وجبت wejbet

Editor’s note: This essay contains descriptions and discussion of sexual abuse.

There is an Arabic word that defines a concept in the culture I grew up in. That word is difficult to translate, but it is embroidered with duty, honour, politeness, hospitality, obligation. In my adult life I add imprisonment and enslavement to it too. The word is wejbet. Someone comes to your grandmother’s funeral; you must now attend their grandmother’s funeral. Someone decides to light up a cigarette in your non-smoking household; you bear and choke on it. Your aunty who hates the sight of you is sick in the hospital; you must visit her.

I recognise these examples are bleak and that the practice likely arose from something more nourishing in ancient-village days like, Neighbour, let me feed you some of these olives while you visit since you were so generous with your soap last year, but somewhere along the evolution of custom that shit got messed up. It probably has to do with that most insidious of things: capitalism. When it all became less about care, reciprocation, and more about value. You should visit your aunty because you want to, not because it means she will place a tick by your name in a wejbet spreadsheet. I think of the concept of Xenia—the sacred bond between host and guest, ritualised and institutionalised. How terrified the Ancient Greeks were of not being hospitable to strangers for fear that it was Zeus in disguise. Can you even call it hospitality if it is ignited by fear?

Someone decides to light up a cigarette in your non-smoking household; you bear and choke on it.

When I was a child, it wasn’t uncommon for male relatives to fondle my genitals as they greeted me. As though weighing my manhood, checking that it was present and burgeoning. I cannot tell if I was a special victim of this. Sometimes it felt nice when my genitals were touched by these men because it is a fresh sensation for a child. There were certainly relatives I preferred to be touched by if it had to happen. And then there were those whose hands I would recoil from because intuition in children is not yet suppressed by the regularities of the world, making it easy to pick out monsters. When I did pull away from those moustached, oily ogres I was branded effeminate. Because apparently the real man (child) grins and bears it when another man plays with his dick.

My parents were neither acknowledging nor ignoring any of this because they did not want me to be a precious, whiny kid. If a family member wanted to hold me down and kiss me all over my face, then I couldn’t be fastidious. I had to be grateful for the affection, polite. But my parents grew up in a village where community lines were blurred because of survival and integrity. Babies died, food was sometimes scarce, three mud homes huddled together was an entire neighbourhood. I did not know that village. I knew the inner west of Sydney. I knew Strathfield North Public School with Ms Bennett who told us that touching someone without permission was not okay. I knew children who did not let themselves be touched.

I am seven and he is twelve. He takes me into the bedroom, shuts
the door, the parents are distracted by the barbecue. We sit on
his bed facing the wall. He shows me how to rub his dick. He
does the same to me. After a while I feel nauseous from the
sensation and ask if I can leave.

I am late to telling this story. I am late to describing the shit that men do to each other, with each other. I am late to addressing the spectrum of powerlessness that goes from fetish to violence and back. Late to acknowledging my self-obsession and what even is embodiment? It feels silly to write this as an indulgent gay man. I admit to the privilege in writing this as a mostly healthy man. But my gosh, it is something I did not invite / I am now inviting / I want / I do not want.

I am skinny from being poor and taking party drugs in London. At
the gay sauna after a night out, a marshmallow man pushes me
into a cubicle and gropes me with one hand while trying to lock
the door with the other. I scream Help! and two guys burst in, pry
the marshmallow off me, pull me out of the tiny black hole.

As an adult it has become common for men to fondle my genitals. I invite them to weigh them, to check if they are burgeoning. Most times it is nice to be touched there. I spend a lot of time searching for fresh sensations. Other times it feels so horrible to be reminded of being a child, of being in the clutch of someone I am too polite to say no to, and I recoil which has resulted in me being branded selfish, distracted, arrogant.

