Reverse Cowgirl by McKenzie Wark

I’d love to make a joke about this memoir being a work of speculative fiction set in an alternative world where the human body and its sexual functions are a source of joy, excitement, self actualisation and pleasure rather than shame and regret, but to do so would erase and dismiss both a) the nuance, seriousness and importance of this book, and b) the legislative backwards step the UK’s right wing government* has taken in the past few days and the ways in which personal freedoms, personal joys, optimistic and hopeful futures continue to be crushed on a personal and societal level by the generative AI-running nothing people who have ascended through this capitalistic, economised, moribund society to the levers of power, which crunch crunch crunch at joy as an easy and obvious first line of attack.

So there is no joke.

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McKenzie Wark is a writer and academic, an Australian in America, and this book is informed by academic knowledge and practice, yes, but it isn’t an example of it.

This book (Reverse Cowgirl (Semiotext(e), 2020)), then, is a sex and sexuality focused memoir (with some (essentially incidental) references to the academic and ideological journeys and explorations Wark was taking part in simultaneously) that takes us from childhood as a conspicuously queer boy in a small Australian mining town, though to partying and getting involved in the cruising and sex party scene of Sydney in the late 1980s and ’90s, through to a long-term relationship (marriage, children, financial co-dependence etc.) with a woman (leading to New York) and then the – (later?) realisation that Wark was, all along, a woman herself, and the realities of transition and the optimism and joy to be found in a better-understood life.

Along the way there are lots and lots and lots of descriptions and digressions about being fucked, about fucking, and about the various forms of relationship that Wark has enjoyed throughout her life.

There are repeated descriptions of pegging, of fellatio, of anal circlusion**, of sex parties and anus stretching, of drug use and sex stores, of the joyful feeling of cum squirting into your ass being curtailed by the AIDS epidemic (and how a later, unexpected unprotected fuck – a condom broke due to the use of oil-based rather than water-based lube – evidenced the loss (and clarified the risk taking behaviour of a former regular lover that meant they were no longer safe to play with)))…

It’s graphic – did you know there are two rings in the anus you have to relax separately in order to get a cock (or dildo) all the way up there? (I, a naif, didn’t!) – but that forms part of a clear and demonstrable sense of directness and honesty that is the absolute opposite of what I would expect to find in a publication from an academic.

In discussion of personal histories, personal experiences and the twists and turns of life, Wark displays an unrelenting clarity and directness.

Descriptions are not cited as if revelations, frankness is not treated as if confessional… This is a book that explores class and money and its intersection with sex*** as much as it explores intellectual growth and education and ambition…

Honesty and truth and understanding are things that are learned both by act and by study.

Personhood arrives through what we know and what we do, and though sometimes we may rely more on one or the other of those verbs, what remains key to a meaningful life is, I think, the decision to decide to never finalise anything.

One must always be open to more… to life, to something.

And it’s easy to read Wark’s reminiscences about fucking and being fucked and sucking and being sucked and kink and group sex and various drugs and orgies and parties and all these examples of intense “fun” and think “sure, maybe I should try and get some of that”, but (I suppose) if that’s the kind of life one needs, one finds it.

Is it a problem (for me) that I’m repressed (i.e. not actively seeking that out)? Not really, no…

I don’t feel that there’s much to be gained (for me) by leaning into sex, but whenever I do read a sex memoir or a realist sex novel (which is pretty frequent tbf and I probably/definitely do read faaaar more sex books than the average person (and I definitely read more sex scenes than I have sex (I don’t count either))), I do get the sense that there is something people who love sex get from sex that is vastly different to anything I’ve ever experienced or even felt alluded to…

Maybe it would be interesting to find that, but it also does seem to come with a different kind of… a more present… lust, and I suppose my worry is that to have a life that is fundamentally a sexual one, one must give up on other things… And I don’t really have time to cook as much as I’d like to at the moment (around childcare, working, walking the dog, blogging, performing, writing, basic socialising, etc), so there’s definitely no time available for a journey of sexual self discovery.

Maybe that’s what my forties will be for? Though probably not.

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On p. 158, Wark quotes Christen Clifford being read by Molly Ringwald, observing the following: “When men want to dress as women, they want to be the sexy version, in lace. Men never want to be a stay-at-home mom still in her period underwear and nothing else at four pm, nursing a baby and zombie-ing her way through the house, not picking up anything, crying in front of the dishwasher.” 

Since becoming primary parent to my infant child, I have spent many days like the person depicted here, and – to be honest – I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so much like a person. There is life to be found in the mundanity and misery. Yes.

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On pp. 61-62, Wark describes the text of Reverse Cowgirl in a manner far better than I have managed above:

This is more meme than memoir. Not a personal essay so much as an impersonal assay. Its genre less adventure tale than misadventurous tail. Not only literary criticism but also critical literalism. It’s not about coming of age, it’s about the age of cum. It is not entirely factual. Maybe these were not exactly the forms, the feels. It might however be a book that has sexual veracity. If something gets hard, or wet, or cums, or doesn’t, that at least probably happened. It was probably more sublime ridiculous beautiful ugly than described.

Yes. It’s that. And it’s very, very, good.

Reverse Cowgirl is a great, provocative, engaging, articulate, funny, personal, important book.

Highly recommended.

Order Reverse Cowgirl direct from the publisher here.

(If anyone from Semiotext(e) is reading this and has review copies of anything available for London-based bloggers, please do reach out. I’ve loved everything of yours I’ve ever read. 🙏🙏🙏)

<<<<Check out my book hip-hop-o-crit which discusses my relationship (as of 2021) with gender in detail.>>>

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*Just in case you’d like to respond, “But it’s not right wing, it’s the Labour party”. I’m sorry, but the way in which a government is described is based on what policies it enacts, not what the name of its party is.

** There’s a great section early in the book where Wark discusses the idea that “being penetrated” is a non-active statement (as language), which is vastly different from her experiences being a person enjoying another person’s dick inside them. Wark posits (and doesn’t claim to invent) the use of the word “circlusion” as an alternative – a term to give power to the person taking something in, encircling something, surrounding something…. As an idea, it seems quite potent and almost revelatory and I feel a bit surprised it’s not something I’ve read elsewhere before (though this book is only a few years old and I haven’t read every piece of feminist theory ever published (I have read very very very very very very little)). Go have some circlusion, not some penetration, innit.

*** One of the songs I sing most frequently to Whamathan, my infant baby, as a lullaby is the Tom Jones song, ‘Tower of Song’ (composed by my infant child’s Canadian compatriot Leonard Cohen), which includes many beautiful lyrics, including the line “the rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor”, which – a line I’m singing five/six times every day atm – resonated in my mind as I read Wark describe some of her youthful situationships with awful Sydney rich folk and – presuming all readers of TriumphOfTheNow.com have read the pleasure of regret (if not order a copy right now!) – reminded me that it’s important for Whamathan to be aware of this fact before he’s aware of anything else. As I once wrote, “They fuck you up, your rich older lovers”. Wark’s text here seems to agree…