The business of pleasure or the pleasure of business

Poking into another false binary

Born from an innocuous question: “are you travelling for business or pleasure?” posed by an unobservant airport security guard, I began to think.  Why do we say this common expression?  What purpose could it serve?

Does he really want to know anything about me?  That he would care where I was going of why?  Does he collect memories in the making from the thousands of passengers who pass him each day, wearing them around him, filling his life vicariously with dreams of faraway places?

Or was it an anodyne question designed to take the sting out of misgendering (his string or mine), or the absurd idea that he was searching my suitcase because a book on trans people was flagged by the airport security machine?

Are we so casual with our use of words that we would ask a question not even caring to hear the answer?  Is this what living with an absence of intention means?  To not care.  To move through life as if asleep?  Or to willfully disregard the other?

And if that is the case, is it not a way of saying that I am insignificant.  That I am insignificant goes without saying, but is it really the task of our daily interactions to be reminded of that?  Is this interlocutor’s dharma to put me in my place by implying that I am irrelevant?

In this case, my insignificance is relational: I am insignificant to him.  He has either asked me an “innocent” question to make noise, to fill space, to eliminate his own feelings of awkwardness.  In which case, should I even bother to answer?  To do so is perhaps joining him in this process of rendering me insignificant.  Or what if he is curious, curious about this creature before him?  Do I travel to the seem places as all these people going on ski holiday?  Does a trans woman actually exist, or is this just some dude in a dress?  Is today April Fool’s?  Maybe I will learn something new, maybe he is going someplace really interesting or different, and I want to know, I have to know, because it is surely different.

But to indulge him in this fantasy is to accept my ‘otherness’.  That I am worth paying attention to only because I am different, a curiosity, something to study.  A pathology.  We know where thinking like that leads.

Perhaps, like me, he is just a baby, filled with gentle curiosity, and like any baby seeing any shiny, new toy, wants to reach out, feel it, put it in the mouth, find out what it tastes like, what it is.  Perhaps he was just curious.

Perhaps.  After all, a ballerina giraffe seen in the wild is a rare occurrence indeed.

But what of the mindless banality of the question itself.  What does it even mean to be going somewhere for business or pleasure?  

It’s the ‘or’ in the question that gets me.

To be successful at anything, one must be good at it.  Being born good is only enough to get you started, but to be really good, you need to love it, because it needs to become your life.  The mutually reinforcing feeling of getting better and better at something, having the feedback that tells you of your progress, whether from others, or from yourself following deeds delivered, makes one strive to go further.  This feeling becomes so powerful and important that it can become the reason we live.

Ask any man who has just retired after a successful career what it feels like to realise that people called him because of the seat he sat in, not because of him.  People forget very quickly that you get to sit in the seat, mostly because you were good enough to be entrusted with sitting there.  Ask not why these men die so much faster than others that have never experienced this, whether man or woman.  They have lost their dharma.  Just like that.  And sadly, many of them forget that it was their dharma that got them there, them, not the seat they occupied.  But such is power.

My recent post on why women are not having children is not for the reasons that keep getting brought out.  It is that any person long-denied, finally discovers that the most fulfilling part of life is a sense of personal achievement, and that what we do, have done, actually matters.  And no matter what, no matter how supportive the partner, the woman whose body carries a child, and who no matter what, becomes the primary caregiver to that child, has surrendered her life to another course.  To have children, except in the most extraordinarily rare of circumstances, is to lose access to this most powerful dream.  And not every person’s dream involves making their dharma something as “common” as raising children, for it is a thankless task.

In other words, for a human, the highest glory is to be successful at business.  And by ‘business’, I don’t mean corporate 9-5.  It can be anything really, but it is what you do.  Your work.  Your life’s work.  And to have a life’s work, well, that is why we are here.  And yet, many of us never realise that.

And what of pleasure?  Surely enjoying what we do is the highest form of pleasure.  To take pleasure out of business is a recipe for failure.  We cannot excel at things we do not enjoy.

