Best Sex Writing 2010 (6 page)

8) In 2010, a law designed to protect child prostitutes will take effect in New York State. Until that time, kids as young as twelve can continue to be charged with the crime of prostitution. This is true even if they were forced into the business by pimps. Interestingly, since 2000, foreign-born teens have been protected from prosecution by anti-trafficking laws that view them as victims. For the next year, however, teens with American citizenship may still find themselves in juvie for being the victim of something most people would consider pretty horrific abuse. Hopefully, this is a sign that we are making progress not only on the issue of sex work, but on the treatment of juvenile offenders in general.

9) In December 2008, a Florida woman reacted to the penis being forced into her mouth by biting. Twenty-seven-year-old Charris Bowers told police that despite the fact that she didn’t want to have oral sex, her husband, Delou, pushed himself into her mouth, and that she clamped down to get him to stop. He responded by punching her in the head until she let go. In the end no charges were filed against Delou, even though it is illegal for anyone, including a spouse, to make another person perform a sex act. Charris, on the other hand, was arrested and charged with battery. Apparently, blaming the victims of sexual assault is not a thing of the past.

10) That sexual double standards for men and women are alive and well shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone. But a Wisconsin town recently showed just how damaging such notions can be. On consecutive January days in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, seventeen-year-old Norma Guthrie and seventeen-year-old Alan Jepsen were charged with sexual assault for having consensual sex with their fourteen-year-old partners. However, that’s where the similarities between the cases end. Guthrie was charged with a misdemeanor, which carries a maximum nine months in prison.
Jepsen, on the other hand, was charged with a felony, which carries a maximum twenty-five years in prison. The
Sheboygan Press
reports, “Assistant District Attorney Jim Haasch, who filed both complaints, said the misdemeanor charge was filed in part because Guthrie has no prior criminal record. But online court records show Guthrie has a pending charge of misdemeanor battery, filed in October. Haasch would not say whether Jepsen has a prior juvenile record—which is typically sealed—but the boy has no adult charges listed in online court records. Haasch also said the cases are different because Guthrie’s boyfriend is ‘almost fifteen,’ with a birthday in February. Jepsen’s girlfriend turns fifteen in April.”

11) In December, something called a
paramour clause
was used to force a lesbian in Tennessee to move out of her house and away from her family. The clause prohibits cohabitation of unmarried partners if minor children are in the home. In this particular situation, the lesbian couple had lived together for over ten years. Much of that was with the biological mom’s kids, who were the product of a previous relationship with a man. There was no indication that this living situation was harming the thirteen- and fifteen-year-old teens. Nor had the father requested that his ex’s partner move out. Still, a custody judge imposed the rule, leaving few options for the women in a state where same sex couples cannot legally marry. And people wonder why Proposition 8 matters?

12) As a sex ed teacher, I believe in answering teens’ questions honestly and in using language that they will relate to and understand. So had I overheard a conversation between a New York State high school teacher and some of her students, I probably would have applauded her candor. But I didn’t get wind of this conversation. Josephine Isernia’s school board did. According to
the board, when asked for advice on oral sex by one of the girls, Isernia used words that were, “vulgar, obscene and disgusting.” The words in question?
Head job
,
hand job
and
fellatio
. Isernia was a teacher with over twenty years of experience who had never been in trouble before. Yet despite her clean record and the fact that the students sought her out for information, when 2009 rolled around, she was out of a job and educators everywhere were given a sad wake-up call.

13) Remember a few years back when PDA policies were making the news every other day? Lately stories about sexting and moms who pose as teens on MySpace have been stealing the headlines. But rules regarding public displays of affection never really went away and this February, twenty-two-year-old Jessica Garcia was arrested at her local mall for kissing her girlfriend. According to Garcia, mall security told the couple, “This is a family mall, y’all can’t do this. Y’all kissed, and if y’all do it again I’m going to write you a citation or I’m going to kick y’all out.” The mall countered that after being asked to leave following the kiss, the couple returned and became belligerent. This, a mall spokesperson claimed, and not the kiss, is what led to the arrest. Regardless, Garcia is considering suing for discrimination.

