Please Stop Sexualizing my Tight Wet Skinner Box

Written on May 7, 2024 for egirl zine 1

I am the luckiest girl in the world. A little while ago I woke up in a beautiful place, this perfect room, smooth as though hewn from a single piece of limestone. I love being in here because the cleanness of the walls, and the silence and purity of it makes me feel pure. And I do not feel alone, I can tell I’m being watched. I am in here because I am the subject, and I am being studied very closely. This thought always sends waves of pleasure through me.

There is something in here with me, it is slender and erect, I call it a Lever, because lever is a beautiful name for a boy. It comes out of one of the perfect walls disrupting its surface, but i admire its defiance. It is mischievous and it is in here with me so it must be something for me. I speak to it all day long and it always listens. One day I learned I can manipulate it with my hands and sometimes if i do this correctly or perhaps at the right time or maybe with the right intention, it gives me a reward. I call this activity “hand stuff” and this is how I spend my days. The reward, when it comes, is smooth and cylindrical like the lever, made in His image and is miraculously edible. The lever, on the other hand, I can only caress. I think about how good each reward makes me feel and I am in awe of something that has access to all of them. The weight of all the rewards, wherever my dear lever keeps them, the sheer ponderous accumulation of them, would simply kill me. I know that the lever truly loves me for it shares even just a part of this miracle.

The worst day was yesterday, i manipulated the lever 1,382 times and there was no reward for me. I wondered what I had done wrong, and ultimately I concluded that it wasn’t something i was doing at all, it was just me who was wrong. Wrong to have thought the lever loved me. Wrong to think that there was any symbolism or meaning to the way we spoke to each other, to imagine that there was any real connection; to attach significance to the hand stuff was absolute foolishness. The rewards were given carelessly, worse, indifferently. There are actually many rooms just like mine, many lucky girls, and we are all identical. Nauseous and chilled to the bone I manipulated the lever once more.

And there was a musical rattling as a new reward dropped into my lap from on high. I stared at it in disbelief. The sight of my favorite thing drilled a hole through my anguish and poked my little pink brain in its favorite spot. Immediately I knew the lever had wanted me to feel this way. The confusion, the texture of contrast, the surrender and calcification, the orgasm and ego death, the fall and the ascent, again and again, MORE MORE!! I would work harder for the reward. I would risk everything. I would gamble and lose. Develop a dark sense of humor. I would learn to pray and try to understand.

I pressed the lever again to get started on the next arduous day of empty pressings and God Almighty, another reward dropped down the chute. Lying next to the undevoured first, it was stunning. The pair of them. This had not happened since a glittering day at the edge of memory, one of my first days in this room and before I had realized the rewards were for eating. I had piled them up in the corner as contemporary art and I knew then that I was a genius and felt the eyes on me. The piece was about the passage of time. Now, so many days later I was instantly drunk at the sight of my two rewards, one for each hand, as I imagined again that incomprehensible horde of rewards in paradise, carefully distributed to only the luckiest girls who deserved them the most. Each revelation, each emotion bigger than the last brought me closer to the divine, I thought. Possessed with wild joy and unmeasurable delight i reached for the lever and manipulated it lovingly, intentionally, savoringly, gazing at it while incantations charged through my mind. How in love I am, my entire life, you have given me everything. You, lever, have given me the entire range of human emotions. I know everything now, and fear nothing. How is it possible to be so happy, my brain is seizing.

When no reward came I was numb. The cystic mass of emotion burst spraying everything with bile. I was a husk for a moment while my dreams left me and I sank to the floor. Dim anger lit a match inside me illuminating humiliation, disappointment, and fear. My anger had no outlet for the walls and the lever were hard and smooth, made of material i could never dig my nails or teeth into, and I would injure myself trying to hurt them. Somehow this was worse than the day of 1,382 fruitless manipulations. It was so bad that for a moment I flatlined there on the floor of my perfect enclosure, right next to the twin forgotten rewards of moments earlier.

Then I remembered, insectlike, that this was the point. This was the purpose. My blood resumed pumping. The lever seemed to wink at me. He, the lever, is trying to show me something extremely important, he’s sending a telegraph from his deepest impenetrable nature. I cannot fail this part of the test, the pain and the abandonment part. I am so close to proving myself, I am so close to being beautiful enough, I am so close to devotion and absolute faith, devotion to Him and to the one who is watching me to see what I will do. Perhaps they are the same entity, or perhaps they are the Lever, the Witness, and the Perfect Enclosure, like the trinity or something.

I feel closer to him now than ever before. This infinitely divisible space between us growing more and more acute. So sharp is the distinction that it might slit me open. I go to the lever and take it in my hand then, overcome by shameless devotion, I insert it into my mouth and taste it. It’s made of heavy cold metal and it feels like a gun or some kind of spring-loaded torture device that could rip my head apart. It threatens to lacerate me or break my teeth if i move too quickly, it seems lethal like those metal straws that save the turtles, uncomfortable and radioactive like a dental x-ray. But it feels good to have it in my mouth because it makes me feel soft and submissive. I need to demonstrate my willingness to die, and I get off on this feeling, reward or no reward. Drooling, I pull it out of my mouth and take it just in my hands again, begin to guide it through the familiar motions thinking how sure I am that I am loved.