Emily McIver (who prefers to simply be called ‘Emily’) is 27 years old. At age 18, during her freshman year of college, she was diagnosed with aggressive ovarian cancer and had to have emergency surgery to remove both her ovaries. She was forced to drop out of college and leave her new dorm and friends in order to undergo months of chemo. She never went back and, to this day, the idea of returning to school is too painful for her. She refers to the two years following her surgery as her ‘lost years,’ spent in and out of psychiatric and general hospitals, taking hormones which affected her body and mood in detrimental ways, as well as psych meds to counterbalance her situational and clinical depression.
But one spring day, the first warm day of the year, she was able to turn her grim reality of psychic pain and sterility on its head. On April 14th, her 20th birthday, she decided to become an artist. Her medium of choice would be most unusual: not pens, brushes or clay, but her own body and her capability to share orgasms with other human beings.
Her boyfriend at the time was taken aback by the idea at first, but slowly warmed up to it. Emily’s mind brimmed with ideas for art projects. To an outside observer, her art might have resembled pornography, but to her and those who truly understood her vision, orgasms were the most profound type of paint, and the collective human mind, body and soul was the ultimate canvas.
The gender and sexual orientation of her canvases would never be factored into her selection process. As long as she deemed their souls to be trustworthy and good, she would offer her ‘human partners’ the opportunity to take their friendship to a level unheard of in most platonic relationships. The Ritual would be simple: mutual oral sex with one orgasm each. If, at the conclusion of the Ritual, the person began to develop romantic feelings, Emily would reassure them that this was human nature and that to forgo clinginess was an essential step towards the realization of her transcendental artistic vision for humanity. She’d never coerce anybody into engaging in the Ritual. She would invite anyone aside from family members, minors, and persons unable to give consent to participate. Mutual trust and respect as well as an STI checkup beforehand were mandatory. She reserved the right to back out of the Ritual at ANY point: even in the middle of the act.
Nowadays she is employed as a licensed sex worker, which she considers her dream job because it melds her art with a source of income. She prefers to be naked whenever and wherever she can get away with it. She doesn’t own a bra, and when she has to (or chooses to) wear clothes, prefers plain cotton panties, wool socks and shirts and pants made from all natural materials. She shaves no part of her body, wears natural perfumes in place of deodorant, and bathes with only the most organic soaps and hair cleansers. Aside from her art career, she is the lead vocalist and guitarist in a band featuring her primary human partner Nathan Justice, as well as nine others: many of whom have ascended to the ‘next level’ with Emily.
Although she seems to have overcome the tragic events of her life and found her true calling, she finds herself unable to form deep enough connections with her human partners. Even with Nathan, she can’t bring herself to say that she loves him. The only people she’s ever expressed her love for are her parents, two brothers, and her cat Onyx who died the summer before she went away to college: an omen she regrets not being able to sense. This instance of 20/20 hindsight served her quite well when she was 25.
A potential human partner she had trusted at first began to exude a painful aura much like the one she felt when Onyx died, as well as in class the day before she went to the gynecologist and received her horrific diagnosis. With this hindsight at her disposal, she called off the Ritual with the man. He fussed and whined and begged her to reconsider, but she put her foot down and blocked him from social media.
A couple days later, she found out that an acquaintance of hers, also under consideration for human partnership, had been raped by the same man.
For Valentine’s Day this year, she plans on writing the words ‘Luv, Emily’ on a paper heart for Nathan: misspelling ‘love’ on purpose as a means of easing into the terrifying concept of true love and commitment.
She has low tolerance for bullshit and can be quite snappish, especially when she hasn’t had enough to eat and her blood sugar is low. Her hormone treatments caused her to put on weight right from the start: a nasty slap in the face for an 18 year old who had been relatively skinny her entire childhood.
Her nudism is essentially a drastic overcompensation for her distorted body image and lack of confidence. The hormones make her constantly hungry for fattening foods like meat, carbs and dairy. Nathan and many of her other human partners are vegan. She’s made many attempts to follow suit, but can’t bring herself to live that lifestyle. The reality of how animals are slaughtered for their meat in the modern world upsets her to no end, but the pangs of hunger she gets at around 8:00 every night, push any and all consideration for those poor, innocent, suffering animals out the window.
She and Nathan and the rest of the band have a gig coming up. Although she likes to be naked most of the time offstage, she finds that, onstage, she’s a totally different person. Performing in the band allows a different side of her to emerge: a gothic rock queen who prefers full-body Victorian style outfits to anything revealing. Her Lolita clothes carry with them a different kind of eroticism: focused more on what’s hidden rather than what’s revealed.
♥ ♥ ♥
As an author, I feel this is one of the most compelling characters I’ve ever come up with. My stories don’t usually focus on characterization, but I swear to god I’ve met Emily before or perhaps, have known her all my life. I can’t seem to get her out of my head now that she’s entered, and I’m totally fine with her staying there. When I decide to finally write her into a story or novel, I don’t want it to be !00% character-driven. These days, I have no desire to write a story that doesn’t have some sort of fantastic, sci-fi or weird fiction element. Perhaps she views her art as a means of communing with the Female Aspect of God that spoke to her once as a child through her cat Onyx. If Onyx’s death was a sign of terrible misfortune to come, perhaps Emily’s ultimate goal is to reconnect with this Divine Feminine Aspect that she feels retracted from her life when she received her diagnosis. Even though she and Nathan could theoretically adopt or undergo in vitro fertilization (her uterus was unaffected by the cancer because it was caught early), she desires to reclaim the ‘True Femininity’ that was stolen from her before it could blossom. This quest for Gnosis, so to speak, may just be what this piece needs in order to make it a Brett Petersen story and not something you’d read in a college classroom.
