Best Sex Writing 2009 (11 page)

From the very start, my love life has embodied that seeming paradox. I lost my virginity at sixteen with my first love and best friend; it was all champagne and roses. It was also as-porn-ational sex: I enthusiastically guided us into nearly every position I’d long marveled at online. At one point, midcoital, I actually pinched my chin and asked aloud,“What positions are left?” Afterward, he ob- served:“That wasn’t what I’d imagined, exactly.” He had imagined:

1) the missionary position and 2) ceremonial crying.

I didn’t do much hooking up in college;I went to a single-sex school. But after I closed the gates to that cosseted women’s school—and all of its unsexy talk about misogyny and
the patriarchy
—I opened those other, um, metaphorical gates of mine. Okay, screw the mod- esty: my legs, I opened my legs. That’s not to say I had a host of one-night stands—I’ve never had a one-night stand, only several- nights stands. But I went through a dressing room phase of trying on different men to see how they fit. (This one makes my control- freak quotient look big but has a slimming effect on my ego.) Like Anna Broadway, I can easily and embarrassingly categorize these men: Lonely Lawyer, Sociopathic Spaniard, Testosterone-Poisoned Pilot, and Bellicose Bartender, for starters.Together, they’re like the Village People for straight women. During this time, I told my friend Sarah and her boyfriend about the latest person I was seeing. “Which one?” he asked, smirking. I laughed, but I wondered:
Shit, am I
that girl?

For a while, I was. First, there was the cartoonist.The first night we hooked up, he took me back to his house and played guitar, sang every song he’d ever written, and juggled his collection of vitamin pill bottles.

Then there was the lawyer. We would have passionate, hours- long debates, as though we were opposing counsels in court; the first of such debates ended with him throwing up his hands and announcing,“Congratulations, you’ve worn out a professional liti- gator.” He owned his own three-story house with a panorama of the Bay Area, drove an SUV—with a shiny hood ornament that made me cringe—and wanted to sweep me off my feet, rescue me from my one-room apartment, as well as the dishes piled up in (and under) my sink, and my bipolar upstairs neighbor whose mono- logues are the constant soundtrack to my home life. I told him, “No thanks,” and moved along.

Then there was the pilot, whom I would see whenever his flight schedule brought him into town. I’d stay the night at his utilitarian airport hotel, order room service, watch planes take off right out- side our window, and talk about sexy things like black boxes, plane crashes, and thunderstorms. He was cartoonishly masculine and he made me feel stereotypically feminine, which I am not; it made me constantly want to challenge him to an arm-wrestling match. It was amorous antagonism.

As far as I can tell, these choices don’t form a pattern, other than a refusal to really choose. I was like a college freshman filling out the Career Center’s job placement questionnaire, making an enthusiastic check mark next to every box; except, in my case, I was checking off men. Most of them were great; others led me on and made me cry. In a few cases, I felt used, but other times I felt like a user.There were some I wanted to date but who wanted to keep things casual, and vice versa.

There’s nothing unusual about my experience. The
New York Times
recently ran a “Modern Love” essay by Marguerite Fields, a college junior, about her search for a boy willing to commit. Like me, and like Broadway, she has worked her way through a number of men and says, “I think what I have been seeking in some form from all of these men is permanence.” Near the end of her essay, she ends a third date by asking the guy when she’ll see him next. “That’s a loaded question,” he says, offering a meandering explana- tion: “He said he had just gotten out of a long relationship, and now he was single and didn’t really know how this whole dating thing works, but he was seeing a lot of other people, and he liked me.”

I’ve heard that speech before; I’ve given that speech before. It shouldn’t be mistaken as a symptom of a generation unable to commit; it’s simply what you tell someone when you realize that you don’t like him or her all that much. For all the anxiety about

“hookup culture” the truth is that for many people older than twenty, “hookup culture” will sound remarkably like, well, “col- lege.” Indeed, students shifted from dating to what was essentially hooking up during a wild time—perhaps you’ve heard of it—called the ’70s.

But, as the median age of marriage continues to climb, young women are spending a lot more time romantically vetting—and being vetted. It isn’t just that hooking up is becoming a common preamble to dating, either—living in sin is increasingly a prelude to marriage. Hopefully, by taking several test-drives before buying, we’ll be happier with our final investment.

Of course, there are also very real hazards to hookup culture: namely, rising rates of unplanned pregnancies among young women and sky-high STD rates. It’s safe to say many don’t take the latter very seriously: Moe Tkacik, a blogger for Gawker Media’s feminist blog, Jezebel, recently stirred the pot by writing that con- domless sex “feels awesome” because she has “only really engaged in bareback sex with the types of dudes…whose diseases I don’t particularly fear, because the worst thing I can think of about most of them is the ensuing lifetime of awkward conversations.” (And, occasionally, sexual empowerment is overplayed to the point of farce, in the case of a recent incident in which Moe and fellow blogger Tracie Egan shrugged off the seriousness of rape.)

But much of the finger-wagging over hooking up neglects those very reasonable concerns. For example, abstinence advocates are fond of the saying: “There is no condom for the heart.” But heartbreak isn’t always sexually transmitted. In the
New York Times Magazine
piece on chastity, prominent Harvard activist Janie Fredell lamented the hurt she’d seen women go through in their pursuit of relationships via hooking up—as though abstaining from sex would have saved them a broken heart. If only.

I learned something from all of the men I dated. Sexually, I learned plenty about what turns me on. More important, by spend- ing time in uncommitted relationships, what I wanted in a commit- ted relationship became clearer—and it wasn’t amorous antagonism but a partnership that didn’t trigger self-protectiveness.

