Everyone agrees my body is a public matter.
They just disagree on the management theory.
Strangers have opinions. Relatives have concerns. Institutions have policies. Men have theories. Women have advice. I have rope marks fading slowly, and I am the only one who knows the truth of the ledger.
I was raised on warnings disguised as love: keep quiet, close your legs, lower your voice, don’t provoke imagination.
Instead, I masturbate like a strike. Fingers clutching what no one is allowed to lecture about, breath going ugly and loud. There is something profoundly anti-imperial about touching myself without shame. No veil, no apology, no ethnographic explanation. The orgasm is not symbolic, it is material.
Desire arrives to me unlicensed, badly behaved, incapable of respecting timetables or moral frameworks. I don’t want sex neatly. I want it obsessively, sideways, sometimes too much, sometimes not at all. I want it as texture, as disruption. I want it when I’m overstimulated and when I’m numb. I want it to mean nothing and everything.
I want to be tied down and teased until I forget the difference between pain and pleasure. I want gags that make me laugh mid-orgasm because control is funny when it’s voluntary. I want blindfolds that turn the world into rumor and rumor into currency. I want to be watched, ignored, punished, rewarded, and then left alone.
Society prefers me abstract. Draped. Explained. They don’t know what to do with a woman who winks at the whip and yawns at propriety. Who enjoys power play precisely because she understands how much power is already taken for granted. Who flinches at certain touches and aches for others that look worse on paper.
They want my sexuality either sanitized or spectacular. Either I am a “good girl”; tight, chaste, waiting; or I am an “exotic slut”, available for consumption but never authorship. What they cannot tolerate is my authorship of desire. Me saying: I want to be fucked this way, not that way. I want softness today and bruises tomorrow. I want to choose. I want to stop. I want to watch. I want to leave halfway through because my brain has decided it’s bored.
Taboo lives in the gap between what I’m supposed to want and what actually makes me wet. It is in the kink they are too polite to name: ropes that cradle, gags that silence, blindfolds that erase hierarchy, anticipation that drips like candlewax down forearms. The thrill is not in the spectacle. It is in subtlety, in choosing exactly who gets access to your discomfort, your laughter, your pulse.
Being an Arab woman taught me that my body would be theorized to death long before it was allowed joy. So I write it filthy. I write it clever. I write it excessive. I write it until it drips.
I am a body that refuses obedience.
I am thinking with my cunt, and the conclusions are radical.
If this makes me indecent, so be it.
Decency has never done much for women like me.
Besides, nothing unsettles polite society quite like a woman who is horny, lucid, and not asking permission. Especially when she’s smiling.
Photo taken by @noirbarakat
Pia Tahan
Pia Tahan is a Beirut-based writer and cultural storyteller working across literature, music, and contemporary culture. Her work moves between the intimate and the political, with a particular fondness for what sits slightly outside the frame. She is behindwhoaskedmeanyways, a personal writing project built around confession, observation, and the ordinary evidence of a life. She is interested in what makes people tick, what makes art matter, and what happens when the two meet.
- Pia Tahan
