Best Sex Writing 2010

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If there is a theme to this year’s anthology, I’d like to think it’s one of being a sexual outlaw, echoing the title of Betty Dodson’s essay. Because it’s the outlaws who are getting the most out of sex. That’s not to say that we should all be off having unconventional sex for the sake of being an outlaw, but rather that instead of listening to and blindly adhering to the conventional wisdom about sex, we need to create our own.

We see this theme in the pieces here about sex work, which defy the “sex worker as victim” trope to evoke new ideas about sex work and the people who engage in it as well as those who purchase sex. In “It’s a Shame About Ray,” Kirk Read is actually the one left wanting, when his client, Ray, knows exactly what he wants, and gets it. Read is left a bit wistful, wishing Ray had occupied him for a full evening rather than a mere two hours. In many ways, debauchette experiences the same thing when she’s
hired by a voyeur. “The intensity reminded me what it felt like to want, and not have. He hadn’t touched me, but in all the silence and focused attention, I’d slowly let go of my resistance, transformed from defensive affectation to open, raw lust,” she writes.

John DeVore, one of the few straight men writing a regular sex column (for
TheFrisky.com
), challenges his fellow males to fess up to not necessarily lusting after Megan Fox—or at least, not exclusively lusting after Megan Fox. Paul Krassner takes us back in time to an era when Brazilian bikini waxes weren’t the norm, lamenting the loss of pubic hair. William Georgiades steps out of the straight male norm and into Northampton, Massachusetts, where “I soon found that the only people who were making sense to me were the die-hard gay grrrls.” He navigates the tension between being a straight man, a breeder, and falling for women who sometimes, maybe, wanted him, in “Loving Lesbians,” one of several essays here that defy our need to put labels neatly around sexuality. (Betty Dodson says it much more emphatically, giving herself this advice when it came to the dreaded “S/M” label: “Embrace the label to destroy its power over you.”)

One of the most cherished tropes about sex is that monogamy, and marriage, are what will make us happy. That the two are intertwined is a given even in an era when BDSM and alternative sexualities are more accepted. That’s why a piece like “The Anatomy of an Affair” by Michelle Perrot (a pseudonym) is so powerful. She’s claiming her marriage and her sexual autonomy, stating:

Each of these authors has inspired me to think about sex in a new way, to not accept the norms, whether it’s Diana Joseph defending her slutty self to both herself and her son, Judith Levine reassuring us that sexting is not the evil of teenage life it’s thought to be, or Rachel Sarah weighing in on the erotic allure of breastfeeding. Noted sex and tech expert Violet Blue schools us on where our country needs to go if our sex education is truly going to serve the people it needs to, while Jesse Bering gives us a science lesson all about cock (okay, he calls it the phallus or the penis, but
cock
is my personal favorite word for that particular body part).

Some of the pieces here may unnerve you: Mollena Williams’s extended meditation on “BDSM and Playing with Race” is thoughtful, honest, brave and at times, disturbing. I’ve included it because this is one of the most taboo topics, along with the realities of safer sex that Seth Michael Donsky uncovers. Williams calls humiliation a “delicate balancing act,” and while the specific type of race-based play she’s talking about takes that to an extreme, I think sex itself, and sexual fantasy, are so often very delicate balancing acts where we are trying to make sense of the insensible, or perhaps the opposite, letting ourselves lose our senses only to find something that defies logic, sense, smarts, and instead stems from the body. “For me, humiliation is a broad-brush full-bore way for me to feel the worst of how I feel about myself, give it away to someone, and have them hold it. Once someone else holds it up for me, mirrors it back, shows me the
depth of my own feelings, my self-deprecation, I can see it for what it is,” writes Williams.

Each of these writers brings a powerful way of looking at sex to this book. I’d love to hear what you think and welcome your suggestions for future editions of
Best Sex Writing
—feel free to contact me at [email protected] and read more about the series and my guidelines at
bestsexwriting.com
.

I’d also like to add that some people have commented that the erotic covers on these books trick people into thinking there will be more arousing material than what’s actually inside. To me, though, as an ultimate voyeur, reading about other people’s turn-ons, unearthing their sexual secrets, seeing how the other halves live, is not just educational or entertainment. It enhances my sex life because it leads me to new possibilities. These authors, the smart, daring, provocative sexual outlaws, have taught me about biology, nonmonogamy, cybersex, and so much more. I hope these essays and articles speak to your brain, as well as other organs, and at the very least, clue you in that sex is a lot bigger, broader and more complicated than you ever expected.