I also discovered that a lot of young men are scared shitless—of women, themselves, and their future; that, contrary to our cultural imaginings, they are just as desperate to figure things out as young women. I found that a lot of the pains in the relationships of us twentysomethings can be blamed on cultural prescriptions for mas- culinity.Yes, there is the stud/slut double standard—but there’s also an expectation that men, unlike women, will not seek safe harbor in a relationship. No, they are supposed to bravely sail their ships beyond the singing sirens and silted waters of their quarter life until they miraculously hit land in the Real Adult World.

As Kathy Dobie wrote in reviewing Stepp’s
Unhooked:
“We learn less about intimacy in our youthful sex lives than we do about humanity…Perhaps, this generation, by making sex less precious, less a commodity, will succeed in putting simple humanity back into sex.” Indeed, and perhaps young women are putting feminist ideals of equality into sex by refusing shame and claiming the tra- ditionally male side of the stud/slut double standard. Also, the idea that a woman has to test a man by withholding sex—as many absti- nence advocates actually argue—relies on a paradigm of inequality in which women are forced to rely on such desperate power plays. It isn’t that feminism has taught women to have sex like men, as the argument commonly goes, but that withholding sex isn’t women’s sole superpower; coitus isn’t women’s kryptonite.

With that in mind, I put my academic and career achievements ahead of romantic relationships, and allowed myself plenty of un- committed entertainment along the way.

Like Broadway, I happily stayed single until I found someone who seemed truly worth the commitment; unlike Broadway, I wasn’t abstinent.These
can
be different paths ultimately converging on the same plateau of partnership. By the same token, though, you can chastely date more men than you can count—or sleep with every man who offers you a drink—and not learn a damn thing about how to find a healthy relationship. We feminists do, indeed, love words like
empowerment
and
respect,
but there’s one we like even more:
choice.
The problem is that, too often, the abstinence movement prescribes a particular path, rather than encouraging young women to blaze their own trail.

A year ago, I decided to take a brief hookup hiatus and then, unexpectedly, met a man who is emotionally available and com- fortably, not defensively, masculine—I’ve never felt the need to challenge him to an arm-wrestling match. We’re in a relationship now and he has become my best friend. He openly calls himself a feminist and, smilingly, describes our relationship as “respect run amok.”

Oh, and we had sex the first night we met.

Notes:

1.
http://www.nastad.org/Docs/Public/Resource/200759/_Abstinence Fact Sheet.pdf

soulgasm

d agmar h erzog

Antimasturbation and abstinence guidance is not the only graphi- cally detailed evangelical advice out there. Obsessing over orgasms has also long been an essential ingredient of the evangelical sex ad- vice business. For at least a quarter-century, evangelical sex advice- givers have recognized that every man and woman wants bigger and better orgasms.They know this is as true for their flock as it is for the average forsaken nonbeliever.And so they have turned their attention to techniques for intensifying climax.

God wants His devoted followers to have boundary-dissolving ecstasy each and every time. There is no need to feel unfulfilled and frustrated after sex with a spouse. Evangelicals deserve the very best in sex, and so evangelical experts offer the happy news that holy sex means orgasmic sex. Dozens upon dozens of evangelical publications rehearse the basic facts of life.
Cosmo
meets the Bible. Evangelicals Linda Dillow and Lorraine Pintus provide one of

the most popular guides for Christian women and their orgasmic lives:
Intimate Issues
(published, like the “Every Man” series, by Wa- terBrook Press, an evangelical Christian publishing house based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and a division of Random House). Coining the term “soulgasm” as the desired result of sex with your husband—incredible orgasms
plus
intense emotional connection with your husband
plus
God’s spiritual presence—Dillow and Pintus describe the experience variously:“Waves of pleasure flow over me; it feels like sliding down a mountain waterfall.” Or: “It’s like having a million tiny pleasure balloons explode inside of me all at once.”

Orgasm equity is key to the Dillow and Pintus vision. They are unapologetic in their insistence that Christian women make their own pleasure a priority.They recommend that women “EX- ERCISE YOUR LOVE MUSCLE.Your PC muscle (pubococcy- geal) is your love muscle.” They describe the “SIX SECRETS OF HIGHLY ORGASMIC WIVES,” which include not only “grab your Nikes” (because a well-exercised woman is also a pleasure- primed one) but also “educate yourself ” about your own body. Above all, they urge women to “let yourself feel”:

As Christians, we often think that focusing on ourselves is wrong, that we should concentrate on giving, not re- ceiving. But in order to move toward physical orgasm, we must give ourself [
sic
] permission to dwell on our physical responses and emotional feelings…It is not selfi h…There is a fascinating paradox as your selfi inward journey to orgasm and intense personal excitement become a mutual experience and a marvelous turn-on for your mate.

Dillow and Pintus are enormously reassuring in their sensible advice that every woman—like every couple—is unique, and that “there is

no ‘right way’ to make love.” So they also stress that while clitoral pleasuring may be the key to orgasm for the majority of women, some women experience their orgasms as centered in the vagina.And they point out that simultaneous orgasm is not a necessary aim; it is perfectly fi for women to come fi st. Indeed, “some couples fi that intercourse is more pleasurable for the women [
sic
] if she has al- ready reached a climax as her genitals are lubricated and engorged.”

And they go out of their way as well to answer the query “Is intercourse the only ‘proper’ way to have sex?” by asserting that, no, “intercourse is not the
only
‘proper’ way to have sex,’ because “God grants us enormous liberty” and “we are free to enjoy sexual variety.” They recommend to their female readers the following prayer:
“Lord, keep me growing as a godly and sensuous woman. Keep me from worrying about what is normal and let me dwell on what is a successful sexual encoun- ter for me and my husband.”
If all goes well, and all lessons are practiced and learned, Dillow and Pintus assure their female readers that this story of “Bethany” might someday be their own story: