CW: Mentions of violations of sexual privacy, scatological and sexual/kink content
Digital disimpaction is a procedure wherein one uses one’s fingers to dislodge or otherwise aid in the removal of stool from one’s rectum. I say “procedure”, but it’s more a last resort after an hour of straining. The first time I hook a finger gingerly into my anal sphincter and pull it open, it helps but minimally, allowing a lump of fecal matter, unsatisfying in its minuscule proportions, to exit my body.
*
In the course of my studies for the diploma in Psychology, I pursue after I am forced to leave my pre-tertiary school, Freud is our first stop in drawing up any theory of psychoanalysis. Among his coked-up theories about psychosexual development, to me, the most intriguing of which is the concept of anal retentiveness. In theory, being unsatisfied at the childhood stage of anal development leads to fixation later in life. One seeks to compulsively control one’s excretory function, extending to orderliness and stubbornness. I have no problems relinquishing control and am somewhat of a chronic sexual submissive. Conversely, if the anally-fixated child is overindulged, it may develop an anal-expulsive personality type, exhibiting cruelty, emotional outbursts, artistic ability, generosity, rebelliousness, and general carelessness.
Certainly, I am careless. But my body insists on stubbornly holding on to all that tries, unsuccessfully, to pass through.
‘Why hold on to all that? And I said, / Where can I put it down?’(Anne Carson, The Glass Essay)
I first dabbled in anal play around the same time, with the same lesbian ex whom I got proto-expelled with. Sexual experimentation finds a way, even after your life has been threatened with the middle-class equivalent of ruin.
*
It is 2015, and I am watching Carol, noted lesbian film, with one of my favourite lovers—privately, I call him my emotional support/distraught ex—in the theatre when I am, perhaps for the first time, triggered. It is one of two real instances I can recall of feeling that way. In the film, the lead characters discover their motel room had been secretly surveilled while they had sex with each other for the first time. Watching them uncover the recording devices is a fascinating thought experiment in imagining myself, processing my own violation, in the third person.
By this time, it’s been half a decade since the bad old days of pre-tertiary, what we call junior college. By this time, I believe I’m too “kinky” and “fucked up” for anyone to make me feel laid bare like a raw nerve, least of all a movie released in Singaporean cinemas (never mind the ‘Restricted To Persons Aged 21 And Above’ film classification, Singapore’s highest, which means nothing more than a mere horror of homos made mainstream).
When we attempt to leave the cinema, both my lover and I try and fail, multiple times, to open the door before noticing that it says push.
‘Two extremely literate people—’ he says, half-laughing.
*
A specific form of digital disimpaction is called vaginal splinting, where the inside of the vagina is massaged with a finger or two to encourage the passage of stool from one’s rectum. I have a vagina, which, fortunately or not, makes this possible. I only learn this manoeuvre is possible because I am trying to earnestly have a good time fingering myself one day and feel a chonker of a shit log bulging up through the wall that separates my vagina and rectum, a single wall of flesh separating the reproductive from the eliminative. I frequently forget I am holding on to something that refuses to budge without my nudging.
In my adulthood, a satisfying bowel movement is increasingly less and less of a mythical thing. In metaphors, I retread the profane hallowed ground of bathroom bodily functions. I grope for the lines between disgust, delight and disavowal. I reclaim my embodiment. I am obsessive, neurotic, unhealthily fascinated—but I reclaim it.
Some ways I have tried convincing my body to shit like a normal person’s: Wait until the absolute last minute. Lie on your stomach while working on your laptop. Drink a glass of water first thing when you wake up. Get anxious. Enlist the help of over-sugared three-in-one coffee.
You must examine your shits, my friends and I exclaim.
What do you mean you flush without looking. You must.
*
Pee on me, I tell people, ruthlessly, countlessly.
My then-lover, now emotional support ex, after doing so in the shower, picks up a travel-sized squeeze bottle and spurts its contents on my naked form. He uses up almost the whole bottle of pearlescent Dove body wash this way. I am nonplussed, then amused, finding pleasure immense in an expression of desire so immediate as to be shocking. I want to do this to you, I want to cover you with a viscous something that slaps itself on wet skin, I want to shoot it out with a vigour almost like violence on your half-reclining form. I want, I want, I want.
It’s very big of me to tell others to Pee On Me when bathroom shyness is the one demon that’s haunted me through my earliest days. Too easily, we can psychoanalyse this. You have problems letting go. You need to be more mindful about what comes in and goes out. Stop reading in the toilet; you conditioned yourself to stay in there for the length of a novel. But with that tempting diagnosis, there’s always a rejoinder, accusatory: You walk away from things too easily. Your problem is, your problem is—
My problem, I think, is that I pick things up and don’t quite know when to put them down again.
*
My first memory of the Toilet is constipation. I am three and straddling a baby-blue swan-shaped potty, both hands on handles jutting out on either side of its head like I’m riding it into battle. Clenched. My fists curl next to cartoon eyes painted with extraordinary jagged eyelash wings. I think I might be clenching my jaw too. I strain while my father says “Mm-mmmm!” over and over, rhythmically, like the wordless noise will help my sphincter realise what it’s doing.
His mouth closed in a nasal hum that lodges in me. It is a shorthand for being backed up without recourse.
*
It strikes me for the first time, a decade after the fact, that the worst time in my life and my deepest reckoning with my sexuality, centres around, once again, the toilet. My coming-out story turns out to be from a water closet.
I am seventeen, and my ex—the first of my emotional support exes—is fingering me in the school bathroom. I’m moaning because it’s after hours and I, drunk on teenage invincibility and hubris, don’t think anyone can hear me.
We hear laughter outside, a flurry of running feet. I think it’s someone having an after-school event, some kind of puerile camp or sports training. Whatever—I don’t care. I am above that banality. I am having a good time. I am having the first actual lesbian sex of my life.
Later, the people who filmed us in secret will say we wanted to be discovered, that we were showing off. Why would we have been making noise otherwise?
Obscured in the shower stall, we waited for the noise to die down, but we never looked up, which is in its way a kind of horror-movie scenario—the characters listening, wide-eyed, for any clue as to the monster’s whereabouts, while the audience watches in mute dread, knowing it crouches above them.
Later, when it gets foreboding and quiet and we’re waiting to see if it’s safe to exit, the disembodied voice of a classmate of mine wends through the closed cubicle door.
‘Marylyn?’
She says she knows it’s us, even though we don’t answer. She tells us people have been watching us, that ‘everyone knows’. She says she is sorry. Even later, this same classmate explains to me that the offenders had climbed onto the adjoined sink behind the cubicles and shot their videos of us from the top down. She says she climbed up as well. But she, apparently, ‘didn’t dare’ to look down. She tells me she is sorry again.
The first real trouble-with-consequences I run into in my life culminates in us trending on Twitter—before going viral was a real thing—under the hashtag #acjclesbians.
It’s tempting to say that having your privacy cracked open like an acorn and salivated over at seventeen does something to you. It’s why I’m like this. It’s why I turned out like this. But I’m too much of an asshole to claim a narrative that bores me. There is nothing thrilling about being a victim.
It is only four years before I decide to do anything sexual in a public bathroom again, the douchey lesbian I picked up on OkCupid who mocks me to her friends on WhatsApp bending me over in a stall at McDonald’s—peak romance—and fingering me dry.
*
Every morning in the university dorms, I shower two-in-a-cubicle with my then-lover, my now defunct emotional support ex, who doesn’t have his own key to the toilets because he isn’t living here and we aren’t technically allowed visitors. Sometimes, the standalone handicap stall is occupied (he jokes about this, saying his transness is the handicap), so we sneak into the main toilet and shower together, feeling like schoolkids playing at adult intimacy.
It is the first time I am living with someone that I am fucking. It’s a queer, young, and poor facsimile of domestic life. This same ex, who never eats vegetables, introduces me to Brussels sprouts, saying they are his favourite. Years on, the realisation that you can eat copious amounts of vegetables in a way that avoids being a chore is gifted to me by a dear friend. Older gays, who can cook, queer-mothered my bowels into adulthood.
*
My father is fond of saying that sweet potatoes saved my life. He claims I nearly lost it to chronic, incurable constipation as a child. As he tells it, he was at his wits’ end at the doctor’s, seriously considering surgery for his firstborn, when a stranger sidled up to him and told him, sweet potatoes. Just steam them and give them to her. And miracle of fecal miracle, it worked. I imagine myself eliminating blissfully, narrowly evading an early death. Sweet potatoes saved my life. I still despise them in any dish.
*
In many dinner conversations I inevitably circle back to the scatological, even while eating. Especially, some say, while eating. It’s almost an impossible feat to disgust me with the sensory imagination of the fecal. Perhaps it’s because the concept of the excretory is still half-hopeful fantasy for me. Perhaps I just have a weak imagination.
I still can’t poop in public unless I blast music, flip the bathroom stall door off with both hands, and shut my eyes. My nervous sphincter has to be convinced there’s no one on god’s dying earth around to witness her long-awaited production. Only then does she finally feel free to let go and be herself. Mm-mmmm! Mm-mmmm!
*
Chinese-Canadian writer and mental health community worker Kai Cheng Thom once described the claim to survivorhood as ‘equated with moral standing’. To be a survivor of violence, one must make claim to perfect virtue, must compete against others to be ‘seen as deserving of compassion’.
My greatest blessing is a mostly absent sense of shame. I have an easier time reconciling desire and pleasure than most queer narratives will have you believe. For me, the story in which my school, my religion, and my nation try to convince me I’ve done something wrong never quite seems to stick the landing. For someone raised Catholic, I’ve never been very good with self-flagellation.
I keep searching for a better pressure point—something akin to release. To afford my younger self the dignity she was denied by institution and authority. I wanted a revenge fantasy. I wanted a working bussy. I wanted the perpetrators circulating the video of our underage bodies in a private moment to be the ones forced to exit the system.
But it ends with me, by myself, digitally disimpacting. Coaxing another backed-up piece of shit out of my anus with my own fingers. The shit leaves a smear on my nailbed as it squeezes its way out.
For me, queer comes heady out of the water closet. I learn to swallow and move things along. I make them palatable by charring them with too much garlic. Sometimes I forget how to read the sign saying push.
I pick things up and put them down again.
