On paper, I look like “that woman.” In my fifties with unseemly, long, entirely unnatural red hair, I’m a picture of harlot health. I’ve never been married; I tend toward open relationships; I spent a good portion of my life predatorily sexually active; and I’ve not much compunction about sleeping with married men (or married women, for that matter). Without much need to juke the stats, I look like everything your mom, country songs, Victorian novels, or Lifetime movies ever warned you against. I also have great big fake tits——a sign, were there ever one, of a woman who is up to no good.

When I take the Buzzfeed quiz “Which Dolly Parton Song Are You?” I reliably get “Jolene.” This upsets me because the analysis (“You are emotional and sentimental. You recognize true love when you see it and find beauty in all things”) reflects the speaker, the wronged wife, and not Jolene, the woman with whom I identify.

I do not recognize true love when I see it. I have often confused love for other things, like security, money, or dick; of course, I've also confused dick, money, and security for love. These days, I’m not sure I’d know love if it dropped on my head and announced itself with a blaring rendition of “In Your Eyes.” I would, however, know good dick.

So would Jolene. She’s resourceful and independent, a woman who doesn’t kowtow to social constraints, one whose vanity may be high, but it’s balanced by her low tolerance for bullshit. Of course, I may be projecting.Jolene, whom the singer plaintively begs not to take her man, is unquestionably “that woman,” the phrase used near-interchangeably with “home wreckers.” To be “that woman” is to be the cunty catalyst for breakup, the vagina wedge that divides a lawfully married couple, the deliquescent bitch for whom your husband leaves you. Few want to be “that woman,” but then no one wants to be the singer of Jolene either.

Without much need to juke the stats, I look like everything your mom, country songs, Victorian novels, or Lifetime movies ever warned you against.

America's original that woman" was Wallis Simpson, who famously spurred Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor, nee King Edward VIII, to get a divorce and abdicate his throne to marry her. A compelling, divisive figure who was prone to vainglorious aphorisms (“A woman can’t be too rich or too thin”; “I’d rather shop than eat”; “I’m nothing to look at, so the only thing I can do is dress better than everyone else”), she had some experience of married men falling in love with her. Her second husband, Ernest Simpson, also divorced his wife to marry her, and it was Edward’s mother, Queen Elizabeth, who first called Wallis “that woman” in 1936. One supposes she did so to avoid Wallis’ name crossing her lips. (The horror. All families have drama, but not all have abdications. While it seems terribly romantic to have a king love you enough to relinquish power and prestige for you, the reality likely pales. “You have no idea,” Wallis said, “how hard it is to live out a great romance.”)

For me, and likely for you, “that woman” is Monica Lewinsky, with whom President Bill Clinton said he “did not have sexual relations.” Spoiler: he did. Monica was 24 when she blew the Leader of the Free World; I can’t say that were I in her blue dress I’d have done any different. Since the Clinton affair, Monica has had a hard time of it. Beyond being raked over the media coals by everyone from Matt Drudge to Maureen Dowd, her life was more or less defined by her youthful sexuberance. As Megan Carpentier wrote compassionately in The Guardian, “Imagine having your whole life defined by the worst guy you ever blew.” It is a chilling thought.

During the time that Monica Lewinsky was on everyone’s lips, I was dancing at FlashDancers, a subterranean stripclub in New York City. Gyrating for cash, I heard more than one man with a ring on his significant finger castigate Clinton for his Oval Office hummer, as if he’d not have made Monica his humidor in a hot, free second. There’s no sanctimony like that expressed when a stripper’s ass is bouncing inches from your nose to the beat of “No Diggity.”

To be “that woman” is inextricable from politics—whether politics qua politics, gender politics, or sexual politics. To be “that woman” is to divide women into two groups: “that woman” and all the rest.

To be “that woman” is inextricable from politics——whether politics qua politics, gender politics, or sexual politics. To be “that woman” is to divide women into two groups: “that woman” and all the rest. It’s the same old, same old——the whore and the accusing crowd of wives, the menacing Jolene and the status quo that likes its IRS filed jointly. Of course, it’s all a pernicious fiction. No one can take your man because he’s not yours. If he leaves you, it’s because he wanted to leave you, flaming locks of auburn hair or nah. That woman is just a woman, doing what she can to cobble together sustenance of various and sundry sorts.  And those who try to set women against ourselves do so to divide and conquer. There never has been “that man.”

