Best Sex Writing 2013: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (2 page)

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 disheart- ening; 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, inter- nalized oppression, questions that may have no answers, or mul- tiple 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, re- sponded, “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 con- tinues 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
Time
1
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 sexu- ally 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

1 http://nation.time.com/2012/09/21/sex-education-in-mississippi-will-a
-new- law-lower-teen-pregnancy-rates/

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 re- ally 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 ques- tions 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

J onathan 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 intelli- gible 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 envision- ing 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 visu- alizations 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 ap- pearing nightly in my home—women to whose unclad forms my ordinary, lidded eyeballs had regular access. My father paint- ed 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 memo- ry 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 mod- els,” 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-burn- ing 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 clip- pings (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 my 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 de- clared 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 draw- ing 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.

No one balked at my presence. This was 1977, 1978. The models, so far as I can rely on these memory tendrils I’m chasing,

were blasé. These were mostly art students themselves, settled into an easy if boring gig. Likely posing for a group of men and women together was more comfortable, generally, than making a private exhibition for a solitary male, and evenings at Bob and Cynthia’s were convivial. The routine followed the lines of every life-drawing class since publication of Kimon Nicolaides’s
The Natural Way to Draw
and probably long before it: a series of rapid- fire poses so the artists could loosen with gestural sketches, then five- or ten-minute poses, then a few held long enough for a study—also long enough that the model might pause to stretch or even don a robe and take a five-minute break before resuming. Between poses the artists wandered to see others’ work, and I did this too. Sometimes the models roamed too, in their robes. Other times they were uninterested in the results. I worked with Cray-Pas or gray or colored pencil, or compressed charcoal and, less often, painted in watercolor and gouache. I was less patient than the adults—I was there learning patience, as much as any- thing—and remember feeling “finished” with studies before the longer poses were done and then watching the clock. Apart from that lapse I worked in absorption, as with all absorbing work since I recall precisely zero from the mental interior of the experience. What I wasn’t doing—I’d know—was mental slavering. The Tex Avery wolf of sexual voraciousness not only restrained his eyeballs from first swelling like dirigibles and then bursting like loaded cigars, he slept. Any account of the evolutionary “hard- wiring” of lust is stuck, I guess, dismissing me now as an outlier, or just a liar. The superextensive actuality of women’s bodies be- fore my eyes was either too much or too little for me to make masturbatory mincemeat of. Both too much and too little: the scrutiny was too much, the context too little. I don’t mean they weren’t sexy bodies. I’d guess they were. But Jonathan-seeing-

them wasn’t sexy at all. Even as I recorded with my charcoal or crayon the halo of untrimmed pubic bush and the flesh-braid of mystery that it haloed, I attained a total non-purchase on those bodies as objects of desire. The palace of lust was a site under construction—that’s what I was off doing at night or afternoons, fantasizing about girls I knew who’d never even show me their knees. Then I slavered plenty.

Did I, in my imaginings, substitute for my non-girlfriends’ un- conquerable forms the visual stuff I’d gleaned at drawing group? Nope. As much as a T-shirt’s neckline or tube top’s horizon might seem a cruel limit to my wondering gaze, I didn’t want my imagination to supply the pink pebbly fact of aureole and nipple like those I’d examined under bright light for hours at a time. It wasn’t that I found real women’s bodies unappetizing but that I didn’t have any use for them in the absolute visual sphere within which I’d gained access. Much like a person who’s disappointed or confused at seeing the face attached to the voice of a radio personality well known to their ears and then realizes that no face would have seemed any more appropriate, I suspect I didn’t really make mental nudie shots of girls my age. I didn’t picture them undressed; I imagined undressing them and the situations in which such a thing would be imaginable. My eyeballs wanted to be fingertips. I was a romantic.

A romantic teenage boy, that is. My romance encompassed a craving for illicit glimpses, not because I lacked visual informa- tion but as rehearsals of transgression and discovery. A craving for craving, especially in the social context of other teenage boys, that mass of horny romantics. But we’re talking about a terrible low point in the history of teenage access to pornography: Ev- eryone’s dad had canceled his
Playboy
subscription in a simulta- neous feminist epiphany a few years before (that everyone’s dad

had once subscribed to
Playboy
was a golden myth; I trust it was halfway true). The Internet was a millennium away. A friend and I were actually excited when we discovered a cache of back issues of
Sexology,
a black-and-white crypto-scientific pulp magazine, in the plaster and lathe of a ruined brownstone on Wyckoff Street. Pity us. When a couple of snootily gorgeous older teenage girls suddenly moved into the upper duplex of a house on Dean Street, there was some talk among the block’s boys about climbing a nearby tree for a leer, a notion as halcyon-suburban as anything in my childhood. But the London plane trees shading our block had no branches low enough to be climbable, had likely been selected precisely for their resistance to burglars. The point is, I was as thrilled to imagine glimpsing the sisters as any of the other schemers. I could very well have gone off to drawing group the evening of that same day but made no mental conjugation be- tween the desired object and the wasted abundance before me.

Only two uneasy memories bridge this gulf, between the eu- nuch-child who breezed through a world of live nude models and the hormonal disaster site I was the rest of the time. One glitch was the constant threat or promise that a drawing group model would cancel at the last minute, since tradition had it that one of the circle would volunteer for duty instead. Two of the group’s members were younger women—named, incredibly enough, Hazel and Laurel—for whom I harbored modest but definite boy- to-woman crushes and with whom I may have managed even to be legibly flirtatious. If one evening a model had canceled and either Hazel or Laurel took her clothes off, I’d likely have been pitched headfirst into the chasm of my disassociation. I never faced this outcome. The only substitute model ever to volunteer on my watch was our host, the hairily cherubic Bobby Ramirez. But I would never forget what
didn’t
happen, who
didn’t
undress.