 

Rachel Kramer Bussel
New York City

 

 

Yesterday my son was turning the pages in his eighth grade yearbook so we could play a game I came up with called Guess Which Kids Are Retarded. The boy thought the game was terrible, so cruel and so mean that I should have to pay a fine, I should have to pay him ten bucks every time I was wrong.

But I refused to pay him anything. I was horrible at guessing who was and who wasn’t retarded. I’ve never been good at knowing something about a person just by looking at him. The ones I thought were special needs for sure turned out to be some of the coolest kids in the class, and the ones who actually were mentally retarded looked to me like members of the chess club. The problem, I decided, is most human beings between the ages of twelve and fifteen look like their needs are special. Their necks are too skinny to hold up their heads. Their teeth are shiny and enormous. There is a shifty, furtive look in their
eyes, and their tongues frequently stick out at odd angles.

All the girls who I thought were sort of cute my son said yuck about. The girl he pointed out as hot did not look retarded. She looked pleased to be in front of a camera. She looked like typical cheerleader material, all blonde and blue-eyed, skinny and pretty and prissy. Then he pointed to a different girl, one in the second row from the bottom. He informed me that this girl is a slut.

“A slut?” I said. “She’s thirteen years old! How can she be a slut? You don’t even know what a slut is. What does that word mean to you, ‘slut’? I mean, how are you defining your term? You can’t just call a girl a slut and not explain what you mean by it.”

The boy rolled his eyes. “What I mean,” he said with exaggerated patience, “is she’s been with too many guys.”

“Too many guys!” I said. “Too many guys!”

The boy wanted to know why was I so worked up.

When I asked him how many guys are too many guys, he said it wasn’t something that could be pinned down to a specific number. When I asked him what do you mean by “been with,” what do you think “been with” implies, he said it could mean a lot of things, none of which he cared to discuss with his mother. When I asked him, well, then, how could you possibly know this girl is a slut, what evidence do you have, he said he didn’t have any evidence. He said he didn’t need any. He just knew.

“Right,” I said. “It’s one of those things a person just knows. Yes. Right. Of course. It’s instinctual.”

Because the boy spent most of his free time burrowed up in his room, playing endless hours of Halo, slack-jawed and mouth-breathing, pale and getting paler, hopped up on Red Bull and Oreos, pepperoni pizza and Doritos, his eyes glazed over, his breath bad, his legs atrophied from lack of use, I figured he didn’t have any Biblical knowledge of this girl’s sluttiness. It just wasn’t
possible. One would have to leave his room for that to happen. One would need to take a shower every now and then. One would have to put down his joystick.

“It’s not a joystick!” he shouted. “I keep telling you that! It’s a controller, okay?”

I studied the slut’s yearbook picture. Long dark hair. Brown eyes. Her neck was scrawny. She was smiling and her teeth looked really big. She looked like everyone else. Unless there was someone in the know available to point it out, you’d never guess this girl was a slut. She looked like a regular thirteen-year-old girl.

Maybe it was in how she dressed. I asked the boy if this girl dressed like a slut.

“When I was her age,” I told him, “I had a belt buckle that said
Boy Toy
. As soon as I walked out of the house, I went in the alley and rolled up the waistband on my skirt. I once wore my father’s blue cardigan sweater to school. As a dress.” I paused, raising my eyebrows so he’d understand I meant business. “It was all I wore.”

The boy said what he didn’t understand was why I was making such a big deal about this. “I mean, what is your problem?” he said.

“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” I told him. I asked my son is this girl the slut of the whole class, the slut of the whole eighth grade.

He said she was.

“Well, then,” I said, “you need to know there are worse things a girl can be. She could be a person who tortures small animals, for example, or she could be someone who eats paste. She could be the girl who wears white shoes after Labor Day. White shoes after Labor Day!” I said. “That’s a crime about a thousand times worse than being an eighth grade slut.”

I could tell the boy wanted to argue that nobody eats paste in eighth grade, not even the retarded kids, and lots of people wear white shoes year round. He’d go on about white Reeboks, white Nikes, white Adidas—he was so predictable! But I’d already closed the yearbook. I told him Guess Which Kids Are Retarded was a terrible game, a mean game, and that I didn’t want to ever hear him refer to a girl as a slut again, that girl or any other. As far as I was concerned, the matter was resolved.

“Fine,” he said. “She’s not a slut.”

“I’m pleased to hear you say that.”

The boy paused.