Best Sex Writing 2013: The State of Today's Sexual Culture Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Live Nude Models

  Can a Better Vibrator Inspire an Age of Great American Sex?

  Sex by Numbers

  Very Legal: Sex and Love in Retirement

  Notes from a Unicorn

  Rest Stop Confidential

  When on Fire Island. . . A Polyamorous Disaster

  Cherry Picking

  Holy Fuck: The Fourth-and-Long Virgin

  Notes

  Baby Talk

  Dear John

  Sex by Any Other Name

  Enhancing Masochism: How to Expand Limits and Increase Desire

  Submissive: A Personal Manifesto

  Ghosts: All My Men Are Dead

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  Happy Hookers

  Christian Conservatives vs. Sex: The Long War Over Reproductive Freedom

  Porn Defends the Money Shot

  Lost Boys

  The Original Blonde

  About the Authors

  About the Editors

  Copyright Page

  Foreword

  Carol Queen , PhD

  If you need any indication beyond that provided by particle physics that we occupy a world containing more than one dimension, look no further than contemporary Western discourse on sex. In the United States, especially, the time/space continuum points toward a diverse future—how are sexual cultures developing and transitioning into twenty-first-century entities? How is a changed, expanded landscape of sexual communities and erotic choices, facilitated by the gods of the Internet, altering the path of growing up, finding oneself, decoding all our culture’s mysterious sex signals, meeting and mating and doing it some more? Plenty of contributors in Best Sex Writing 2013 shed light, or at least drop crumbs, to help as we consider this.

  And yet! On the other hand, the Scarecrow’s arms are crossed and he simultaneously points forward and back. This way! That way! And people who have been influenced by way-post-sexual-revolution, feminist, and sex-positive ideas now watch with amazement as linear time morphs, shimmers and wiggles like the suddenly-visible air above a blacktop road on a hot summer day, and serious political discourse includes ideas about gender roles, contraception, homosexuality, abortion, and censorship that made me, at least, wonder whether Anthony Comstock might return from the dead to join the Republican presidential ticket. Paul Ryan: a reanimate?

  I’m associated with sex education, pleasure activism, erotic diversity and sex-positivity; there have been loads of interesting progress on all these fronts over the past couple of decades, as the many ways one can experience or desire sex and relationship have shattered, scintillating into a spectrum of identities and communities. All of these, except maybe Furries, have always been part of the private, even secret, landscape of erotic drive, choice, or chance: our great-great grandmas had vibrators, artists documented their own and their lovers’ erotic bodies in the 1920s (and certainly before), Samuel Steward let Alfred Kinsey set him up with an SM dominant in 1952, and Virginia Woolf had more than one partner and wrote a gender-bending novel about one of them. There’s next to nothing new under the sun, sex-wise—but now pretty much all these identities, the ways we learn about possibility and are affirmed in our desires (or at least find porn that reflects it or partners willing to engage in it), have stepped into the light of day, into Google searches and Facebook groups.

  At the same time, it’s yesterday once more. Haters hate, bullies bully, and young people kill themselves because they can’t believe a future full of love and pleasure waits for them. That’s really no surprise; it’s way easier to fill a conference hall with thousands of kinky people than it is to get a public school to represent sexuality as something other than a danger, especially sexuality that is non-heteronormative. Actually, too many young people get no message at all that alternative sexualities exist and that they might have something to do with them. And you can be as heteronormative as you please and get out of high school not understanding anything about the clitoris.

  A society fixated on and yet fearful about sex exists today as surely as it did in my mother’s time, and then as now it enables sexual abuse, erotic cluelessness, us-and-them belief systems. If anything, the latter is worse now than it was in the longer-ago past, because my mom and dad weren’t even sure, in the 1940s, what a homosexual was—now, alongside all the amazing gains that have been made, this culture is polarized over sexuality from stem to stern.

  But that’s not the half of it. Here in the twenty-first century, land of progress, my specialized Google News search (set to “sexuality”—isn’t yours?) brings me mostly LGBT results. Is it so little understood that everyone has a sexuality? That it can be as diverse with varying desires among heteros as among queers? That sexual orientation is not, in fact, the definition of sexuality; that knowing someone’s sexual orientation does not give you a true idea of that person’s sexuality, their sexual preferences, only really revealing the gender/s of the person/s with whom they’d like to engage in that sex? Gay, straight and everybody else: any of us can be vanilla or kinky, monogamous or polyamorous or open, fetishistic (in a thousand different ways), into the person and not the gender, into no one but gender variants, even asexual and into no one at all. (At least, not that way.) We can have safer sex or bareback; we can feel more erotically alive in a costume than we do out of it; we can charge money or fuck for free; we can be shy or brazen, exhibitionistic or private, only in it for love or only in it for the orgasm. And of course we can be many of these things at once, or morph fluidly (or very bumpily) from one identity or set of desires to another.