In other words, business and pleasure are not a binary.  Any more than male and female.  We are not opposites, but complements.  One feeds the other.  [Kindly note I have not used ‘man’ or ‘woman’ which leave out the vast temple of Queer.  I have also not used ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ which are evidently present in everyone, in all things, for this makes the argument banal].

If there is a direct relationship between the joy we take in our work, then making it as pleasurable as possible, is surely going to make us better at it.  Mary Poppins had it right for even the bad bits, the necessary bits, the dutiful ones, “a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.”

What is the binary then?  Pleasurable business on the one hand, and duty, obligation, the weight of society on the other?  The security guard could have asked me, “is your trip to fulfil your dharma [equal measure joy and achievement] or are you going to fulfil an obligation, a duty?”  Pretty good.  But a binary excludes alternatives.  In my case, the reply was, “I am going for surgery.”  It is certainly not an obligation, although there may be aspects to it which are—to myself mainly.  [Separately, I do feel that Facial Feminisation Surgery and Voice Training are obligations in part, because the force to do them comes in part from how society reads a “man” in a dress, and both help to reduce the chance of being misgendered].  Surgery is most definitely my dharma.  But this is a radical redefinition of work, of business.  Or is it?

When we are in business, we develop our skills, we develop our empathy, the mindset and talents that we need to succeed.  We become the boss that we need to grow into.  We train to become what we wish to become.  The athlete works on their body.  The academic devotes themselves to study.  But what of me?  I’ve done these other things, and yet none of them cured my dysphoria.  In other words, no matter how good or successful I became at something, I still felt empty inside.  I was not pursuing my path, my true reason for being.

I do not wish to ‘reduce’ myself to being a trans woman, to make that the reason for my existence, after all, gender (which in my case is transgender) should be a given, a hygiene factor.  That I am not a man and not a woman, in the traditional sense, shouldn’t matter at all.  But it does, and in order that my dysphoria should be healed, and that society is impacted in a way that anyone else who has dysphoria can be healed or inspired by example, requires me to live fully on my own terms, and to be a “bitch who takes up space”.

Not being a doormat or a people pleaser anymore is exactly this.  I want to be a bitch who takes up space.

And what of those people who make pleasure their business?  My love and respect for the Sex Worker is no secret.  I love it and respect it so much that I am actively exploring becoming one.  A lesbian dominatrix friend made it okay for me when she told me how common it was in the lesbian community for a crush to be, “I’m not sure if I want to f**k her or be her”.  I get this feeling all the time.  What if you want both?

Becoming a sex witch is my dharma, at least a big part of it.  Becoming a healer is also my dharma, at least a big part of it.  Can I do this and be a CEO again?  Probably not.  Should I keep trying?  I’m not sure.  My kids tell me the most powerful thing I can do for trans people everywhere is to make lot’s of money.  And they are right, only I don’t have the energy to live for other people anymore. 

I want to live for me.

And what does that mean?  Who do I want to be?  What kind of person do I want to be?  Most importantly, I wish to be a person who gets the ‘how’ right.  To be gentle, kind, loving.  For people to feel better for having interacted with me, met me, dined with me.  And gosh, do I ever want to just have fun.  To play, innocent, child-like, but to also just focus on living…being intentional about everything.

In other words, I seek to make my business about pleasure.  And if I am more specific, it is about women’s pleasure.  I am becoming a woman because I could not serve women as deeply as I wanted to as a man.  My love of women is all-consuming, and the more I taste it, and live it, the happier I am with my ‘choice’, this becoming.

Today, my choice is whether to attend a deep-stretching yoga class or to go socialise and tie people up.  Guess which one I chose?  Stretching.  Only 9 nine days to go before I get a new hole in my pelvic floor.  Those muscles need to begin to relax.  And anyone, someone is coming over to my home, the womb, the cocoon, to be tied up on Monday night.  A blissful evening of rope lies just around the corner.

What’s your pleasure?  May it be making your business pleasurable.