For a while I convinced myself that my body was not mine to keep. That it was something I was borrowing from the earth—which I had no hold over. If Eric from the gym decided to box my chest as I greeted him by the squat racks, if someone grabbed my butt on the dancefloor, I could not stop that. I thought that having agency over your body was a silly neo-liberal thing that capitalised bodies, that held them at bay, in shame, upheld the myth of agency. I thought I was smarter than that. I thought that depowering and decentring my body, myself, was political, anti-fascist, cathartic, clinical. That it was my salve to all the touch.

I see how it was a coping mechanism now. I see how the imprint of a fist on my chest, a hand on my butt, lives on me, in me. How wejbet still plays out on my body. How my skin is connected to my organs is connected to my brain is connected to that dark current that swirls in the sea of my memory. I see how I must live with that person’s spontaneous decision to touch me.

I am at a Sydney sexual health clinic for chlamydia treatment.
While asking questions, for which the answers are input into
a computer, Nurse Humphrey B Bear pauses, places one hand
firmly in the crevice of my thigh and groin, his other hand rubs my
beard, and he tells me how handsome I am. The chair I am in is
backed against a wall and wedged between his desk and the
examination bed. I pull back, bashing my head on the gyprock.

I am thinking of Zeus again. He was a nasty God, really. Abused his authority, his offspring, his devotees. Maybe the men who have touched me are all Zeus. Perhaps I should count myself as religious, a worshipper of sorts. But religion is also politics, and all politics are body politics. I am processed, marginalised, cuddled, slapped, licked, because of and through my brown skin and my black hair. I am avoided and approached at the bar because of my shape, my teeth, my tattoos. I get a job or not because of the queerness and ethnicity inscribed on my body and through my voice and my hands that write. I am ashamed when you see my body. I am loved when I see my reflection, when I take fifteen selfies and most of them are good. My body is a transmogrifying symbol depending on where I am, how I am bent, presented. When I was twenty-one years old my foreskin was cauterised off me because I could not retract it properly. There were options that could have saved my flesh, options shut down by the surgeon I could afford. Circumcision was the easiest procedure—for him—and I was a good guest. I paid six hundred dollars to watch and smell my skin being scorched, removed, piled in a small metal tray. A cut penis and an uncut penis carry entirely different meanings to me, to you, to the government, to religion.

Religion is also politics, and all politics are body politics.

My beard can be a repellent in some airports and an invitation to a white guy at a Mardi Gras party to ask me for tips on how to shape his own beard. I said trim it like a hedge, go easy, don’t use one clipper length all over, the beard needs to be constructed, manicured, kept. I thought the interaction was a wholesome one, especially after having felt so much anxiety before walking into the party, and even as I watched his eyes rolling all over my body and around and around in his head. But when I turned to walk away with my vodka soda, he called out, Hey, what country are you from, as though he could not hear my very Sydney accent made by the vibrating bits in my throat persuaded by the convicts and invaders of this beautiful land. I did not pour my drink on him or scream or spit because I was a visitor in the home of that party. Instead I was forced to internalise being brought back to my body, to my otherness, to my identity, when my guard was lowered. Instead, I spent the next two hours trying hard to not break down, to stifle paranoia, to let myself dance in a way that did not draw the wrong kind of attention. My body is a transmogrifying symbol. My body is kneeling before Zeus, awaiting Him to feed me his flesh.

I am at a Melbourne sexual health clinic because I’ve slept with
someone who has gonorrhoea. The doctor asks what my
ethnicity is, says that he has heard Lebanese guys are well
endowed. The doctor asks if there is any discharge from my
penis. I say no. He says that he should check. I lay on the bed,
pull my shorts down. He holds my soft thing, strokes. He keeps
stroking my not entirely soft thing. I think about my mum to stay
soft. It doesn’t work. When I’m hard and he is still going and I’m
staring at the ceiling and I feel that particular nauseousness from
when I was seven spread through me, I half sit up and say,
There is no discharge.

Keeping a body requires a tremendous amount of care. It must be exercised, cleaned, preened, medicated, relaxed, touched. It can be exhausting. And it can mostly be outsourced, which places a fiscal value on it. Shucking off the obligation to my body is absolutely fine—until it is not. I search for autonomy while others invest in me. I am trying to be responsible for my body while paying someone to massage it and inject it with Botox. I exponentially feed the market with my muscle and wrinkles and sinew, and it too feeds me. I am out of touch.

