(no subject)

from The Erotics of Trent Reznor by Jude Doyle (via malinoi)
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My girlfriends and I used to listen to “Closer,” giggling, because it had the word “penetrate” in it. What strikes me now, as an adult, is that Reznor also sounds perilously close to giggling on that line; “you let me penetrate you,” he says, dropping his voice to a whisper as if he’s afraid someone will overhear. As if he’s just not sure he can get away with this one, even now.

It would likely horrify Reznor to realize I see him this way. You don’t make fifteen different videos styled to look like snuff films if you want to be known as a softy. But here’s the thing about softies: I respect them. It takes strength to be vulnerable. It takes courage to lay all your tender, urgent, poorly phrased feelings out in the open, out where someone might stomp on them or laugh at them or point out that you rhymed “now” with “now.”

I don’t need a Sensitive Guy; in my experience, guys who try to seem Sensitive never are. I don’t need to be cajoled into sex by some guy who tries to make it seem unthreatening. Sex is threatening, just like love is threatening, just like there’s a threat in any desire; love can break you, rip you open, and if you are very lucky, you will be in love enough to be destroyed by it, at least once. Even when you recover from that kind of love, you won’t be the same. Screw Bob Flanagan. Screw the fake snuff films. Love is the machine that rips your dick off and feeds your organs to the meat grinder, every time.