, began to prove that something had been lost in translation. I instinctively understood Islam’s parameters, even if I didn’t always relate to them, because I understood being a person of faith also required doubt. That within the paradox, God could be found. There was a mercurialness to Islam that had been completely lost, and as I discovered this I began to realize a lot of other Muslims had a surface relationship to Islam, and didn’t know much about it, outside of its stricture, which is a lack of connection adopted through the fundamentalism of Islam. Pankaj Mishra writes, in From the Ruins of Empire, “Until late into the nineteenth century, people of societies with belief-systems like Islam or Confucianism at their core—much of the known world—could assume that the human order was still fused inseparably with the larger divine or cosmic order defined by their ancestors and gods.”^[6] Isn’t it strange how an entire people’s fate can change in a century?

*  *  *

In a colonial sense, the truth is that whiteness and the aggressor depended on shaming people whom they colonized of their culture. As Muslim historian Ghulam Husain Khan Tabatabai wrote in 1781, “No love, and no coalition can take root between the conquerors and the conquered.”^[7] Yet facing this shame, speaking to it, giving words to how our bodies and our cultures were othered, forcing us to seek reprieve in whiteness and the standards that those who took from us believed made us inferior—like our awareness of our bodies, our legacies of music, dance, of rapture and evolution. “True sexual liberation can actually threaten capitalism and a lot of colonial structures and therefore it’s not embedded in our education system, that’s why this work is so important to treat the next generations,” Bundjalung woman and activist Ella Noah Bancroft says on the For the Wild podcast. “So much of our pleasure, or what we think of pleasure, is derived at the expense of earth.”^[8] This is where self-care is lost. We think caring for ourselves is actually about getting other people to care for us, or that the Earth should pay for our gargantuan needs as a society. Our inescapable greed can’t be quenched by more material possessions, self-care can’t be through land-grabbing or denying the realities of capitalism. Healing ourselves must happen in tandem with healing the Earth, we must understand things holistically. “The psychology of authority plays a very important part in the awakening of man’s latent power,” Swami Satyananda Saraswati writes in Kundalini Tantra. “It is not well understood by modern man who has unfortunately accepted that man lives for the pleasure principle, as propounded by Freud and his disciples. The psychology of austerity is very sound and certainly not abnormal. When the senses are satisfied by the objective pleasures, by the comforts and luxuries, the brain and nervous systems become weak and consciousness and energy undergo a process of regression. It is in this situation that the method of austerity is one of the most powerful and sometimes explosive methods of awakening.”^[9] A lot of the Vedic and Buddhist texts are of the understanding that spiritual growth comes with true spiritual labor. The same could be said about Islam and most other Eastern faiths.

As a young child, I watched Islamophobia rise through the media, in the streets, and across the globe. The West refused to see its contribution to Islamophobia and how it was a clear pathway to the advent of Muslim terrorism. Ernest Renan, a French Orientalist and Semitic scholar, in 1883 “denounced Islam as the begetter of despotism and terrorism. He invoked the racial hierarchy in which rationality, empiricism, industriousness, self-discipline and adaptability defined Western man, and their near-total absence defined the people he dominated,” writes Mishra in From the Ruins of Empire. “He also stridently identified progress as the unique achievement and prerogative of the white race and Christianity, arguing that Islam and modern science were incompatible.”^[10] Similar to Bernier, but within the realms of sex, I like to think about how people evolve, in a social sense, when there are declarations like this smattered across history books esteemed for empirical knowledge. Yet when we start to question that very source, lots of things begin to reveal themselves and disintegrate within the realms of pleasure, and what colonization has done to the concept of desire for us the colonized. “The West won the world not by the superiority of ideas or values of religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence in most countries,” writes Shridhar Sharma.^[11] What Renan proclaimed in 1883 was almost one hundred years before Islamic terrorism was even a theory.

I was raised with the idea that Muslim men were dangerous. What I saw everywhere around me, including a lot of my interactions with Muslim or South Asian men, felt uncomfortable. Yet to present men from my region of the world as the primary aggressors (how many times had a friend, usually a woman, told me that their parents would allow them to marry anyone except a Muslim man) felt like an offensive admonishment. Still the question was important: Why did so many of the women in my life have domineering relationships with men from these particular parts of the world?

When we think of the colonized, rarely do we think of sex, but looking at sexual relations can be an indicator of the tactics that were used against us to socialize us. As witnessed, the declaration of difference was first pathologized by whiteness, meaning they constructed the dictum by which we govern race. Before white people did this, we were all relatively unknown to one another, our societies were more localized. So, to say one group of people is “x, y, z” without thinking about context only exaggerates and supports white supremacy.

I think of the men from my region of the world, Muslim and South Asian men, as beautiful creatures who were Romantics and poets, artisans and charmers. This was the uniqueness of my brethren, a quality palpable in the tomes of Hafez, Kabir, Rumi. I see it in my father, in the way his thin body wails against the wind. His fragility is something I find most beautiful about him, it’s why I deemed him worthy of my protection early on. But it’s something I’ve also seen that he himself contends with, how people so easily dominate him. I think about domination a lot because colonization is a form of domination. Think about sex when you think about loss, now think about a person who loses their land to an aggressor who comes and steals everything from them, then tells them it’s their fault, blaming it on their weakness.

