Best Sex Writing 2010 (25 page)

Who coined these terms? We’ll never know. But these unsung heroes have provided us with a quick and easy way to describe our sexual world.

Not all these words are in daily use, (my spell-check barely recognized any of them), but they are there for the taking as a way to enrich our experience. Which brings me back to the lout who stole my hyphen.

You cannot own the act until you own the word.

I did not have a three-way.

We did not make triangles of ourselves. There was no geometry, no directional signals.

A three-way is something you boast about. It is a phrase without grace, a phrase reflecting the numbers, not the experience. There is nowhere to go from a three-way. The story has been told, you’ve jumped to the end, and you’ve climaxed too soon.

A ménage à trois is a memory to keep you warm on a lonely night.

A ménage à trois, a house of three, only sets the scene. There’s the feel of sex, there’s the house, and there are the three people.

It begs the question, “What was the house like?”

Once I had a ménage à trois with a doll and a dame. Another time it was with a betty and a fox.

There were no blumpers or felching involved.

In the beginning there were breasts and bottoms, but by the end it was all tits and ass.

Vaginas were perfumed, pussies queefed, and in the end I was very, very flaccid.

 

 

On Thanksgiving Day my boyfriend walked out the door. Our daughter was seven months old, and I’ll never know for sure what put him over the edge. He was bipolar. He drank. He was fragile. He didn’t leave a forwarding address.

This was a time when I believed that love would overcome anything. Well, it certainly overcame me. The very first thing I did, even before crying, was to sit down on the living room rug and nurse my daughter, Mae. Nursing was my landing pad. It was the place where my milk could turn my anger into white, warm calmness. Nursing had the same soothing effect on my baby, no matter how hungry, agitated, red-faced, and cranky she was at the start. Nothing beat nursing.

No matter how alone I felt, those times that Mae lay on my chest, her tiny hands kneading my breasts, milk flowing from me, I knew that I could do this alone. Not only did nursing nourish
Mae, it nourished me. But it wasn’t long after her father split town—as Mae’s first birthday approached without a sign from him, I knew he wasn’t coming back—that friends started to ask me, “When are you going to get back out there?”

As in
date
? They had to be kidding. Not only was I a twenty-nine-year-old single mom with dishes in the sink and baby clothes with stains I’d never actually scrub out, but I breastfed “on demand.” How in the world could I even think about hooking up with some hot man when my cha-chas were making milk?

“But look at you!” my girlfriends (who were all married) said to me. “You’re attractive, and you’re young.”

Maybe they were right. About getting back out there, anyway. As the months passed, I started to notice men: our building manager—who gave Mae stuffed animals and called her “Little Guacamole”—and the UPS man, who rolled his packages past me.

Still, noticing men in the hallway was
not
the same as dating them. I’m grateful that back then I did not sit down at my computer and type
lactating and dating
into Google. If I had, I
never
would have gone on a date. Because recently, while writing this essay, I turned to my computer to do some research, in hopes of finding a thoughtful example of what it means to balance these two acts. I hoped to come across a first-person essay in
Redbook
about a mother’s deep feelings, something to inspire me as I worked.

One of the first things that came up, however, was a site called
MilkMyTits.com
. Men were looking for “mature women willing to breastfeed me.”

Gross. I kept scrolling through the sites that Google brought up; there
had
to be something. But they were all the same: white men in their forties in search of sweet breast milk. My breasts had always been one of the most sensual parts of me. Before motherhood,
when a man put his lips around my nipple, it made my body rain—not a light sprinkle, either. If I slept with a man as a nursing mom, my breasts would rain on him. Perhaps, after undressing, I could open my closet, pull out an umbrella, and hand it to him: “You might need this….”

I couldn’t remember if I’d slept with Mae’s father in the weeks before he’d left for good. If I had, I didn’t remember the details. He was shut down and hungover; I was absorbed with my baby. I lived in the world of womanhood for years, and now I was a mother. But who says that you can’t live in both worlds? Some mothers I knew wore bras to bed because they didn’t want to leak on the mattress—or their husbands. That’s how they divided their realms. But I wanted to be a woman who lived in both worlds; I wanted to be the kind of woman who didn’t care if she spurted.

