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GUEST POST (September 29th, 2017): Thoughts on PDA? Answered by Lisa Borst

Despite long being an object of public scrutiny, regulation, judgment, and fantasy, the thing about sexual intimacy is that, for most of us, it finds its most overt expressions in relative private. In bed, in the backseat of a car, in rose-petal-strewn hotel rooms: these are the spaces where normative sex happens, or is imagined to happen. At the same time, a very fun part of being attracted to or in love with someone (at least for me) is that occasional upswelling of affection that surfaces at odd moments, when you feel you just must make out this instant—even if you’re in a public place.

But public displays of affection can easily morph into their nasty counterpart: public displays of exclusion. And this distinction, to me, totally depends on what kind of “public” you’re in.

My current partner and I are both women, and we tend to regulate the ways we touch each other in direct relation to our surroundings. There are plenty of places where we more or less have at it—for example, at Dyke Night at Aurora (RIP). But if we’re hanging out in smaller-scale settings with our single friends who we know are fundamentally lonely? Maybe we tone it down for the sake of not excluding the people around us. Ditto for places where we know we’ll be subject to uncomfortable, unproductive questions or interpellations—like at the clock repair shop in North Providence, where the elderly owner once told us, after an unwise bit of PDA, that he’d had a lifelong fascination with scissoring. (Reader, I suggest you take your clock-repair business elsewhere.) The aggression, discomfort, or judgment that can surface in response to PDA of all sorts is, I’d argue, a result of the same kind of exclusion that your lonely friend might feel if you and your bae start hooking up in front of them: regardless of whether an onlooker specifically wants to make out with you, there is still something unnerving about a private thing erupting in public, a reminder that two people know each other more intimately than other members of the public can know them.

But sometimes certain situations all but demand subjecting onlookers to exclusion and discomfort, and sometimes a little bit of public romance is exactly what’s needed to disrupt our sanitized understandings of what public space is for. The uncomfortable fact at the core of PDA, of course, is sex, and the uncomfortable fact at the core of sex is that—as Lauren Berlant, that better, wiser LB, reminds us—it is the means by which we most readily forfeit our own sovereignty. And the metonym of this forfeiture that is PDA has, in many cases, enormous political power: I’m thinking of AIDS-era kiss-ins, for example, which forced people in public to confront queer sexualities at a moment at which they were feared and reviled. If we take as a given the idea that PDA is, in most cases, fundamentally about communicating care, then I think it’s generally helpful to ask yourself: is my communication of care occurring at the discomfort of someone else? If so, what utility might that discomfort have? If you don’t have a great answer to that second question, I’d suggest you get a room.

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Question #1 (July 1st, 2017): How can I maintain a sense of self when alone for long periods of time?

Dear Alone and Wandering/Wondering (AWW), I've never been a big fan of the introvert/extrovert dichotomy (here's something no one has ever said before: splitting things into two rigid categories doesn't work! A revelation, I know) but I think it is worth asking yourself how being surrounded by others and how being alone feeds you in different ways. Your question, how to maintain a sense of self during long stretches of solitary time, suggests that you feel more "yourself" (what does that mean to you?) when around others. And by "others" I'm assuming you mean people with whom you have substantial relationships with, yes? Otherwise, just ride the subway all day and you will totally discover urself!!! In developing a sense of self, it can be helpful to spend time with people who you feel know you, to a degree, because they often project certain expectations of you, according to who they understand you to be. If you spend enough time together, you develop patterns which ideally feel true to your relationship and to each of you as individuals. I find that these projections and habits within my relationships can sometimes be comforting and affirming but also sometimes constraining. Along our *journeys of self-discovery,* interacting with others can also be helpful because getting to know someone leads us to find bits of ourselves reflected in them as well as discover parts of people that are mind-blowingly different (not everyone feels like they are careening towards some imminent disaster on a daily basis?!). Some people say there's danger in definitions that only exist as a relation. As in, I'm this thing, because I'm not this thing. But I'm not really convinced! Shit, everything's relative...(thanks Einstein) but I DO think there's danger when relational definitions become rigid and self-perpetuating. i.e.; If I've decided my friend is the cat lady and I'm the dog person, every time we are together we will look to reinforce that within our relationship. This could be an issue when maybe, for whatever reason, I begin dreaming of adopting an adorable Siamese rescue cat. I guess what I'm wondering, is where does there exist the most room for inconsistency? Because (shocker) we are all remarkably inconsistent. Sometimes I think there's more room for me to be inconsistent when I'm alone than when I'm with others. When I'm alone, no one is projecting a narrative onto me of what it is I want and how I will behave. I have to completely come up with those answers on my own. Could it be that this inconsistency is making you feel lost and confused? If so, is it possible that the feeling of being lost and confused is actually more true to who you are than a projection of yourself who is completely directed and self-assured in everything you do and want? What if our "sense of self" is a superficial cover for the complex, confused, contradictory selves we actually are? Is that reassuring or depressing?

<3, 

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