TRACTOR FUCKER
TRACTOR FUCKER
ALANA DUNLOP // STIMULANT WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 013
ALANA DUNLOP
“TRACTOR FUCKER”
Everyone knows I am working on a short story about a woman who fucks a tractor. As of now, it is half-complete, the ending still missing, and this empty space is grating on me—it is a story that feels impossible to resolve. The story concept itself has spiraled into a lot more than a story; it has become the lens by which I have interpreted sex, and connection, or lack thereof. While travelling Europe this spring, I loved telling new people about Tractor Fucker, and it became this easy image to slip into conversation like a bare foot into a shoe—it is stark, naked, apparent, but also it is covered, revealing nothing about my interiority.
When I took the first draft of Tractor Fucker to my writing group, everyone wanted to know what the tractor represented. Someone said there wasn’t enough intimacy between the protagonist and the tractor. Piotr said the protagonist’s human boyfriend needed to figure more into the text, he needed to be a foil for the tractor. Gwen wanted more fucking and more tractor and longer scenes where these two actions are intertwined. Jade pointed out that the climax was too rushed, and then the story just flattened, the voice tapering out like it had forgotten what it wanted to say. In truth, I had no idea why anyone would want to fuck a tractor, besides sheer circumstance—like if you were insanely horny, and in the middle of a corn field, and needed something inside you, and fingers weren’t enough. But people have done it—when I explain the plot of Tractor Fucker, usually my interlocutor will bring up that famous My Strange Addiction episode about the man who is in love with his car and has sex with “him” by grinding against the hood. In the episode, the man is living happily with his car, so we don’t get to see those initial moments where he recognized his desire, before he ever acted on it. When you want to fuck the tractor, what happens after? How do you reach the point of contemplating tractor anatomy, of cold hard metal, of where your body may fit within it?
I started having “object fucking summits,” as I like to call them, which just means I would have conversations with my friends where I asked them what object they would have sex with. In one of these conversations, S* raised her eyebrows and asked if it had to be penetrative, to which I said, no, of course not. Then she said she would fuck a lightbulb, so that she could come to light. K said they would fuck a punching bag. T said they would fuck the handle of a knife.
No one could really explain why they would fuck these things—usually it boiled down to an interesting shape, a shape that might feel nice when swiped across genitals or inserted somewhere private. Of course, most people’s sex lives do include objects—vibrators, dildos. It is easy to imagine bringing other objects into the bedroom, because objects already have a distinct place here, in drawers or on shelves or atop of sheets, usually within easy reach of the bed.
I found out that attraction to objects constitutes a whole category of sexuality: object sexuality. I read an article about two people who are in committed long-term romantic partnerships with buildings. This, to me, felt like a testament to the expansiveness of the human imagination—these people felt love, strong love, for their “building boyfriends”, and they forced gender onto them (one of the anonymous interviewees says: “my current love is a modern office building, she is very unique”). They were offended when the interviewer called buildings “inanimate.” They insisted buildings have feelings of their own, and even reciprocated their love. I imagined women lovingly stroking staircase railings or elevator doors, feeling the ridges in stucco walls—paying acute attention, sexual or otherwise, to the structures we usually take for granted. But I wanted to know about the people who fuck objects knowing full well they are objects, and their intended purpose isn’t for fucking. I wanted to know about the imagination required to make that leap.
Object fetishism began to underscore my life. When I was hooking up with my ex-girlfriend for the first time, I asked her what object she would fuck, and she answered, without a beat, the sort-of brutalist building across the street from Sherbrooke metro. She imagined fucking it as an inversion of size—she would become huge, and the building would subsequently be tiny to her, and she could use it how she wanted. And then, in Berlin, I met two people at a noise show who also had their own obvious answers: the arborist would fuck an oak tree. The mixed-media sculpture artist would fuck the handle of a teacup.
I was fumbling for theories about these object fuckers—these people, who, in indulging me, willed themselves to think about familiar objects in a new way. But more than that, I wanted an end to Tractor Fucker. I wanted to know—why am I so obsessed with this idea? And why has it been so hard to write?
The idea for Tractor Fucker came to me while I was missing my ex, M*. I couldn’t masturbate that much because it would make me think of M, especially in the moments where I lurched into orgasm. When I would hook up with other people, afterward I would feel tears welling in my eyes and have to wipe them away quickly. Sex, for me, was situated in memory, in the context of the sex I had had before, and now that I had reached this new, intense realm of intimacy with M, I felt I had levelled up, and I could never go back to imagining sex as anything else but something M and I did, had done. I had craved M all the time, even when I was with him, I always had this feeling that it was never enough, that I could keep going and going and going like a spiral curling around on itself. We had huddled into each other like quotation marks. I once wrote in a letter to M: “I want you to fuck me so hard that my brain dislodges from my brainstem and I forget all my memories of before I knew you.” I suppose, in a way, this had happened. I had touched every part of his body, and now I couldn’t forget it, my body recognized his for months and months after, when we were in the same room my muscles would tense and strain and wail that they needed him. And when I was alone, or with someone else, trying to get off, my body couldn’t help but remember how M had gotten me off, the succinctness between us, how it seemed like our closeness had no end or marked beginning, it was just this endless terrain of touch. I started to wonder, could I ever get off without replicating connection? Could I get off without any prerequisites or preconceptions of intimacy? Could I be totally swallowed up by imagination, and could this be better than being close to another physical body?