Ditto that “Jolene” with whom I identify so dearly. She’s a fictional character and as such she lives less in infamy and more in eternity. Let her. Let Jolene live fierce and free and pure fantasy because no one’s breath is always fresh, and no one’s voice is ever summer soft. Let her be an aspiration for those who like to dish a little swagger. Our happiness depends on Jolene, but not for the reasons Dolly gave. Because Jolene is like a power suit, an identity we can wear to feel some slink, an outfit certain of us find some temporary beauty in, if only in the service of getting some serious good dick.

Image: Bernardino Luini, Salome, 1527

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I texted my lover today. “I miss your cock,” I wrote. “I want to suck it.” Then I texted a series of illustrations: an eggplant, an ear of corn, a cactus. With all debt owing to Sonnet 130, my lover’s cock is nothing like the corn, but William Shakespeare never had to express himself in emoji. (Shakespeare used “cock” as a pun, eliding penis into pistol trigger in Henry V, but in Shakespeare’s day “cock” wasn’t a dirty word——it was just a word. Aside: while it’s probable that Shakespeare enjoyed cock, whether or not he sucked them remains a larger historical debate.)

I’ve taken to few things with the vigor and naturalness with which I’ve taken to fellatio. Reading. Lifting weights. Even writing came less naturally than sucking cock, which may or may not give you an inkling of my affinity for it. I remember my first blowjob like it was yesterday, and it wasn’t. It was 36 years ago; I was fifteen. My boyfriend was pushing me to have sex with him, but I wasn’t ready, so I blew him. Taking his penis into my mouth was weird and electric and slick and mushroomy, but when his cock hit the back of my throat, I felt like I’d hit a phantasm of home.

Other acts wax and wane. I can take or leave most cunnilingus these days, and while it might be that none of the men populating my bed in the last half decade have the magic mouth, it might also be that my body has changed. These days, I find receiving head to be annoying. On the other hand, somewhat literally, I never liked having my clit rubbed when I was younger, and now I’m quite fond of manual stimulation. I’ve cycled through dominance, submission, and that blanc mange flavor of sex that is neither; I’ve liked long, slow fucks that lasted for days and I’ve found that languor tedious as fuck; positions have risen and fallen on my hierarchy of wants, ditto styles of sex. One thing that has never, ever wavered is my adoration of the blowjob.

To express what I so adore about fellatio is to make me starry-eyed and mouth agape, as long as I like the cock in question. You are what you swallow, or so goes the adage as I remember it, and a cock of surpassing beauty, size and heft holds an imperious command. I love the fulsome visceral experience of a penis filling my mouth, my nose pressing tufts of pubic hair flat. I love feeling my spit turn from pallid watery quotidian stuff to thick ropy strands. I love nursing a spent, flaccid baby-bird cock into upstanding erection. I love the strange geometry and thaumaturgical patience that allows a cock to pass my esophageal sphincter and enter my esophagus. This is also known as deep-throating. I love to deep-throat.

In short, cocksucking: I’m a fan. Which is why I’ve long had a hard time wrapping my head around fellatio-based insults.

“Cocksucker,” commonplace would have you believe, is a gay-adjacent slur. Commonplace would tell you that it the term means what it says: a person who gives fellatio, but the implication is a gay man and thus, a “contemptible person.” Commonplace is wrong. Not once have I heard the word used this way. When a person calls another human a cocksucker, it has nothing to do with contempt or fellatio; rather, it has to do with profound annoyance touched with a grudging respect for a person, usually male, who is contentious, nasty and unpleasant.

When a person calls another human a cocksucker, it has nothing to do with contempt or fellatio; rather, it has to do with profound annoyance touched with a grudging respect for a person, usually male, who is contentious, nasty and unpleasant.

Jesse Sheidlower, lexicographer and author of The F-Word, a book about “fuck,” points to an 1865 Civil War court martial trial as the date for “cocksucker” entering written language; it meant not the literal person who fellates but a figurative asshole. Interestingly, it’s hard to date the word “cock”  alone; it’s likely to have crossed from avian name to human slang by the mid-fifteenth century. And while the mid-nineteenth century might have been the first time “cocksucker" crept into written English, both Cattulus and Martial, first century BCE Romans, were fond of the Latin word “irrumator.” It means “cocksucker” in almost precisely the current usage. David Milch (maker of Deadwood, 2004—2006) and all his limber-dicked cocksuckers were historically accurate; ditto Rome (2005—20070). HBO is on top of its historical epithets.