One of my best friends in New York City told me that she wanted to set me up on a blind date. Ironically, she was the same friend who, in 2002, was thrown out of the public library in Manhattan for breastfeeding her daughter. She’d been nursing in an empty reading room, when a female security guard screamed at her to “Take that outside.” The guard didn’t know that my friend, Susan Light, was a lawyer who took it straight to the media, after which the library expressed “deep regret” over the incident and immediately sent a memo to remind staff of the right of women to breastfeed.

“I want to date, but I can’t,” I told my friend.

“Why not?”

“I’m nursing.”

“So?” she said.

“What would I wear?” I huffed. “A nursing bra?”

She laughed.

“No, really,” I said. “I’d have to bring my pump along, for after my drink.”

Little did my mother-friend know that the blind date she wanted to set me up with might have had a breastfeeding fetish. She told me that he was a lawyer, too, “a cute one.” After chatting on the phone with the lawyer—his call woke me as I fell asleep while nursing Mae in the bed we share—I decided to go for it. I’ve always considered myself to be open-minded about anything intimate. Maybe I was rebelling against my Catholic mother, but I certainly was not a prude. I decided that I’d keep the date short and sweet—and I’d nurse before leaving so (I hoped) I wouldn’t leak.

The following Friday, after enlisting another girlfriend to babysit, I dashed out the door to meet the lawyer at a bar. When I got inside, he waved. I didn’t see the cuteness—he had a receding hairline—but maybe I was too nervous.

Still, he did the right thing: he asked if I had a photo of Mae, and when I pulled one from my wallet, he used the word
adorable
.

“She is,” I said. “I’m late because I was nursing her before bed—”

“You were nursing her?”

That’s when I noticed the sparkle in his eyes. Maybe I’d misread? But no.

“A woman who’s lactating!” he said, way too loudly. “What a turn-on!”

I waited for the punch line, but he was not joking. I’ve always had this untactful knack for blurting out details that shock people—I do it without thinking. Why did I tell him that I was breastfeeding? Nursing was such an essential part of who I was, it was like telling someone, “The sitter was running late, I’m sorry—”

It’s always
after
the fact when I realize I should be wearing a soft muzzle. The lawyer’s enthusiasm was a sure giveaway that I’d said too much. I didn’t know if I should crawl under the table or give him a high-five. Was I flattered or freaked out? Or a little of both?

But the truth was, if any possible romantic date of mine was squeamish about the fact that I was breastfeeding, I did need to know this up front. I mean, if I hadn’t said anything, and then all of a sudden he looked down and noticed the wet spots on my blouse, that would have been interesting.

And that’s exactly what happened.

If you’ve ever breastfed, you know that just thinking about nursing can, well, have certain consequences. My breasts were flooding with milk. I had no control over it, and when I looked down, there was a damp spot on my chest.

Maybe it was all in the name of discovery, but perhaps more important, I liked the fact that this man acknowledged who I was: a woman
as well as
a nursing mother. He could have overlooked that wet spot on my blouse. He could have glanced at his watch, embarrassed, and said, “I’d better get home.”

At the time I wasn’t interested in having him—or anyone, for that matter—as a companion. I was an unseasoned single mom who was trying to get over her ex. I was still trying to get a handle on raising my daughter solo. I wasn’t ready for a relationship. But I
did
crave sex. And I was curious. I wanted to know what it felt like to have a man drink my milk.

Afterward, when I told a couple of friends what had happened, they scrunched their noses up. “You let him do
what
?”

Much to the dismay of my girlfriend who was babysitting, I brought him home. As my daughter slept in the other room, I let him unbutton my blouse and run his mouth across the edge of
my bra. I let him touch me. When I started to leak, he was ecstatic. He told me that he’d never tasted anything so sweet in his life. (Yes, I wondered if, maybe, his mother had never breastfed him.) But this is what mattered most: he wanted me as I was, and I didn’t have to hide any of it.

