Actually, I don't really like chairs…

Lesbian visibility day ( April 26th) and week is an important moment for us to collectively acknowledge the wonderful lesbians in our lives. Mar Amargi, one of the newest members of Paramour Collective has generously shared some of his thoughts for this day. 

Mar a performer, sex worker and dancer from Cologne. He is active in the “sexworkers of Cologne” collective and helped to found the Queer Lapdance Collective, among other things. 

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Actually, I don't really like chairs. Someone once told me that they find sitting on a chair awful. I feel the same way. I have to say, I've never been able to sit normally on a chair. At a 90-degree angle. Legs bent. Bottom on the seat. And my back against the backrest. It makes me incredibly nervous. I never sat ‘normally’ on chairs at school. I always imagined that the chair was transparent and that people could see everything from below. Then no underpants in summer. People can see my arsehole from below. And a slug. I once took a chair apart. I mean, I broke it. Out of anger. My mum once collapsed on a chair and badly injured her tailbone. I once transported two chairs on a bike at the same time. I put one on the saddle, sat on it and put the other one over my shoulder. I'm sure it looked cool. There are incredibly expensive designer chairs. There are also some really ugly ones. At Ikea. And probably elsewhere too. I've had sex on a lot of chairs. They're really quite good for that. The chairs, I mean. And for theatre auditions. Every other person recites their fucking monologue with a chair on stage. Why is that, actually? I performed Antigone with a chair. Were there even chairs in Sophocles' time? I tried Chat GPT, no, of course not. Fuck Chat GPT. I asked Wikipedia. The first chairs were made more than 5,000 years ago in Egypt and were status symbols for pharaohs, priests and officials. Hot hot hot. That makes the whole lap dance thing even weirder. 

I worked in a strip club in Frankfurt for a while. Danced for cute and not-so-cute cis men. On chairs, too. But it was never for them. Well, never for him. You know what I mean. Even if they were actually sitting in the audience. It's not appropriate for anyone to tell me who I should or shouldn't dance for. No matter how I move, no matter who's in the audience. I feel it's wrong to say that body waves and booty shakes satisfy a ‘male’ gaze. I may express sensuality, but that doesn't mean I'm doing it for a specific group, and certainly not specifically for a cis man. In a heteronormative context, wave movements performed by women could be seen as seduction of a man, but even that is not limited to that. And that's not the fucking context either. 

And what is the framework? Who am I dancing for? And what is the difference between sexualisation and objectification? I asked Chat GPT – no, again. I didn't. 

I set the framework. The moment I decide that you can focus on my ass without having to engage with me on a deeper level. The moment I ask you to look at the hair on my belly, the hands on my thighs, and you maybe get a little horny.
 It makes a difference whether I sit down on a chair because I want to talk about my anger at the inflationary use of Chat GPT – and you digress, look between my legs and wonder how big my dick is. Or whether I sit down on a chair and say to you: feel free to join me if you like, and I'll sit on you if you like, and with my smirk I invite you to sexualise me. I like that idea. Being sexualised by you. At the moment I decide. At the moment I decide who this lap dance is for. 

I've always liked that feeling. I'm just 99 per cent slutty. And 1 per cent very shy. Or maybe it's the other way around. Whatever. I slept my way through high school. I loved it. At the same time, I was ashamed. I believed the others and myself that I was a little ‘abnormal’ because I enjoyed sex. Nympho. What was the name of that awful dubstep band I used to listen to at night in my little Opel Corsa? Borgore. ‘This bitch is so used, I wouldn't sell her at the second-hand store. Cause her pussy is so wide that you could put your head inside.’ Yeah. Maybe my pussy really is so wide that you could stick your head in it. Just unfortunately, you're not allowed to. Sorry. 

All that trauma. It took me a long time to realise that sex isn't inherently bad. That I do not get wasted when I have too much of it. And then I start stripping away the binary and the beard and the belly hair and the testo, and I've never felt so comfortable in my body – or lap dancing. I enjoy my monster whore existence, I shake my ass and love my tits and want to cut them off because I love the idea of loving my tits when they're gone and still feeling the same way about them. And I get down on my knees in front of you and want you to slap me and then again and again and again and again and again and—stop! Or nah, one more. And I want to give everything for you, sitting there on the chair – I want to serve you – and I do all this for you, and then it's not right at all because I'm actually doing it for myself. 

And maybe I just like sex because it feels like being held, because I feel myself when others touch my body. And maybe, besides all the hot hot hot and lap dancing, what I like most about it is the people I dance for. All the beautiful lesbians, dykes, butches, trans gods and queens, enbies, gays. The queer collective. Even without chairs. 

Happy Lesbian Visibility Day!