The Weight of Fucking: Zanta Nkumane's Ode to Orgasms, to Full Unbridled Pleasure.

When my orgasm comes for me, it lingers on top of my skin because I didn't know the end goal was to orgasm as a sign of enjoyment, it has more time to slot itself into my cells. When my first orgasm comes for me, I am free from the pressure of penetration as the pinnacle of desire.

ZANTA NKUMANE WRITES!!! I'd like to state that fact on this platform, because people on my Facebook have heard it many a time. Nkumane's writing is the hill I choose to rest on.

Reading "The weight of fucking" felt like an awakening, a kind of undressing that only happens when someone affirms something you have held to be true but couldn't articulate. In this essay, Nkumane writes about experiencing pleasure in its fullness, an ode to orgasms and sexual exploration that does not centre the penis or penetration. He writes about how so much power is placed on the endgame of partaking in sex, that the journey leading to it is neglected, more so when one has not truly experienced how liberating and transcendent the anticipation is. He likens that to construction, how it requires a strong foundation and its completion need not be rushed. Like a house, even when it is finished, you are constantly fixing and decorating it. Pleasure can be experienced as an endless exploration of one's loves, fantasies and desires.

& sometimes your hand is all you have to hold yourself to this world & it's the sound not the prayer that enters the thunder not the lightning that wakes you.

Ocean Vuong wrote about the beauty of masturbation, of self-pleasure, and how knowing what you want sexually and being able to give it to yourself allows you to be able to articulate that when engaging in sexual intercourse with someone else; which is something that the protagonist in Nkumane's short, descriptive and bold inserts, does. Having discovered the height of pleasure and given it to himself, he does not compromise when he's placed in a position of having to submit. I also appreciated how the piece critiques how penetrative sex is seen as the epicentre to pleasure, when in actuality, any kind of sex can lead to an orgasm without it.

Pleasure exists in many shapes and forms, and it is through dismantling these limitations that we can truly, fully experience its beauty and liberation.