ISABEL puma KENNER

What does it feel like to love beyond being owned?

Every person I meet I excavate myself through one notch further. I used to think I loved people because of what they offered in my life. Now people are beautiful because of who they are in their own life. Something beautiful that I cannot and will not touch. They don’t need to go anywhere but exactly where they are; I equally remain exactly where I am. In the club, whether the strip or the weekend bar, I love the tantalized novelty we approach each other with. What’s your name, where you from, I like your jacket, what perfume is this, tell me about your tattoos, you seem familiar, I’ve never met someone like you, you’re funny.

Someone who strikes a particular resonance of beauty that makes you want to not just excavate further, but deeper; that’s one in a million. Getting past the ‘this is new’ of it all. What sort of energy carries that? Recognizing something that’s worth existing alongside, without disrupting or muddying their beautiful water. Ownership is something that’s been on the chopping block of my mind as of late. It’s commonly dissected through attachment styles, but to my psyche and history of processing, unwinding & rewriting it is a story of possession. What does it look like to own oneself and to prioritize that relationship, knowing that you can never own or tame another.

When men attempt to enter my life whether via a temporal sexual exchange, or a shot in the dark at an enduring and unyielding coexistence, all I sense is this concept of ownership. Since committing to the field of using sexuality as a vehicle for money, there’s been a surrender of the constancy that monogamy provides; that secluded paradise ruled out. There is a suspension of belief in any relationship type, purely because none of them sound quite right. All sound, taste & feel based around the concept of ownership, or lack thereof. Possession rests at the heart-based center, feeling-wise, of them all.

Monogamy is considered the basis of homeostasis. Non-monogamy, or non-ownership, is still honoring the concept of ownership in the absence of it. Polyamory speaks of loving multiple people at once, which denotes an air of freedom. However, the need to title it feels like yet another rebellion against the nature of ownership. Something about naming a way to love feels limiting and reductive, even when freedom is involved. Rebellions to me often feel like opposition born of polarity and misunderstanding, rather than integration and innovation. What kind of love does not require a title, a container, a ruler? Why do we require such labels and what are they keeping us safe from? Misunderstandings, judgments, incompatibility, emotional fluff, excess, complications. That’s fair.

All of these questions seem so plain, and the nature of these titles are incredibly clear for the majority of people that they contain. These words are not intended to instigate those who align with these values and claim they don’t know the answers, their answers. There is of course a part of my heart that longs to solely be loved by one, and another part that longs to love freely without rules, and another part that wants to love as deeply as I can with multiple other hearts at once. It’s a sensible triptych, human. However, the question that I aim to beg is what kind of love lives beyond these titles, both integrating and transcending the concept of ownership, confinement, control.

This is the question my soul began to long to explore once I accepted that there is no foreseeable future where my transactional intimacy with strangers would be curbed or sacrificed. However, I am a lover and always find myself in the pursuit of loving another, in any form, but especially the life altering, heart churning, fire taming kind of way. Some simply call this romance, others limerence, others obsession, others desire, others something other. What is there that’s left to hold onto when this aching desire doesn’t want to lead to any of these predetermined agreements or limits. Even those that present as limitless somehow feel limited. That’s not something that I know how to explain. All I can name is the antithesis of love I sense beneath it all, encompassing it all, surrounding the all that’s surrounding all of it. I feel we’re structuring an exchange, but not honoring the ever-changing organism that love is and will continue to be.

Exchanging sexual energy for work rules out an air of loneliness and lust that drives many dynamics. It also rules out a sense of jealousy, because if I’m playing, so can you. When I choose a partner it’s not solely about physical desire and it’s not about sequestering something in me that feels vulnerable. I definitely don’t have the desire to sleep around, if anything I require very particular conditions to want to have sex with someone because my libido gets drained from work. What conjures my sex drive feels like it’s at the heart of Eros, which is the desire to unite with another being, and all the intense fantasy that Eros conjures. It’s not solely about your career, your style, your capacity for love, your taste in music. It’s an unspoken subtlety that not everyone can emulate, something deliciously exclusive, secret, inimitable.

What remains is something bare, reduced, truthful. To come as you are and be honest about it. To share what you secretly desire, how you enjoy being loved, what you’re afraid of. Cutting to the chase in sexual dynamics professionally creates a longing to cut to the very same chase in vulnerable settings. I don’t want to guess who you are and what you want from me. Although cutting to the chase by no means implies rushing. There’s no need for a conversation around if I’m single, what I’m looking for, what my last relationship was like. There’s no need to contextualize ourselves in each other’s lives, nor carve anything out to find a way to make room. There’s only a need to candidly assess what our individual energies feel like together in this present moment.

All the obsession and self abandon comes from hypothesizing and hyperbolizing and yearning and baiting and waiting long enough to reply without seeming too eager. There will be no more of this in the presence of a sex worker. Be honest, be true. Come without hesitation, yet feel no desire to rush. There’s nowhere to get to. We are exactly where we are and will always be. If this doesn’t feel good now, when will it? Do not mistake the desire to get in my pants with the desire to be on the phone with me at 4AM talking aimlessly of life and its questions and never ending answers.

The question of who the stripper does and does not love is far less pertinent than how does the stripper love. The partner asking that question is the one that’s already arrived at the answer. To be in consideration of how to handle such an unfamiliar dynamic. To be willing to learn. The stripper loves in a way that moves beyond desire and physical offerings of any kind. The stripper, when self-realized, is free. The sex worker, when self-realized, has the power. This is a liberated woman we’re speaking about. One that’s not concerned with the positioning of her femininity in relation to her eligibility of being someone’s wife. One that’s not afraid of expressing her sexuality just as she wishes to express it, thus moving beyond the role of simply pleasing a man. This is a woman that’s pleasing herself by expressing herself, and what’s sexier than that? Owning it? There is nothing to be owned, tamed, or claimed there.

The quality that leads us to truly desire to excavate further is something much more rare than we make it out to seem. We are only granted so many great loves in one lifetime. There are important people to meet in passing too, and it’s very important to meet people in passing. These people give our great loves contrast, tone & saturation. It’s important to fuck when we want to fuck. Even in those moments when fucking isn’t about the person we’re fucking, but just fucking for the sake of fucking. It’s important to live a life that’s colored by our desires. It’s important to give our great love the freedom to go out and reconvene. Even if that time in between takes seasons, stories, lifetimes. 

Love beyond containers of ownership feels like a bond that can’t be described. A love that is loved so deeply it is set free. A meeting ground where we can share all that we’ve seen in the recent past and what we see in our future. Where we don’t alter each other’s luck. Where we allow our rivers to flow parallel. Where what we desire and how we’ve acted upon it in relation to sharing our minds and bodies and energies with others can be shared as little or as much as we please because we know it doesn’t constitute the nature of our desire towards one another. As a sex worker, my sexual encounters with others don’t detract from the love I have for a partner, they clarify and amplify it.

I can’t help but address how closely akin these sentiments are to the containers of non-monogamy, polyamory, and open relationships. However, I equally can’t shake how antithetical it feels to place these sentiments in a container to be owned, labeled, and sorted. That is the very nature of the connection at hand, how ephemeral the quality is. There is a desire for love to ebb and flow like seasons and always find its way back, wild, untamed, yet deeply reliable. Something invisible and constant. The beauty is that this is something you can sense within your first few encounters with another. As a sex worker, there is no making them out to be something they’re not. There’s no distortion or extraction. There’s only freedom and presence. There’s only the mystery of great love.