 

 

Sally has a problem. Sally is a music slut. She plays with everyone. She has two regular bands, and some sidemen she jams with. When parties get late and loud, she will pull out her instrument and play with people she just met, people she hardly knows, people whose names she cannot remember—or never knew! She plays for money, she plays for beer, sometimes she even plays just to get an audience, because she likes the attention.

This paragraph makes no sense, at least not when taken literally, but the adoption of the concept of “slut” is so clear that the paragraph is, on even the most casual read, a thinly veiled metaphor for sex. The reason it makes no literal sense is that playing music does not share essential characteristics with the way Western culture models sex.

Rape is an act of war against women, one that can be committed only because of an entire culture of support, which makes
most rapes permissible. Not all of the structures of rape support are about sexual culture: racism, classism, and the prison-industrial complex, as just a few examples, create circumstances under which some women can be and are raped with impunity. So simply changing the cultural model for sex will not undermine the social support for all kinds of rape. But many rapists acquire what is sometimes called a “social license to operate”
¹
from the model of sex as a commodity (which constructs consent as the “absence of no”) and from its close corollary, the social construct of “slut.”

Without the notion of the slut, many rapists lose their license to operate—the notion exists only within a model of sex that analogizes it to property or, more specifically, to a commodity. The “commodity model” should be displaced by a model of sex as performance, which sits better with the notions of enthusiastic participation (or the “presence of yes,” as distinct from the “absence of no”) that many feminists argue for.
²

We live in a culture where sex is not so much an act as a thing: a substance that can be given, bought, sold, or stolen, that has a value and a supply-and-demand curve. In this “commodity model,” sex is like a ticket; women have it and men try to get it. Women may give it away or may trade it for something valuable, but either way it’s a transaction. This puts women in the position of not only seller, but also guardian or gatekeeper—of what Zuzu
of Shakesville, a feminist blog,
³
refers to as the “pussy oversoul”: women are guardians of the tickets; men apply for access to them. This model pervades casual conversation about sex: women “give it up,” men “get some.”

The commodity model is shared by both the libertines and the prudes of our patriarchy. To the libertine, guys want to maximize their take of tickets. The prudes want women to keep the tickets to buy something really “important”: the spouse, provider, protector.

Purity balls and the chastity movement have provided countless opportunities for feminist mockery and outrage. This movement, most popular among Protestant evangelicals, has for several years found its way into our public school curricula through federally funded “abstinence-only education.” Much of this movement can be summarized by the familiar old saying that men will not buy the cow when they can get the milk for free. That also summarizes the analysis: women are livestock, valued for what they provide, not as partners. Their produce is milk, which is taken, bottled, and sold. Milk is fungible. When we drink milk, we care about its quality, but not about the identity of the cow. We may appreciate the milk, but this does not extend to appreciation of the cow.
⁴

The chastity movement is a practical set of principles, a set
of investor’s guidelines for maximizing the benefit of the commodity. Abstinence-only programs are quite blunt about this. One program advertised its 2007 conference with a logo of a diamond wrapped in a padlocked chain. The logo read, “Guard Your Diamond, Save Sex for Marriage for a Brighter Future!”
⁵
The diamond is the hymen, but (with the explicit reference to marriage) also the engagement ring—and the program wants young women to preserve the commodity to make this optimal trade.

This view, not incidentally, makes sense only if the property is not a fully renewable resource. A cow keeps giving milk. But the abstinence proponents tell us that a woman’s commodity is not as valuable later as it will be when she first offers it: like olive oil, the “extra virgin” is worth a lot more, and the stuff from the later pressings is of an inferior grade. One Peoria, Illinois, purity ball volunteer said, “Girls have a wonderful gift to give, and we don’t want them to give all of themselves away. What we want them to do is present themselves as a rose to their husband with no blemishes.”
⁶