  Really, there are more than seven billion sexual orientations. If the turn-back-the-clockers understood how really, truly diverse sexuality is, some of their heads would explode, and maybe the rest would leave their target populations alone and stow the opprobrium—about sex, at least. It makes a bigger sexual world for them, too, of course, not just those of us already identified as Other. The irony of this vast rend in the cultural fabric is the way more information feeds both sides: fear and loathing or excitement and relief, we have in common this range of reactions to a very big and sexy cat who has well and truly escaped its bag.

  We can’t do justice to all of this in one volume, but we can pack Best Sex Writing 2013 with the best essays and journalism we can find, reminding you how much variety, difference and drama can be found when we till the ground of desire. I hope this inspires you to take your own sexual reality seriously, and to consider in what ways you’re unique—and how surprisingly well you may relate to the stories of those very different from yourself. It’s the only way we’ll bridge this gap, heal the rift in the space/time continuum of sex: really listening to the stories we all have to tell.

  Introduction: A Different Kind of Sexual Education

  As editor of the Best Sex Writing series, and a writer about sex in both fiction and nonfiction forms, I’m privileged to hear from lots of people about sexuality, whether asking for advice or wanting to talk about the big issues of the day, whether that means attacks on birth control or Fifty Shades of Grey. The biggest thing I’ve learned, though, is pretty basic: we are all always learning. You can indeed get a PhD in sexology, like foreword author and contributor Carol Queen did, but that doesn’t mean you simply give up and assume you know everything about the wide world of sexuality and sexual variation. You can’t; it’s impossible.

  Part of why sex writing is so vital is because we a
ll have things to learn—about ourselves, and about others. While this book will not teach you how to have sex, you will learn about what motivates others in their sexual desires, whether to engage in multiple relationships, perform sex work, come out as bisexual, build increasingly advanced vibrators, or more.

  I think it’s safe to say that whether this is the first book about sex you’ve ever read or the thousandth, you will learn something about what makes people tick, about sexual desire and sexual community. The latter is as important to me as the former, because it’s within the community of sex writers, educators and activists that I’ve carved out a place for myself as a bisexual, feminist, kinky sex writer. Lori Selke writes in her open letter, “Dear John,” about feeling disillusioned by the judgments being passed around her local leather community: “See, my kinky leather identity grew firmly out of my queerness and my feminism. All three of those elements are important and in some ways inseparable. It’s important to me to pursue the sort of social justice that ensures that our consensual relationships are someday entered into from a place of roughly equal societal power. Without that aim, we’re simply perpetuating oppression.” I suspect many people aren’t aware of just how committed to their ideals those in the kink and leather communities are. To assume it’s all about whips, chains, bondage and spanking is to miss the point—of course it’s about those things, but it’s also about much more.

  The educational lessons here are often much more personal. When Conner Habib opens his essay “Rest Stop Confidential” with, “I was fifteen the first time I found out that men have sex in public,” I must admit that, at thirty-seven, I have only seen men having sex in public at parties specifically designed for sex. The first of many firsts Julia Serano details in “Cherry Picking” begins, “The first time I learned about sex was in fifth grade.” We are all both capable of learning more, and impacted by what we did—or didn’t—learn about sex at a young age.

  Some of what you’re about to read is sad or scary or disheartening; I cannot promise you a book of shiny happy sex bouncing off every page, because that is not the world we live in. There are laws to fight against, AIDS plaguing the gay community, internalized oppression, questions that may have no answers, or multiple answers. I didn’t select these essays and articles because they purport to have all the answers.

  Last year’s guest judge, the noted sexual commentator Susie Bright, when asked about The Guardian’s Bad Sex award, responded, “There is no art without sex.” I think the same could be said for the news; sex is not a topic squirreled away on the back page of the paper; it’s on the front page, in the sports section, the business section, the editorials. It’s covered in fashion magazines and newsweeklies. In Best Sex Writing 2013, hot topics include New York Jets quarterback Tim Tebow’s virginity and the laws governing condom use in porn.

  Sex education remains at the forefront of the news and continues to be “controversial,” though, like birth control, another political battleground of late in the United States, I would think it would be a no-brainer. Yet I can still read articles like one in Timea about the Mississippi county, Tunica, with the highest teen pregnancy rate that is only recently getting on board with sex ed, via a law mandating it do so: “During the four years Ashley McKay attended Rosa Fort High School in Tunica, Miss., her sex education consisted mainly of an instructor listing different sexually transmitted diseases. ‘There was no curriculum,’ she says. ‘The teacher, an older gentleman who was also the football coach, would tell us, If you get AIDS, you’re gonna die. Pick out your casket, because you’re gonna die.’”

  We should not be reading articles like this any longer, but we are, and it’s not just youths who are in dire need of sex education. Just today, I received an email from an acquaintance asking if I could chat because, “I have found a wonderful woman with whom I have begun to explore areas of my sexuality I really have never followed through on or even verbally fantasized about.” He has questions. So do many people, but they don’t know where to turn.