14) Imagine this: You’re sixteen and having sex with your boyfriend. You want to be safe so you ask your mom to take you to the doctor for birth control. Most people would call this a sign of maturity and responsibility. The state of Mississippi would call it an incident to be reported to the cops. That’s because a bill that passed in January makes it a crime for parents
not
to report to the police that their kids are having sex. The Mississippi Child Protection Act of 2009, requires mandatory reporting of sex crimes against children and imposes new abortion restrictions on minors. Though there is much to quibble with in the bill, one
section is particularly alarming. This is the clause that prohibits, “the intentional toleration of a parent or caretaker of the child’s sexual involvement
with any other person
.” Supporters of the law claim that they are trying to protect young people from abuse. But nowhere does the bill distinguish between sexual abuse and consensual sexual encounters between teens. Mississippi already boasts the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country. Maybe they are striving for the number one spot in preventing parent/child communication, as well….

15) This past November, a convicted sex offender in Oklahoma had little reason to celebrate having his criminal record expunged. That’s because the requirement that he register as a sex offender for life remained. This is particularly problematic seeing as the individual in question is a kid. Due to age of consent laws, he was convicted at sixteen of having consensual sex with a thirteen-year-old girl. His mother explains that sex offender status meant the boy was, “removed from high school [and] prohibited from being in the presence of children other than his younger brother. He can’t go near schools, day care centers or parks. His brother, age eleven, can’t bring friends into their home. If his brother had been a girl, Ricky [the offender] would have been removed from his home.” The United States has some of the toughest sex offender laws in the world and Ricky is far from the only teen forced to live under such conditions. As Human Rights Watch reports, “Some children are on registries because they committed serious sex offenses, such as forcibly raping a much younger child. Other children are labeled sex offenders for such noncoercive or nonviolent and age-appropriate activities as “playing doctor,” youthful pranks such as exposing one’s buttocks, and noncoercive teen sex.”

There has been talk recently about America’s liberalizing morality.
But as long as teens and gay men are still under attack for having sex, and teachers and parents still get in trouble for talking about it, then it would seem as if there is still quite a way to go before we can claim that this is the dawn of a progressive new era.

 

 

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and so are boners. One of my most profound sexual experiences was a hand job in the basement of a friend’s house in high school. She was taller, broader, and more confident than me. To call her voluptuous seems cliché; she was an incandescent teenage Valkyrie with ice-cream skin and soft arcs of flesh, and I wanted to dig my quivering fingers into her strong back, pull her into me, and die just a little, for the briefest of moments. She lay on her side next to me, naked, perfumed with sweat, the curves of her hips so pronounced I imagined Lilliputian skateboarders zooming toward her pinched waist. Her hands were strong, her tongue was sweet, and when I came all over her adorable little belly, I collapsed into her full bosom, and in a way, I’ve stayed there ever since.

I have a secret: what turns me on isn’t necessarily what I’m told should turn me on. And even worse, what turns me on isn’t what
I’ve told other people should turn them on. For many years, I was a men’s magazine editor. As you can imagine, many hours were devoted to doing what editors for those kinds of publications do: playing video games on the company clock, writing highbrow flatulence jokes, and researching beer bongs. Then there were the models. I spent a lot of time sifting through modeling agency photos, interviewing models, working with them on photo shoots. The first thing you should know about models is that most are very nice, and they all think they’re fat and/or ugly. But the fact was, deep down, I was never turned on by the scenes we’d place these professionals in. Cheerleaders with galactic hooters posing in the rain wearing nothing but heels and leather belts never did it for me. To get turned on, I needed curves. Curves, long legs and a devilish twinkle in the eye.

There is no reason to hate on our collective notions of beauty, so I’m not going to. Does Megan Fox cause my eyes to pop out of their sockets, cartoon-style? Sure. But it’s an almost Pavlovian response. Conditioned. There is a profound disconnect between what we’re told to think is sexy, and what it is that we actually think is sexy, between glamorous groupthink and the sanctity of the individual kink. Our blush-worthy little perversions are too often hijacked by flesh merchants and the noise of the hive. Not all dudes want to go home with vampy, bikini-clad beauty queens. In fact, most men will probably agree with me that what satisfies their touch and tongue cannot be communicated in two dimensions. That while the pack howls for sexpots built to factory specifications, we’re all still lone wolves hunting our lust’s lonely prey. The difference between a boy and a man is simple: a man knows what he wants and doesn’t apologize for it. The right “type” is whoever he says it is. He owns it and rolls hard.