I am avoiding lizard eyes on the dancefloor, but he keeps
creeping up. I’ve got my shirt off because it’s hot and I feel sexy.
The MDMA is working. I go to take a piss. At the urinal, the lizard
appears beside me. He looks, I don’t. Then he clasps his mouth
onto my nipple, sucks, bites. I don’t pull away for fear of leaving
my flesh behind. I stamp on his foot, he unlatches.

In my thirties I have become obsessed with transforming my physique. I want the thing to be more desirable. It manifests in a bodybuilding journey that correlates with the passage from being top to bottom. The more muscle I amass, the more I want to be fucked. The more outwardly masculine I appear, the more submissive I become. The more control I relinquish, the less thinking, the less masculinity I have to do. During sex I am high off watching my sexual partners’ reaction to my performance, my muscle contorting and pulsing. I yearn for my body to be hospitable. I want to let them all in and I want them to forsake everything inside so that I can set up a little altar of DNA.

I jog around the neighbourhood shirtless, petitioning the driving folk on Cambridge and Salisbury and Liberty to lock onto me, to weigh me. My bodybuilding mission is documented on my Instagram profile. It irks me and my loved ones to see it, but the broadcast persists. Slowly, I leave all the tongue-in-cheek artsy humour behind and focus on presenting my shiny, tanned muscle. Perhaps ultimate and utter corporeal obsession is the only way out of this. I persevere in the gym because I want to reach Adonis level. Hypertrophy is my ticket. I lift heavy—thirty-eight kilo dumbbell chest press on a fifteen-degree incline. Eighty-five kilo wide grip lat pulldown. I always put my weights back. I sauna, I cold plunge. I cause an inguinal hernia that must be repaired with laparoscopic surgery. The pretty private school boy anaesthetist asks if I am shaking because of the cold. I say, No, I’m terrified I won’t wake up. Later, the Filipino nurse cares for me as if I were in his home. I am overwhelmed with emotion when he changes my compression socks. I post a photo to Instagram of the reflection of my back in the mirror. The hospital gown is open, revealing my butt crack.

The more control I relinquish, the less thinking, the less masculinity I have to do.

Esther Perel is a social media-famous psychotherapist popular for her titbits on sex and relationships. She says that sexuality is a coded language through which we express our deepest emotional needs, fears, wounds, and longings. I try to work backwards from a gaping hole to work out my needs, fears, wounds and longings.

I go to a velvet man’s house for sex. He bamboozles me
with charm and his djinn-like skin, his molten voice. Soon enough I am
pinned underneath him. He is whispering in my ear to relax, he is
chuckling, he is forcing his dick against my clenched hole. I say no, I say
stop, I say I need a break. I am about to be raped. And
then I am for ten strong seconds. The pain is everywhere. In me,
out of me, on the walls, in the sky, on the road, in my childhood
bedroom. I free one of my arms, elbow him, get out.

• Needs: constant gratification, adoration, affirmation
• Fears: never being touched again; being touched again; people I love judging me
• Wounds: holes everywhere all over my body from every single touch; being told I’m skinny; being told I’m chubby, hairy, dark; my unibrow won’t grow back from over-plucking; conditional love; rejection; herpes
• Longings: touch, endless touch, touch that leaves more holes that merge so that there is nothing left of me; to be witnessed

I learn to jump rope over the line separating kink from damage and then back again. Sometimes I don’t even realise I am jumping until my feet are caught and I trip and fall, and the exhaustion courses through my body, and it’s as though I will never get up again. In that stretch between desire and disappearance I learn so many useless painful things about my body and things that feel good too. All while observing wejbet. I am learning too much about my body. It is all I have thought about since men put me into contact with it, since they showed me how much of it was for sexual pleasure—not often my own.

Years pass by and I go back to velvet man. I am back under
velvet man.