After having sex with me three times my ex asked me to take an STD test for him. I was infuriated by his implied message that I had been fucking anyone else other than him. The truth was, ever since we ran into each other at a collector’s Christmas party in an overdecorated apartment that somehow encourages the kind of awkwardly intimate conversations one has with their ex, I had stopped attempting to fuck my way out of that deepest sadness. During the three months between my breakup (my ex—let’s call him S for the sake of my readers’ identification, but the name really means anything, the master signifier, the divided subject, Saint Stephen of Hungary, or the art movement that thwarted Vienna into the history of early modernism—proposed it) and our rather untimely reunion, I downloaded every dating app I could think of and registered myself with every imaginable cruising website that facilitates vile, dirty sex uncaptured by homoerotic literature. And I failed miserably on each of them, as it turns out that my brand of being a depressed performance artist well-versed in the genealogy of German idealism made me largely unfuckable. I have too much shame in vocalizing my desire and I still hold romantic attachment to the act of sex. At a park near Chinatown, I almost succeeded in getting a man a lot shorter and fatter than me to fuck me—I had one sexual fantasy my ex could not fulfill, which is humiliation by association, for he works out frequently at the Equinox near his church and pays for laser skin resurfacing through his tax refund. I did a goob job sucking said man’s unhealthily veiny dick, risking having a locked jaw, but soon the ecstasy of being a ‘good boy’ transformed into the disappointing realization that I was being subservient to someone else’s idea of sexuality, which I could never do. Plus, I didn’t like how his dick was bigger than my ex’s. I stood up and demanded anal sex. He looked me in the eyes for three seconds and declared I have too much darkness in me and therefore fucking is off the table. He saw it through: I have always liked the idea of being fucked by a stranger more than the experience itself. The image of cruising in my mind is one of abject self-annihilation beyond anticipation but every inch of my anorexic body—regional pain displaces itself when the whole body lacks the energy to localize it—just simply hurts, very banally, from my lack of coordination whenever an alien object (It does not have to be a real penis, which it rarely is. A fascist dildo from 1980s erotic thriller has the same function.) inserts me. The fat man on the other hand was the first true subversive I had met, capable of conducting sex in pure physical terms. From swiftly handling my rather immobile face he already knew I lack the imagination for positioning my inflexible body without the comfort of bedroom, and by extension I would awkwardly fail to work around the absence of friction. He wanted to have sex that freely adopt and adapt to environmental conditions and in-the-moment demands of overheated bodies. He possesses no style or ulterior motive, for he knows an image is desire’s perverse parody. I went home, searched for “couples in love” on Pornhub, masturbated, and cried hysterically after cumming too much. Luckily my mother, a sex ed curriculum designer who secretly hates sex, had given me some Chinese pills with secretive ingredients that promise to repair post-ejaculation exhaustion. I could masturbate again after taking the pill and I did, to the thought of my ex being the only person in the world interested in fucking me, until it became too much to clean the cum stain. My ex used to be a writer, but now he is a copywriter, the kind of job that convinces its haver they need to build generational wealth. Naturally, he broke up with me right after he received a promotion. At the collector’s apartment, the first thing we discussed was how his new boyfriend—let’s call him L, sharing the same name with a gay porn actor who died from leukemia in 2015, and don’t ask me how I know this—is a failed-artist-turned-flight-attendant who makes twice what I am making. The difference in financial prowess soon transmuted into a discussion on power itself. And S was turned on. In no time, we left the apartment together and his penis as erect as totemic figures I saw in picture books as a child was inside me by the time it hit midnight. We always started with missionary. The perfect position to make eye contact and be in my head instead of my body. I liked to ask him to collapse onto me for a few seconds before pulling out his boyfriend dick, which neither poses threat nor disappoints, for the next shove. During those intervals, I would wonder if he was experiencing castration intensity. Then, we returned to the usual arrangement of my legs spread widen open and him attentively looking at his own dick in and out of my ass. I could not help but be curious if S just wanted to not experience penis envy. However, that night, my ex asked me to ride him. I hate having agency in sex and controlling the intensity of fucking. Riding him did not fit with the idea that anal sex is the ultimate jouissance of surrendering the self. But there is nothing he could do to help me reach that threshold in the first place. My body is biologically wired to quarantine the pleasure of sex. I am only interested in if my anatomy—being ultra-sensitive, tight, or capable of endurance—could turn on the other person’s subjugating aggressiveness. Indeed, I could not feel like a helpless victim being denied the prize of communion had I gotten on top of my ex, but I was never one and would never become one through him. I deny my own prize. I invented a humiliation ritual to make sex with my ex more enjoyable for me. The sex was by my design shamefully affordable, in principle with his conviction of saving for the future, which does not involve me, for I insisted on barebacking and only using spit and requested him to not buy me food afterwards. I imagined that S was imagining I was L whenever S asked me for the permission to cum, which I of course granted him. That way, I felt unimportant and discarded, and therefore more in love with him. I left S’s apartment furiously after he suggested I was being promiscuous. I sat down in a tea shop across the street and the tea bag they served me said love is the highest forms of all virtues. –QINGYUAN DENG