  This book doesn’t purport to have all the answers, and is likely to raise many discussions and propose multiple answers to questions about open relationships, prostitution, sexual orientation and other topics. It cannot take the place of talking about sex—with your lovers, friends, parents, children, neighbors and coworkers. Those shouldn’t be the same conversations, but they can exist, and by making sex a topic we don’t shy away from, we start to educate ourselves about what others are thinking, feeling and doing. So I hope that you won’t read this book and keep it tucked away on your bookshelf (or e-reader); while you are more than welcome to do so, I hope you will introduce some part of what you’ve read into a conversation, take it off the page and into real life. You will very likely learn something, and that is a process that can easily snowball; there’s never an end, because it’s a lifelong process, one that I look forward to every day.

  Rachel Kramer Bussel

  New York City

  Live Nude Models

  Jonathan Lethem

  Be careful what you wish for; you may turn out to have already had it. That’s to say, to have had it before you could make intelligible use of it, perhaps before you could get your synapses to parse it for what it was. By the time I was seventeen years old and had a girlfriend who would take her clothes off (there had been one at fifteen who, serially, entrancingly, wouldn’t), I’d been envisioning women with their clothes off, ravishing them with the secret lidless eyeball of my brain, for at least five years. Though these were five long, aching years, which I took entirely personally at the time, I do realize how mundane such a confession must be. Is. There wasn’t anything baroque or complicated in my pining visualizations or the procedure by which I took their edge off, and it’s surely the case that a savvy person glancing my way would guess I did pretty well nothing else of note at the time.

  Here’s what’s un-mundane: in that same span, through my rude, ripened, teen-prime years, there were live nude models appearing nightly in my home—women to whose unclad forms my ordinary, lidded eyeballs had regular access. My father painted them, upstairs in his studio. “Nightly” may exaggerate, but through those years nudes were the main subject of his large oils on canvas, of which he painted dozens—sometimes from memory or from studies but often with the body present before him—as well as generating many hundreds of nudes on paper or vinyl, in pencil, oil crayons or gouache or combinations of those mediums, nearly each and every one of which was done in the presence of what at eight or ten I would have still called “a naked lady” (or, rarely, but it bears mentioning, in the presence of a naked man).

  Me, I opened the door. I walked through. My father’s studio was part of our home. I did this, probably, beginning at twelve or thirteen, when I would have learned to refer to the naked ladies in question as “models,” as in a mock-casual formulation like, “We can hang out in the kitchen, my dad’s up with one of his models,” or the defensively sophisticated, “Sure, I see the models with their clothes off, it’s no big deal.” I do recall forming sentences like these, just as I recall the slightly widened eyes of the models themselves, a few times, as they met the eyes of the would-be jaded twelve-year-old who’d pushed through the door without knocking. I can also bring up a good portion of ambience (visual aspects of which are confirmed by the paintings themselves): the musty throw rugs and scarred chairs and hand-carpentered easels and exposed-brick wall; the upright, soldered-iron wood-burning stove my father later installed; the jazz or blues or (less often) leftist news and culture-gab of WBAI seeping from the cassette-playing boom box; the savor of brushes marinating in turpentine and tangy odor of the cake of Lava soap—the only brand, my father explained, that would gently strip oil paint from human skin—at the shallow porcelain sink; the bulletin board layered with valentines from my mother and enigmatic newspaper clippings (the death of Karl Wallenda was one) that would inspire later work of my father’s, et cetera. What I can’t supply, despite the clamor I by now imagine I hear from m
y reader on this point, is an account of any parent-child consultations on the topic of the models and how I was or wasn’t supposed to feel about them. I can’t supply these because, I’m fairly certain, they didn’t occur. Nudity Is Fine, like Nixon Is a Vampire or Grown-Ups Smoke Pot, was a truth floating in our house, the sort I gradually inferred was somewhat more true inside our doors than out.

  I not only glimpsed the models. At twelve or thirteen I declared myself an apprentice artist and began to draw them myself. Not in the studio upstairs, or rarely there. Mostly I went along with my dad on “drawing group” night, to the home of his artist friends Bob and Cynthia, a loft space on Atlantic Avenue with square footage enough for a model to stand encircled by seven or eight artists sitting with sketch pads braced on crossed legs, or seated before small easels. Specifically, seven adult artists (though my father was their elder statesman, likely at least a decade older than any of the others) and one teenager. Young teenager. I began before high school—I know this for certain because there were nudes in the portfolio of sketches I used to win entry into the High School of Music and Art that year. I was a regular at drawing group for three years, I’d guess. By the time I was sixteen I was through hanging out with my dad, for a while at least. But for three years I soaked my eyeballs in live flesh—not even a kid who’d grown up at a nudist colony could have been invited to stare like I stared. After all, I was an artist.