I started craving a solution to this misplaced intimacy, this error of wrong-thought-at-the-wrong-time. I began to think that all I wanted was to fuck a machine, some undefined hunk of metal that expects nothing of me, and I of it, except for its potential utility for sexual pleasure. It was more of a thought experiment than something I sought to do, because after all, thinking about your ex while masturbating or having sex with someone else is not pathological in the slightest—if anything, it’s totally normal. And I’ve heard stories of people fucking couches or cucumbers or what-have-you—I knew that fucking an object wasn’t an inherently special activity. But it spawned an idea for a character—the protagonist of Tractor Fucker—who, suddenly in her adult life, experiences this overpowering desire for a John Deere tractor. It’s not love—she doesn’t really attribute any emotions to it, in fact she regards it with a detached sort of interest, like how a doctor would look at a rash—but it awakens her sexuality in a way that is primal and urgent.
Back in March, my friend Mariana swooped into the Little Italy café where we had arranged to meet, wearing a long coat lined with fur. I was already setting up a portable microphone to record our conversation. I fiddled with bits of wood that were splintering off the table as I explained to Mariana what I had gathered so far in my object fucking summits.
“Maybe this is just a trend with my friends, but we are thinking so much about objects. Jade just told me about how she wrote a poem about a woman who fucks a bridge—apparently there’s a small population of women in this world who fell in love with bridges.”
Mariana nodded along with what I said, humming sometimes to indicate she was thinking.
“Maybe it has to do with this capitalist idea of utility,” I continued, “an object that is produced can be used not only for how it is intended, but also to satisfy a sexual urge. I haven’t met anyone who is, like, an actual ‘object sexual,’” I put air quotes around the word, “but I think people are thinking about it.” Later, I found proof of this while skimming a 2018 issue of theoretical humanities journal Angelaki that details how “the object is receiving close attention across the humanities.”
“It’s also a show of human ingenuity, I think. In a way, it’s an example of problem-solving. Bridges are so complex, and tractors are part of what allows us to eat and produce food. It’s like people are craving that very specific utility, because in our everyday objects now, the utility isn’t evident anymore,” Mariana gestured to her cellphone which was sitting face-down on the table, next to her half-finished coffee, “like a phone—what is that?”
I laughed. “Yeah, it just looks like a brick, and if people from the Roman Empire saw it, they’d be like that’s an interesting brick, but you can’t even really stack it. But like you were saying, society is so obsessed with phones and like, creating things that serve every purpose, now we’re particularly obsessed with things that just serve one purpose. And we’re fetishizing objects that visually represent just one purpose.” I thought of the objects I liked the most: cameras, little blown glass vases, decorative dishes to keep jewellery, faux fur pillows, tractors, I suppose, just because I’ve been thinking about them. I recently bought a cheap clay vase with 3-dimensional moulded lips all over it, and now it seems particularly sensuous to me, and maybe that’s why I was drawn to it in the first place.
Later in our conversation, Mariana drew a parallel between our talk of objects, and our talk of writing, and how both seem to interact with the erotic. She invoked a book she really likes, Eros the Bittersweet, which argues that the lover and the writer are cut from the same cloth. “The book talks about how when we started writing and making literature our relationship to erotic love changed. When we are just telling each other stories out loud, there is so much physicality that goes into it—the speaker’s voice, their body language. But once we start writing stuff down, it’s another mediation. To read properly, you have to cut off every other sense in your body, you’re just connected to your eyesight and imagination, you’re not existing in reality. It’s just a pure example of desire—writing and reading is just pure desire.”
I walked away from that conversation conflating the process of writing with the process of fucking—is fucking not pure desire, too? It took a conversation with my friend Rebecca to understand that Mariana was actually saying the opposite—reading and writing is a retreat away from the external world into fantasy. I love fantasy—I have a shitty stick-and-poke tattoo on my ankle, which reads “fantasy” in faded blue ink, as proof. But fantasy, or pure desire, is not an external event. It is a mental exercise.
Rebecca said: “sex with someone else can never be just pure desire, because it requires an external force (i.e. another person), for which you compromise your fantasies and desires to achieve the satisfaction you wouldn’t be able to achieve on your own.”
Masturbation, then, must be an expression of fantasy, much more than sex can ever be. Masturbation does not necessitate external actors who are unpredictable and have their own internality. In the same vein, writing also does away with these external forces, with the outside world completely.
When M and I broke up, I needed to retreat into fantasy. Existing in the world was too painful. My spiral into object sexuality, and my process of writing Tractor Fucker—these were really just ways to withdraw from the external world, into a space where I can control things, where these things can be touched and moulded and crafted to suit my imagination and will never be more than what I want them to be.
And it is incredible to live in this internal world, but it can never last for too long. Whenever I finish a story, as I am writing the last line, I have a moment where I “come to,” where I emerge out of the semi-unconscious state that my best work really requires of me, and suddenly the external world exists again.
In the end, Time was what came between me and this intense sexual urge I still had for M. It dampened. Then it went out. I can sit with him in a room for hours without once remembering the dirty things I wrote him in that letter. And now when I masturbate I think of someone else. And as for fucking tractors, or fucking anything—there is something so exciting about imagining outside the realm of what is natural, what is expected. I had to figure out how deep that internal world is, and how extreme. Sometimes creativity emerges out of urgency, out of extremity—sometimes I need to write a story more than I need to cum, and it’s this all-consuming, pulsing desire, the urge to write.
What do I want to write? I want to write. What do I want to fuck? I want to fuck. Maybe the objects are just the mediums which allow us to do that, to enact this desire. Maybe utility is just a question of circumstance. Maybe the what comes later, after that pure desire has been splayed out and shaped on the page, in Tractor Fucker or in any other short story I have written. In any case, I really hope I finish.
*Certain names of people have been changed to protect their anonymity.
GET HIP:
Buy limited copies of Stimulant Volume One from The Word on Milton and De Still on Duluth.
Order Sam Pink’s book of poems 99 Poems /// Cops of Life, cover and book designed and formatted by Charlie Zacks.
“The Prophet” by Sam Pink in Southwest Review.
incredible, cannot wait to read the book