So what really turns a man on? It’s probably not what anyone
thinks. Because it’s specific to the man, provided he’s come to grips with one simple fact: he’s man enough to ignore the clamor and chase the women of his dreams, not the focus group–tested dreams he’s bullied into having. It is said that confidence is sexy. If a man is not confident about his carnal hungers, what turns him on doesn’t matter. Because chances are, he’s never really had space-time continuum–warping sex. But a man who rocks his inner freak without apology is a happy man, and one worth trying to turn on.

My secret is not a secret anymore: I want curves. And if not curves, I want tall, lanky, long legs. I think I have a weird Earth Goddess/Edward Gorey fetish. Hell, both at once! I like the word
curvy.
I mean, you could use the word
chubby
if you wanted to. I’m a lil’ chubby. There’s a reason my nickname in fourth grade was “Puddin’.” But I’m also a galloping sex centaur. Whatever the word you prefer, I need a woman with a little bounce to her. A woman with a big ol’ badonkadonk. But that’s just me. I’d like to take a moment to also mention that not all men love huge boobs. Many of us, and by “us,” I mean “John DeVore,” like them small, perky, the kind that say “Why, hello.” Like peaches. A mouthful.

I have dated all types of women, and I don’t judge a potential relationship, or even a sticky, sweet fling, exclusively by physical criteria. But we’re talking desire here, and desire is wholly misunderstood. Desire is an intense fist floating in your pelvis that only unclenches during those fleeting moments when you’re running your nose up her neck, nibbling her lip, sliding fingers under shirts and up spines. Desire is not a Whopper after a morning spent in front of a computer writing blog posts. It is waffles and ham steak after a monumental hike. It’s nipples like lit fuses, red claw marks crisscrossing shoulder blades, balled-up bedsheets that
need to be laundered. What we desire is unique to the individual, and must be sated. Far too many people lead very unhappy lives, desperate for the mob’s approval. Men dating centerfolds for the applause. Women confusing the car for the driver.

You know what’s really of social value? Happy people. People who valiantly flip the bird to convention and bang it out with whoever happens to turn the roots of every hair on their body into itty-bitty lightning rods. Want fearlessly; when you’re dead you’ll regret not having gone to bed with those people who haunted your dirtiest dreams.

Women with curves make my junk bark. There is something so shockingly vulnerable, feminine, and grounded about a woman with back, hips, a lil’ paunch. Oh, and the beanpoles, with their delicate architecture. A tall woman with long legs, who is shyly unaware of her fairy-tale regality, likewise turns me back into a sweating, erotically overcharged fifteen-year-old. It’s almost a narcotic effect, when one of these graceful women wraps her legs around you, holding you close, yielding and demanding surrender at the same time. It’s…sensual? Did I really just type that? Surely there’s a more testosterone-friendly way of saying “sensual.” Like, “slow boner?” The word
sensual,
like desire, is misunderstood. Sensuality is a time machine that slows things down so you can greedily savor every nanosecond. It is lust on the molecular level; it’s knowing that the fingertips are the real eyes of boot-knocking, and to glide them over a curvy woman’s figure, or up and down legs like the horizon is to take in the kind of vista they turn into postcards. I know these things to be true.

The majority of the women I’ve chased, loved, and slept with fall into one of those two categories. The other categories include: book nerds with glasses, tattooed punk rockers, and almost any woman who will watch
The Wire, Battlestar Galactica
or
Northern
Exposure
DVDs. Also: dirty talkers. I can’t neglect to mention the sassy, simmering little pixies either. All of these women turn my nerves into blinking Christmas lights. And of course, there’s that woman from my adolescence, who etched into my subconscious my lingering, lifelong craving for a woman with her beauty, fire and gentle passion. I swear she was made out of clouds.