People reading this essay should keep in mind that no aspect of Emily’s character was conceived through the dirty lenses of the male gaze. If I end up describing her body in a story, it will only serve to advance the plot and develop her character. Lewdness and gratuitous objectification are barred from entering my fictional landscape. Human sexuality is the core of Emily’s art, and all of her works are predicated on mutual consent, trust and respect. Some readers might perceive her as a sexually promiscuous floozy, and frame my descriptions of her as the fantasies of a perverted male mind, but don’t be fooled. I’ve seen a lot of art that looks like porn, and I can usually tell when something is art and when it is not.
I am a cisgendered, heterosexual male author, but I actively refuse to portray my female characters through the goggles of boorishness. I view porn in my private time like any other person should be allowed to do, but at my age (31) I no longer confuse it with true art. Emily’s story may blur the lines between porn and art quite a bit, but that’s okay: that’s the point! If she was flat and uninteresting, one could make the argument for her being a porn star. However, she is anything but. She has amazing qualities for sure, but unlike Rey from Disney’s Star Wars, she isn’t always strong. She’s not as close to her human partners as she’d like to be, especially Nathan, the one dearest to her. Nathan has good and bad qualities too. He can be vapid and overly contrarian, but his sense of wit and aesthetics is a thing of beauty. He often chides her for not being vegan, but he buys her sausage and bacon at the grocery store every time he goes shopping. Their relationship isn’t all free love hippy-dippy shit. They fight, throw plates across the room and scream at each other, but then they make up, kiss, cuddle and watch old DVDs on his PlayStation 3. She rarely ever allows him to cum inside her. She’s self-conscious about her mutilated reproductive system and doesn’t want to be reminded of the fact that she can’t have children in the traditional way.
At the end of the day, she gives all the empathy she can muster to her human partners. She’s making strides to become closer to each one of them and desires to someday live in a house of six or seven people, all of whom can express their love for each other equally.
It should be noted that Emily’s desires are NOT my own. I would never live in a poly house or enter into such a relationship. I am a hopeless romantic/seeker of heteronormative monogamy: a sexual ‘square’ if you will. I have bizarre kinks which I am just now exploring for the first time with people online, but if someone like Emily were to offer to ‘take me to the next level of friendship’ with her, I don’t know how I’d feel. I’d probably be scared that my old tendency to cling would resurface and ruin it all. Emily would have to do a pretty good job of convincing me that even if feelings were to develop, it would just be a matter of acknowledging them for what they are, and letting them go. Emily certainly has more ‘balls’ regarding sexuality than I do at the moment.
I somehow doubt this would ever happen to me in real life, but a vaguely similar situation did arise this past summer. I’m very proud of myself for the way I handled it. We didn’t ‘do it,’ but the desire was definitely palpable. I sensed she had a ‘thing’ for me, but didn’t act on it. Perhaps the very act of maintaining a healthy distance was what attracted her to me in the first place. She and I are still friends and there will be no animosity on my part if sex with her never comes to pass. By not pursuing her that week, I was doing the exact right thing: being myself. Whenever the possibility of sex arises, I never seem to find the courage to make the first move. But when the ice is broken and the notion is laid out on the table, I tend to be pretty open-minded.
If Emily were to ask me to engage in ‘the Ritual’ with her, I think I’d be able to handle it just fine. It would be scary and nerve-wracking for sure: I’d feel constantly in danger of reverting to my old ways of thinking, but Emily would assure me that everything would be okay. Old concepts regarding sex and human relationships have to die to make room for new and more sophisticated, ethical philosophies.
I still want nothing more than a committed, monogamous relationship, but not with Emily. I’m mature and wise enough to respect her boundaries even though she’s a figment of my imagination. I still can’t get over how real she seems. Perhaps imaginary entities, like consciousness and the human soul are more real than we ever imagined. This idea brings me immense comfort. It assures me that matter and energy never disappear: they only change state. Consciousness simply undergoes a phase shift upon the cessation of human bodily functions.
What if, like the Goddess she so desperately seeks, Emily is a spirit that has taken up residence in my brain? Even though I conjured or ‘invented’ her, it feels like she has always existed and will continue to exist long after I’m gone. If there’s one thing I’d like to say to her, it’s this: welcome. Feel free to stay as long as you like, and in turn, I will give you tangible existence as words on a page. I have never made such a connection with a phantasm of my own design before. It may very well be that I simply wasn’t mature enough to handle and accept such a being in the past. In many ways, she’s a symbol or set of symbols: total freedom of body, mind and spirit, an icon of femininity who can’t conceive and therefore represents the incompleteness of all human beings. Welcome, Emily. Welcome to this world.
Welcome to the garden of the jellyfish! 