But while “cocksucker” is slippery, “suck my cock” holds firm. Perhaps it’s the bare imperative of the phrase that lends it its potency. Or perhaps it’s the visual that invariably leaps to mind. You can’t cross the path of “suck my cock” without seeing a phallus swallowed. If you utter “cocksucker” with a reluctant regard, you spit “suck my cock” with pure imperialism. My royal cock, knave, on your knees and polish it.

The truly beautiful thing about “suck my cock” is its close unmooring from gender. Just as “cock” has meant “vulva” in pockets of the American South and in West Coast Rap, so too does “suck my cock” work as an epithet regardless of genitalia. I might baroque it up a notch and tell you to suck my big swinging metaphorical cock, but the result would be the same. You’d understand that I’m expressing my extreme displeasure with you, and actual literal cock sucking would most likely not incur.

Unimaginable to an inveterate cocksucker like me is the implicit notion in “suck my cock” that it’s something we must be coerced to do. Are men that alienated from, that disgusted by, that divorced from their own cocks that they can’t, as a people, conceive of a joyfully given blowjob? Or is it that the waft of power, of hand, of supremacy adds spice to the sauce?

The commonplace idea is that the cocksuckee, not the cocksucker, holds the power, and while contemporary culture and contemporary porn would have you swallow this whole, and once again the commonplace is wrong. They forget that the cocksucker is the one with the teeth.

All those delicious sibilants, all those hard-hitting velars——uttering “cocksucker” and “suck my cock” is an indubitable pleasure. And this is, perhaps, the rub. The idea is that to suck a cock is to automatically be submissive, subservient, obeisant. The idea is that you can’t do it properly without bending your knees, and when you are on your knees, you are begging. The commonplace idea is that the cocksuckee, not the cocksucker, holds the power, and while contemporary culture and contemporary porn would have you swallow this whole, once again the commonplace is wrong. They forget that the cocksucker is the one with the teeth.

The cocksuckee is the one who closes his eyes in pleasure. The cocksucker——and I say this as one who has been face-fucked until covered with snot and spit and mucous lubrications of unparseable origin——will always have power. Because we are the ones who can close our mouths. Fast or slow, now or later, behind velvet lips, chomping teeth can chomp. Mouths can form the slow-mo near kiss of “no” and close on the vowel. Not to get all Hegelian on your ass, but without the cockers, the cocksuckees are just swinging their dicks, silent in the night.

A blowjob by any other name may feel as sweet. Were I one morning to wake, Tiresias-like, a man I would certainly find out. Eggplant, corn, cactus, please put it in your mouth, and mind the teeth. I know they are there, waiting.

Chelsea G. Summers is a regular columnist. She can also be found dirtymouthing on Twitter and via Tinyletter.

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My lover likes to watch me come. He stares at my face encouragingly, intently. He makes these little moues of appreciation; they’re adorable. His eyes flicker about my face, half in wonder, it seems. If he’s behind me, he likes to have a mirror in front, the better to watch my face discompose, my mouth widen, my eyes close. His gaze clamped on mine, he nods, nudging along my sometimes grudging orgasm, as if it’s a ball he’s pushing with his nose. He moans and he shivers with my pleasure. I’ve wondered if he were faking his excitement over my excitement. I prefer to think he’s not.

It works for me. I like being watched, and I like having a lover who gets fucking seriously off on my orgasms. This lover is not the first — while I don’t come easily, or often or sometimes at all, I do come operatically, banshee yowling with a stunning dearth of grace. My lovers who stick around tend to be the kind of guys for whom female pleasure is paramount, or if not paramount then motivating. 

The feeling is mutual. I enjoy it when my lover comes. His thrusting grows ragged, his rhythm in disarray. His breath turns heavy. He groans loudly and shudders, contentedly. I do love it when men come. It’s satisfying, like when I’ve cooked something delicious and my dinner guests lick their fingers and their plates.