My friend Ali once shared a story at our friend (also his partner) Salman’s studio on a recent bright summer’s night in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He spoke about how the last Muslim ruler in India who lost his land to the British was seen as a failure because he was a poet and thus could not protect his people. The men from my lands were known to have male lovers as well as wives and use astrologers in the royal courts. They could speak to Socratic methods and translate texts. They were lovers. They were free. Then something happened. The feminization of Asian and Muslim men has resulted in a shame that has penetrated these communities and hardened them. People think of imperialism as a past concept, when in fact Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan are modern examples of the continuation of imperialism: Bleeding oil, creating war, and devastating people to keep them in a state of trauma is the definition of imperialism. We should be extremely worried about the well-being of these people who have been forced into catastrophe again and again. I see how this demonization has impacted the men in my family, the men in my culture, the men in my faith. Our men who have been shamed into feeling their bodies, their dynamic sexualities, are undeserving and disgusting. “All Western culture has achieved is to bulldoze the modes of traditional identification and to leave the individual surrounded by troubling ambiguities and sources of conflict,”^[12] Moroccan writer Abdelhak Serhane writes. If you tell people they are barbaric, less humane, more savage, that—like the narrative of an abusive parent—seeps into your soul. “The myth that the dominant elites, ‘recognizing their duties,’ promote the advancement of the people, so that the people,” writes Paulo Freire, “in a gesture of gratitude, should accept the words of the elites and be conformed to them.”^[13] Speaking about Egypt soon after the opening of the Suez Canal, Mishra writes, “Until the revolts of the 1870s, British officials counted on the possibility that the Egyptian peasant was so beaten down that ‘no amount of misery or oppression would provoke him to resistance.’”^[14]

Because the victor writes history, they will always favor themselves. “It is not those whose humanity is denied them who negate humankind,” writes Freire, “but those who denied that humanity (thus negating their own as well).”^[15]

*  *  *

There’s so much I want to say, like how I long to be touched, how I have always sought embrace wherever I could—a mother’s hug, a sister’s patient kiss, a father’s concerned head pat. I also crave pressure on my body like a bug to a lamp—I love a firm embrace, a hand on the knee, an eyeball-to-eyeball gaze. Of course, these things can feel bad, too. How brilliant that our bodies know their own safety for us. To first listen, then trust ourselves enough to know what feels good, is a wondrous gift we can give ourselves. We get to determine that for ourselves—nobody can or should be able to tell us what feels good for us.

During the pandemic, in my aloneness, I worried about myself. I worried about the impact of not being able to feel someone else’s tenderness as I healed my body, but then I started writing this book and that purpose, that drive, left me feeling less alone. Understanding myself, to be able to explain it here, on this page, has been a journey. But locating, reading, and documenting has helped me see how all of this is connected, and that in itself is tantric. I think of the Zen proverb “How you do anything is how you do everything” as I consider what I am, who I am, what I want for my life. I find an erotic kind of pleasure forming and strengthening within myself, in my own body.

“We know that sexual relationships outside wedlock are common in Morocco,” Slimani documents in Sex and Lies. “The fact that all of them must be hidden only promotes abuse and attacks on personal freedoms.”^[16] Perhaps this is why I write about sex: I want to liberate sex for Muslims. Our cultures were not always what they are now. “The Moroccan legislation is drawn not from sharia or any other religious source but from substantive laws inherited directly from the French protectorate.”^[17] This puritanical strain of Islam is a foreign entity, and we have to start asking why. I see the power of eroticism, and how that energy is the energy of what binds us, of what binds the divine. This fluidity, this power, can be found in all things and all beings, and that is the power of faith. That no matter what, we deserve connection to divine source. We know that sexual health is part of social health just as sexual safety is part of social safety. “We cannot live well when we’re afraid, when we feel guilty. This is what we mean by ‘sexual deprivation,’”^[18] Professor Abdessamad Dialmy tells Slimani about his life as a gay man in Morocco. We have to begin to forgive ourselves and find love in God, not fear. Bismillah al rahman al rahim, the words that are said before every prayer to Allah. It means God is most gracious, most merciful. It is one of the most repeated phrases in the Qur’an. Yet, how have we forgotten this? Why are we so lacking in mercy and grace with ourselves and each other? Why have we become so hateful? I want my people to be free, I want my people to forgive themselves.

*  *  *

Accepting that I was sexual, that I needed a sexual life, was understanding myself and my faith at its core. Having a spiritual life means acknowledging all parts of your creation, including the parts you’ve been taught to disregard or hate or demonize. But if God is everything, shouldn’t these things that we’ve been taught to disregard—but are a natural part of life—be accepted, loved, or at the very least seen as a vehicle for God? Everything can be an active prayer, so why is sex any different? Vedic philosophers saw gateways to enlightenment through tantra, and Sufi dhikrs through poetry to Allah, the divine, the source of everything. Were the exaltations of Rumi about God or his lover? Do they have to be one or the other? We have to stop thinking that we are removed from that source. If we all believed that we, by virtue of being alive, have worthiness in the eyes of God, and if we saw each human to have that same worthiness, then we would be a different people. It’s so simple, how enlightenment works, and yet . . .

