On Mutual Entanglement
New England Travelogues and revisiting Lucie Fielding's Trans Sex
Hello Lover,
Boston and Providence were absolutely magnificent, thank you for asking. I began with a Bloodplay class in Providence, hosted by Fist Boston. And let me tell you—I am acquainting myself with the pleasure of teaching sadistic technique to a room full of bloodthirsty freaks and watching the hunger dilate their pupils to the size of a dinner plate I could feast from. I also got to acquaint myself with new (to me) Bostonian kinksters, and I am thoroughly impressed at their capacity to be used! Between the whirlwind of kink magic, and the blessed civilian highlights (namely: dining at the famed Kowloon with Violeta Felix and the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum), I hope to make another trip in the future.
The final episode of my trip was a jewel: attending the book talk for the second edition of Trans Sex at All She Wrote Books. Trans Sex was written by my dear friend and frequent collaborator Athenais Nin, who is also known as the author Lucie Fielding. During her talk with Jordan Anderson, they discussed one of the major updates between the first and second edition of the book, which cites our collaboration. I am including a passage below.
Please enjoy this abridged transcript of Athenais’s talk with Jordan:
“We were set to teach like this Psychological Edgeplay class. And I when I teach classes, I don’t like teaching 101s. There’s so many people who could do it so much better than me. I always want to take a canted look at something—I love a niche topic more than anything, and I love a high concept topic more than anything. Psychological edge play certainly is that.
“And so [Empress Wu and I] spent all this time talking about it. And the two classes of that we taught, one was an online version, one was an in person version, and they both involved demo scenes…We’re planning this and and I have it—It occurs to me to say, ‘Darling friend, I don’t feel safe with you, but I trust you.’ And I was like, ‘What is that?’ Because I don’t—you should NOT feel safe with this woman! You do so at your peril!”
“She’ll actually cut you!”
“Thank God! Lovingly so. But I was like, ‘that’s it! that’s the thing.’ The solution that I come up with in the book, you don’t have to feel safe, but you do have to feel in solidarity with someone when you’re doing something hard. They’re in solidarity with you, you’re in solidarity with them. It’s a relational construct. One way that Wu described it was using ‘mutual entanglement.’ And it’s just brilliant, you know? I could go set off on all sorts of tangents, but the brilliance of it, I think, is that it captures two really important facets of solidarity and being in relationship. The first is that you are wrapped up in someone, you’re entangled. Like limbs in bed. Like a mycelial network, like root systems. And then the second facet of it is the idea of tangling with something. It’s the idea that there’s conflict. That entanglement, at the heart of the solidarity relationship, there has to be tension, friction, conflict, even.
“Then it all came together. And this made sense to me. because you’re talking about two or more people risking so much. And I think about how I don’t have to feel safe with my friends, my therapist, my play partners, my clients. But I do have to feel like I am mutually entangled with them.”
It is a divine experience to get to be entangled with, seen, and described by such a brilliant and perceptive person. Listening to Athenais’s reflections of our scenes years later has me re-reckoning with its longstanding impact. To be mutually entangled is to recognize a truth of play: I, as an actor in scene, have no choice but to be affected by the events of play, no matter how unfeeling I am portraying my role. I am there not only as a witness, but as an additional rider in the vehicle of the scene, even if I am the one driving.
If you are reading this, I highly, highly, highly recommend grabbing yourself a copy of the second edition of Trans Sex, no matter how you identify, as it methodically outlines thinking about sex differently, thinking of your body differently, thinking beyond the typical emotional and physical scripts of sex, which is what kink is all about too in my very humble opinion.
If you are NYC-based and interested in learning more with Athenais, she is teaching a day-long intensive in Brooklyn in on May 9th called Emotional Storms: Building Scenes and Dynamics to Haunt your Dreams. You might catch me there.
And if this spoke to you, and you’re interested in learning how mutual entanglement actually feels,