Let us then cut the crap and admit it: you and I and everyone we know have at one time or another faked an orgasm. And if you haven’t, what the hell is wrong with you?

Orgasms, we can all agree, often are nicer than they are easy. Thus we fake them, as we do so many other things. I deploy subterfuge every day and in many ways to present a managed face to the world, and so do you. Let us then cut the crap and admit it: you and I and everyone we know have at one time or another faked an orgasm. And if you haven’t, what the hell is wrong with you? 

Charlotte Shane, writer and prostitute, recently wrote what she called “the definitive guide to orgasms, fake and otherwise” for Playboy Magazine. She researched the fuck out of fake orgasms, and she deftly weaves together women’s faking it, feminist outrage at faking it, men’s outrage at faking it, men’s faking it, medical reasons for faking it, and the importance of faking it. 

“My sex utopia,” says Shane, “is not a place where no one fakes it but rather a place where sex is less numbers-oriented; where we don’t measure our own sexual prowess by charting our partner’s orgasms; and where the language of ‘giving’ someone an orgasm is done away with altogether.” She ends, in short, with a bang. How could it be otherwise?

When I take a long, appraising look through a jeweler’s loupe at my orgasms, I can put my finger on only one reason why I’ve ever come: it felt good and I let go. The thickening mass of physical sensations overwhelmed my conscious self, and that orgasm took flight like a swooping murmuration of swallows. (These are tenuous things, orgasms; so easily they can go over all apparitional, leaving nothing but a shimmer in the air and a vague sense of unease. For these reasons, we go agape at pornstars, at medical anomalies, at people come at the drop of a hat, the flick of a tongue, the push of a breeze or of a sneeze.) 

The thickening mass of physical sensations overwhelmed my conscious self, and that orgasm took flight like a swooping murmuration of swallows.

While there is but one reason I’ve ever come, I can summon a litany of reasons why I faked it. I felt bad for the dude. I felt pressure to come. I was bored and wanted to signal an end. It wasn’t really important to me to orgasm, but he needed to bear witness to one. I started faking it and ended up making it. It seemed polite. It was “on brand” to orgasm. He was new to sex. I was new to sex. It was a pity “orgasm.” I was angry. He was angry. He sucked in bed. Or I did.

(I should, I suppose, note that I’ve never faked it with a woman — unless of course I have, and I’ve lost track. In 35 years of fucking, track gets lost.)

In the timeline of the discourse of human sexuality, female orgasms once were really important, and then they weren’t, and now they are again. For centuries, English law wouldn’t prosecute a rape if the woman got pregnant because, despite all evidence to the contrary, jurisprudence recognized pregnancy as a sign of pleasure; if the woman didn’t orgasm, she couldn’t get pregnant, and if she orgasmed, she wasn’t raped. This belief fell by the wayside at some point in the early nineteenth century, and freed from procreation, female orgasm grew less important. By the Victorian age, it was unseemly for bourgeois women to derive pleasure from sex.

There’s a strong argument to make that the Jazz Age, women’s liberation, and porn dragged female orgasm out of the crepuscular recesses where it hid, latent and slick and quietly and hysterically heaving. Once reserved for wanton women, female orgasm is fetishized; everyone who’s anyone and even your mother feels compelled to come. These days, women aren’t just supposed to feel pleasure; they must. These days, female orgasms are quantified and qualified, sorted into types and arranged on Richter scales. These days, women feel inadequate if they can’t come on cue, loud and wet and orgiastic, squirting long liquid streams into the baby grand. These days, female orgasms are Voxplained.

The relentless gaze of a panopticon, no matter its pleasure principle, can be too much to bear, especially for something as ephemeral as an orgasm. People cheat and perform, in the truest sense of the word. Faking it is a legitimate a part of human sexuality as fiction is as legitimate as memoir.
 
The thing is that while women can fake orgasms quite easily, quite often, and quite well, so can men. And they do — for the same reasons women do. Because they’re bored. Because the sex isn’t great. Because they don’t really feel like coming. Because they might psych themselves into it by faking it. Because they’re angry. Because we’re angry. Because they’re young. Because we’re young. Because it’s polite. Because because because sometimes humans lie when they lie with others.