Why is such a natural part of human nature an issue of dominance and control? They say sex work is the oldest profession in the world, so don’t sex workers deserve more respect when clearly their demand is high and their work is esteemed? Why has their work been relegated to realms of darkness and disgust when most people crave to fuck? Would bridging the parts of us that we’ve separated as “good” or “bad” help us understand ourselves more wholly? Would that then allow each of us our particular path to wholeness, too?

Acknowledging the sensual was seeing the world as an erotic ecosystem that needs the balance and consideration of all species. It brings me back to a point of my own cultural origin, which Roberto Calasso explains beautifully: “This is typical of a language like Sanskrit that does not love the explicit, but hints that everything is sexual.”^[19] That’s why knowing and naming boundaries, of being invested in goodness and accountability, are vital to retaining the aspects of the old world where bodies were understood and accepted. I’m not saying that the past was perfect (obviously) but that at the very least there seemed to be a merge of the spiritual and the profane, there was communication between those two parts of existence. The existence of eros is fundamentally a cornerstone of human evolution—we procreate, but we also lust, and that is an integral part of our spiritual governance. Dividing the two has created a dissonance that’s been hard to weave back together. When people are embroiled in shame, it’s easy to forget the tether of divine presence.

Touching the earth has healed me in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. I mean this in the day-to-day sense, of being around nature. The act of composting, too, of being with the dead flowers, the acrid way the white-rimmed green fungus can create a ripening among newly bought yet already rotting tangerines. Touching dirt with my hands has created a newfound gateway to understanding myself within the mercurial spectrum of life and death.

I imagine we want it all to be sterile so it doesn’t make us confront our mortality, so we constantly can avoid death. “The essence of consciousness is being with the world,”^[20] Freire tells us. Being with the world outside of commerce, outside of transaction, what are we to each other? I’ve always dreamed of living on a plot of land with my friends, each of us in our own little portal. Those years ago in Montreal, my friends Zoë and Sophie and I would dream of tending to the land, a desire that’s been reflected in multiple relationships throughout my life. A desire to return to the Earth, to be with her, to feel the soil in my blood, the blood in her soil, toiling together, we are one. We are the children of clay, children of Earth, borne of her. Why are we so divorced from her? From the vastness of her ecology and the light that exists in the unique flora and fauna of this vast and beautiful Earth? Nature is erotic. To watch animals is to witness wisdom, to see how every other species on Earth has a cadence with each other, there’s a dance—and even among alpha species there’s a respect for the creature you kill. You take only what you need—animals understand there’s a balance, there’s an equilibrium. They’re superior to us because there’s no delusion of ego. We’ve propped up humanity as the apex of civilization when all we’ve managed to do is burn the whole thing down. It’s so fucking embarrassing.

These days I understand erotic to mean balance, to mean an energy that is harnessed and pure and deep. But eroticism also means an awareness of death, it’s understanding that all of life must be appreciated because all of us have a pulse, and that in itself is the erotic duality of life. How quickly death can come, and all we can do in the interim is to understand, locate, communicate, and then enjoy the pleasures that we seek.

I’m tired of pretending my body wasn’t compromised by someone who espoused my safety while simultaneously demonizing my body and sexuality when I should’ve been allowed to be a child, to be innocent. I was first accused of being sexual while I was being sexualized, so what does that say about me and the legion of Muslim children who have been compromised by a so-called religious elder? There’s no use in demonizing us when you desire us in the first place. If we actually acknowledged our need for sex and the deep importance of that in our society, I’m assuming so much tight-lipped perversion wouldn’t exist. Ironically, better communication about sex shows an aptitude and respect for it. Imagine if we had reverence for the sacrament of sexual connection. Imagine if we actually put honest attention there?

What I want so much from touch is to feel safe. I want that from sex, too. When I close my eyes and dream, I see the immense possibilities of our future. I see how a sexual revolution, accepting and having compassion for our sexual proclivities, meaning we need to prioritize the voices that have been silent—women’s voices, disabled, trans, fat folks’ voices. If we let all of us speak, if we prioritized the voices of survivors of sexual harm and trauma and allowed them to pave the way toward a collective future of safety, I think we would get closer to true revolution.

It’s not about accepting human nature; it’s rewriting the stance. It’s understanding the divine is everywhere. Eroticism is that embrace. It’s about knowing that there is so much more to the erotic than sex. It’s a way of life, of existing in a state of liminality, of understanding that the sacrosanct has its own erotic compass. If we accepted our ways, without demonizing them, if we understood our complexities without judgment and took effort in finding peace with ourselves, we would find true, unadulterated liberation.