Kris Kneen - Affection: A Memoir of Sex, Love and Intimacy

PRAISE FOR Affection

Sex, friendship, family, humour, confusion, sadness and
the kind of straight-gaze honesty you cant fake: Krissy Kneens
memoir has it all. This confiding, absorbing and beautifully
written tale describes one womans journey through
sexuality and self, but will speak to many womenand
enlighten many men.
KATE HOLDEN

Kneens sexual odyssey goes beyond a catalogue of ways to
have sex and into the far more subtle territory of an honest
womans reasons for seeking it out so compulsively. When this
exploration is good, Kneens prose achieves a lush and erotic
lyricism; when its bad, she records it with unflinching honesty.
Everything is laid bare herenot just bodies, but a
constant, brutal self-reportage.
CATE KENNEDY

A lyrical gem. Kneen has a rare gift for constructing the most
exquisite architectures of narrative and meaning from simple
and elegant prose. Sometimes confronting, sometimes
hilarious, and always amazingly honest.
JOHN BIRMINGHAM

Krissy Kneens Affection is powerfully and voyeuristically
erotic, a relentless yet tender examination of the bodys
relationship to self-worth. Excruciatingly honest, it stares
down the veils that polite society erects to protect us from
ourselves. It is painful but full of hope, shocking yet
heart-wrenching; above all, it is a brilliant exposition of
the politics of sex. An extraordinary debut.
MATTHEW CONDON

A taut, confronting story about the paradox
of sexual obsession.
CHLOE HOOPER

KRISSY KNEEN is a writer and bookseller. She is the author of a short collection of erotica, Swallow the Sound, and she lives in New Farm, Brisbane with her husband. Affection is her first full-length book.

a f fection

krissy kneen

TEXT PUBLISHING MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA

The paper used in this book is manufactured only from wood grown in sustainable regrowth forests.

The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William Street
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia
www.textpublishing.com.au

Copyright Krissy Kneen 2009

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

First published in 2009 by The Text Publishing Company

Cover design by WH Chong
Page design by Susan Miller
Typeset in Bembo Book 12.25/17pt by J & M Typesetting
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Kneen, Krissy, 1968

Affection : a memoir of love, sex and intimacy / Krissy Kneen.

ISBN: 9781921520617 (pbk.)

Kneen, Krissy, 1968- . Women--Sexual behavior--Queensland--Biography.

Sex (Psychology). Sexual excitement.

306.77082092

ISBN 9781921656729

Ebook ISBN 9781921776236

This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government
through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

To Anthony
Husband, lover, friend

I have changed names. Memory is fallible.
Time changes all things.

Contents

Richard tied me to a pole because I asked him to. He used duct tape and he secured my wrists with it. The mattress was within reach but only close enough to rest my head on. He tied a sock around my face; I could still see if I opened my eyes and squinted. The floor was concrete and I felt the chill bite of it in my knees. He had tied my hands low, and I could stand but not straighten. Kneeling was best, my head resting on the pillow of my bound palms. My back arched up, my bottom raised. I knew where this was leading.

There was something strangely domestic about the morning. He filled the sink and I could hear the clatter of plates in the soapy water. Upstairs a similar scene was in progress, our landlady washing her own dishes, a domestic parallel minus the girl tied to the pole in the middle of the room.

I imagined that he would look up from the dishes and watch me. I wondered if I looked ridiculous in submission, if he was grinning with the humour of it all. Perhaps he watched impassively, clocking the time by the fading heat of the water. I heard him empty the sink and fill it again. Time passing. The slow drip of dishes drying. The television upstairs chattering about nothing to no one.

My skin became my eyes. I felt the fingers growing out of my back, wriggling like an anemone, my tentacles of awareness picking out small changes in the breeze and temperature. If someone had photographed me like this there would have been a hazy outline. Kirlian photography would have captured the little bubble of awareness that enveloped me. I thought about the boy upstairs, Richards previous lover. The boy upstairs watching football on television as his mother did the dishes, and in the downstairs parallel universe my loverhis ex-loverand me, tied to the pole.

I grew restless. I wanted to call him over to me. I wanted his hands and his body and some relief from this stretching out of my skin. I imagine that he spent an age over the drying because he wanted me to enjoy my time of longing, but I am not sure I enjoyed the long minutes of waiting. When he came to me finally, I could have ripped the duct tape off the pole and finished in a second but I did nothing. Said nothing.

He examined me. I felt his hands still dripping with dishwashing liquid, lifting, pulling, separating. Of course I knew how this would end, but still there was the little shivery thrill as he traced the ridge of bone arcing down from the centre of my back, slipping his finger over, but not into, my anus, and hooking it into my vagina, testing the viscosity there.

I thought of dissection tables, dead things tied down, paws and legs splayed, bellies exposed to the glare of fluorescent light. The fact that this aroused me was perhaps a problem. The erotic appeal of the medical experiment had become a recurring theme.

It was the idea of him watching me like that, the openness, the vulnerability. There was no question that he would penetrate me eventually, but he took his time. The joy is not knowing exactly when, and exactly where. The joy is the anticipation. A moment of breath on the skin, a sense of exposure, a vulnerability. Someone watching or not watching; never knowing which. I remember the hot cold of the afternoon and the disappointment of the inevitable ending. The sound of his ex-boyfriend turning off the television at the moment of his orgasm, a sudden silence and the slight, pleasurable pain of his withdrawal. The normalcy of a Sunday morning creeping into afternoon.

I will always remember this, perhaps. I remember it now.

And that was just the sex part.

BRISBANE 2008
Sex addiction

Sex addict? I laugh. Im not a sex addict.

Katherine raises an eyebrow. I have known her since I was eighteen. She is the friend who has stuck by me longest. I look at her gorgeous luminous face and I wonder why we have never slept together, not once in all these years. She sips at her coffee and watches me and I feel myself unpicked; and when I am seamless there is nothing left of me but sex. I have been pathologised.

I picture an ape, furiously masturbating in its enclosure; I can feel the ugly monkey suit itching against my skin and for a brief moment I am repelled and also aroused by the image. I am used to this sudden rush of desire, the narcotic effect of the idea of sex, a prickly spread of it like ecstasy trickling through my body.