Is it a shame when faulty folks fumbling at the ties that bind and fail and fake it and make do and fake it again and again until pain impedes pleasure, rather than speaking up and voicing their dispassion? It is, but that’s the worst of faking it. Most often, we’re tired, we’re bored, we’re done, and we can’t be bothered to tap out. The spectacle calls and we answer, theatrically, having what she’s having, even when it’s not really what we want.
 

Chelsea G. Summers is a regular columnist. She can also be found dirtymouthing on Twitter and via Tinyletter.

Painting by Dorothy Iannone.

The post You’ll Have What I’m Having appeared first on Adult Mag.

I once had this boyfriend, this dick-swinging man’s man. He was a former Army Ranger and a silver-tongued ex-junkie, a guy who liked to refer to himself as the “cat-daddy,” the “goat-gatherer” and the “man with the dermis of steel.” He fished. He hunted. He chewed tobacco and spit noisily into empty water bottles. He had a bald head and a hard body. When he fucked me, he rained sweat down on my face, my throat, my breasts. The next day, he sometimes liked to wear my panties to work.

He’d work all day at his lawyer job with my dirty lacy bits rubbing flat against his cock and the placket of his worsted wool suits. To him, my panties were a pelt, a trophy. If he could’ve strode into his office with them hanging around his neck, he would have. Far from emasculating the Goat-Gatherer, my panties reinforced his salty manfulness. Had anyone caught him tucking his penis into lace, he’d have smiled, pointed at them, and said, “Stripper.” In the context of this body, these lacy bits were all about aggressive masculinity. No cross-dresser was this guy, although maybe he liked the feel.

Lingerie will always live in paradox. Susurrations of satin, of lace, of boning, of silk, and of net, these garments hold our private parts; they are the garments meant to suggest but not announce, meant to seduce but not destroy, meant to support but not withhold, meant to define but not distort, meant to display but not expose. A beautiful set of lingerie can an exquisite thing. It’s also hideously expensive, usually hard to remove, and often pointlessly delicate. I have, for example, a gorgeous Mimi Holliday black lace bra; it cost $80 on sale and now sports a hole the size of a fingertip from ungentle removal. A beautiful set of lingerie is like nothing so much as a hymen: largely symbolic, uniquely female, and easily rent. “Rent” as in torn; no one wants to let other’s underwear.

Lingerie is the only clothing we put on to make us look more naked.

Called “unmentionables” by polite society, at least since the Edwardians became scandalized by their presence, lingerie is the garb that must whisper its name. It is a secret, after all, and a secret shouted is a secret no more. Lingerie is the clothing whose presence is marked by absence; they’re the only clothes that we put on to make us look more naked. This is one reason why I like to wear thigh-high stockings to bed.

You need go back barely a century to find the inception of unmentionables—or to use Charles Dickens’ word, “inexplicables.” The modern brassiere dates to about 1910 and the modern panty arrived shortly thereafter; thongs, surprisingly, have existed since WWII. For centuries prior, women’s undergarments were much more baroque. Corsets and petticoats were de rigueur, and men who think themselves dexterous for unclasping a front-hook bra would be cowed by the underwear of yore. Eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope called the petticoats of Belinda, heroine of his epic poem The Rape of the Lock, her “sev’n fold fence” for their protective abilities. When you consider that women of Pope’s time period wore a chemise, a minimum of two petticoats, a corset, and an underskirt, all before getting properly dressed, you can understand how underclothes presented a formidable barrier. On the other hand, pantaloons lacked a center seam, and their slits allowed for easy access; this is why the nineteenth-century can-can dance was flash-flash pornographic.

There is no male equivalent to lingerie. A man in his underwear may be sexy, and a man in his gripper boxer-briefs may hold unquestionable allure, but no one is going to sell men on the idea of thousand-dollar lingerie sets for themselves. The obvious reason for this satin gap is that we’re not conditioned to think of male bodies as gifts to be unwrapped—when was the last time you saw a pretty bow on a pair of boxers? It’s also because, aside from its architectural buttressing, lingerie is all about embodying languor and idleness in its pointless frippery. These are not attributes men aspire toward, though they might enjoy taking them for a test drive.

Lingerie marks your body as expensive, cheap, or blasé-blah bourgeois.

