AA: I feel like they’re pretty much impossible to pull off, which is why I think this book is so bloody impressive because I never felt embarrassed when reading it.

AP: That’s great; that’s very encouraging. I wanted to try to write some sexy poems because – like humour, like horror – to turn text into sensation in the body for the reader, if it works, is really difficult. If it’s good, if it works, we have a visceral answering to what we read. This would be the aim – not only a kind of cerebral: ‘oh, that’s a nice theme’, but actually a felt response or a sense of enablement. I’m curious about a paradigm for the body and for sex and for desire that would leave everybody a dignity, and which is not always a trading of something. Not [only] a transaction. It’s very hard to manoeuvre existing paradigms for this to happen – but I’m adamant about it. It doesn’t also mean it’s particularly ‘vanilla’ but an exploration of where this new space can be.

Isn’t that the Oscar Wilde quote: ‘everything’s about sex except sex, which is about power?’ It’s witty; but I’d question that. Not necessarily that it doesn’t have to be, or that it shouldn’t be, but like: is it only ever about that? It’s a bit similar to: are we as neoliberal subjects only fighting tooth and nail against each other for survival? Is that all we are? Is sex just about power? I don’t know, of course. Maybe yes and… And, and, and. This proliferating sentence can go on and on.

AA: I read this incredible piece that you wrote in Literary Hub, in June [2019], about envy. You were just talking then about the female relationship with the body, which is something that I’m thinking about a lot in my own life. I’m really unhappy with my body. Especially now that it’s not doing the things that it usually does because I’m not living the life I usually live. And you write in this piece – it’s called ‘The Writer Antonia Pont vs. Envy’: ‘If someone wants to make you look too much, then my advice is: fucking riot, because more is at stake than you know’. I feel like there’s a question in there about protecting your time and attention from not just social media but everything, to link it to what we’re talking about just now, with regards to protecting yourself from being co-opted by a gaze that’s not your own. By a frame of reference that’s not your own in terms of the body, not what sex is to you. You strike me as a person that works pretty hard at dismantling that stuff moment to moment.

AP: Yes, you’ve got to fight the fight. Don’t lie down. Do it standing up!

It’s really interesting that you connect that essay where I was thinking much more about when someone makes you look at everyone’s achievements. You know, this thing that happens. And, maybe I’m just more willowy and fragile than everyone else, but it’s pretty intense when everyone just presents their achievements over and over, in a list. At conferences, parties, scenes, festivals, everyone is rocking up to each other with a pre-prepared speech of Stuff That I’m Doing, Will Do, Have Done and Have Been Applauded For. You know, it’s like: ‘holy moly, like what? This is not a human exchange.’ Is this what we – as neoliberal subjects – are trained to do? Constantly to claim our turf, hoping that this intimidates someone else into incapacity. It’s just not much fun, actually. Others might find it fun. Maybe I don’t have a competitive style about the way I move through the world. I was talking about how, when we’re forced to look at other people’s gains or achievements or whatever, for many people, the question might be: does it incapacitate me? If so, then we could try to avoid [so much] exposure sometimes. Try to avoid having someone constantly tell you how great they’re doing or whatever, which is all this weird kind of smoke-and-mirrors that everyone’s involved with. Social media’s big on that sometimes. And sometimes not, when it can be real discussions happening about [shared] events and that’s quite interesting.

It’s also interesting to me that you connected this to sex. I’m interested in the danger of the scopic. Once I was joking with a friend of mine who’s deeply involved in psychoanalysis and I was joking that – you know – sex is not about the vision. It’s about what you feel in the dark. And then she joked back, saying: ‘except that it also is.’ The gaze is involved, you know, from a purely psychoanalytic stance. Looking is involved, and so that’s true too.

But, as I’ll say to anyone, I’ve never used porn in my life. (Except for one weird lesbo porn thing that my cousin thought I should see ‘cause he thought that if I was gay, he was being really racy. He’s like: ‘oh, I’ve got some lesbian porn that you’ll like’. And I was like: ‘can’t we just go to the beach and have the swim we planned? Why are we sitting here in this creepy apartment, watching this thing you think I want to see?’)

That’s the only time I’ve ever seen any porn and I’ve prevented myself because I don’t want to see [or get training in] that gaze … Of course, it’s totally there, you know, and I say all this out of ignorance of the form, since – of course I know – it’s as diverse as you could possibly want. Heaps of people who make porn are like also trying to subvert that gaze. It’s a whole thing. So, I’m also in an ignorant position regarding those productions, but there’s something about being forced to see one’s own position sexually as a thing, rather than to experience it. And I think it’s confusing in a way. It’s like, if we want to dissect – in male/female het-relations – different kind of positions, then I don’t know…People can see one position as less dignified than the other and that’s really problematic, if that’s someone’s pleasure. I think it’s weird, and just a bit thankless to be told: ‘oh, you know, when you do this act, this is how you look. Doesn’t look very dignified, does it? Or, you know, it looks like you’re kind of taking it, or it looks like … whatever.’ And maybe, we shouldn’t be looking so much because actually the experience of it is really not like the film’s gaze at all.

And maybe for some people, that doesn’t bother them, but I think there’s this interest for me in a sort of levity and intensity of experience, in humour and dignity, basically. And, how does this dignity function? Because I’m still surprised, despite the fact that we’re supposedly secular or post-secular or whatever you want to say, that actually guilt features; people have guilt around sex and desire, [build sex and desire around guilt]. It’s still there. People feel guilty about wanting stuff, and it’s not joyous. And I think there’s something for me about what I – from the outside, in my ignorance of it – perceive porn to possibly be (and I don’t really want to be enlightened) that it also functions really conservatively. A sort of profound conservatism, you know. A bit like how people wondered if de Sade was in fact profoundly conservative. If we are rebelling against something or imagining that we are naughty [or ‘bad], it’s only in relation to a paradigm that says that that even matters. To really transcend guilt and a certain conservatism, you have to get out of there, you know?