Like red lipstick, high heels, fur, or perfume, lingerie reflects class. It marks your body as expensive—or cheap—or merely blasé-blah bourgeois. And just as it classes your body, lingerie places you within a hierarchy of sexual tropes; Agent Provocateur picked its name with full knowledge of the seductiveness of a fluid identity. A g-string may comprise less than five square inches of fabric, but it speaks volumes. Black leather says one thing; white lace quite another; red satin says something else; and humble gray cotton gives yet another message—yet all these garments may belong to the same woman. Me, for example. Perhaps you.

Femininity, in my experience, is a lot like martial arts. Anyone can pretend at it and look a fool, but it takes years of practice, true skill, and unwavering dedication—or some really excellent cinematographic sleight of hand—to make it look effortless, fluid, and natural. And if femininity is martial arts, then Dita Von Teese is the Bruce Lee of femininity. Like Lee, Von Teese has predicated her livelihood on making something very difficult, very painful, and very time-consuming look simple, even pleasurable. Like Lee, Von Teese is as much a fabrication of her own mythmaking as a very mortal human who glides as a colossus among men. Like Lee, Von Teese inspires acolytes, a fervid fan-base who wants nothing so much as to be like their idol. Unlike Lee, Von Teese is still alive, and she has her own line of lingerie.

It’s hard to put on lingerie and look born to it. Even if you’re wearing it for no one else, lingerie makes you into an object—sometimes a very expensive object—and that’s not always a comfortable thing to be. Most women wear the wrong bra size, and it’s not for lack of resources. Underwear is intimidating—even to us. I didn’t know myself until a little over a year ago, and I consider myself a fairly self-assured woman. It took a blown-out busted heart to push me into a tony lingerie shop to use a gift certificate I’d held for more than three years. I walked out after spending $350 on several pairs of underwear and a bra that made my breasts feel as if they were borne by fairies.  I’m a 34-E, as it turns out.

The thing about wearing lingerie—and I mean the full complement of lingerie options, from whore-store fishnet cat-suit to proper lace bra and panties to baroque latex corsetry—is that it makes you feel self-conscious until that moment when it merely makes you feel self-aware. Lingerie does more than lift and support your breasts or shape your ass or hold your stockings high; it makes you feel like a naturalized woman. And when you no longer want to play that role, you can take it off. Sure, I wear lingerie for sex dates, cliché pieces that are easily parsed by men, but they’re not the pieces I care about. The real lingerie I wear for me, or for my girlfriends is difficult. It's a bright acid pink bra and g-string in a vaguely neoprene fabric; it’s grey and purple and festooned with eyelash lace, like an expensive hearse; it’s not simple and it’s not black and it’s not anything a heterosexual man would comprehend. Each set is something I chose for me because it’s badass and so am I.

Lingerie, underthings, underwear, foundation garments. The thing about unmentionables is that it’s a lot like femininity: ultimately it’s up to us to make it our own. It’s probably not going to look like Vogue models’, and it’s probably not going to look like your mom’s. It’s not going to attract every man (or every woman), but who would want that anyway. Underneath it all, these little bits of fabric and fancy, of boning and lace, sing paeans about a woman’s relationship with herself. We all have to compromise, but we don’t have to settle. I don’t wear my crazy expensive privileged sets of underwear every day, but I could. Lucky are men—or women—who get to see me in it.

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One very cold night at the very beginning of 1980, I got very, very drunk and put my mouth all over my friend Melissa. The details are hazy. Underage, we drank many, many sloe gin fizzes, left the bar very late, and very likely stiffed the waitress. Melissa drove us home, unwisely, and we pulled over to make out on the side of the road, the engine of her father’s giant ’70s car thrumming like the heart of a Great White. When we slipped into bed, the sheets white and cold as ice cream, I kissed her breasts, her belly; inexpertly, drunkenly I mouthed her clitoris.

The next day, and for decades after, Melissa pretended it never happened. It was fine, her pretense. I was used to it with the boys I blew under the dusky cover of midnight keggers. Saturday night, they moaned my name; Monday morning, they willed me into namelessness.

The following summer, I learned how to fuck a woman. Wait——that’s calloused; that’s the voice of the woman I am now. At 17, I was pliant and unformed; I was cookie dough. I was not the brittle woman I am today, cooked by age and hardened by experience. I did learn how to fuck a woman, yes, but mostly I learned how to fuck Marta.

I was her first. In fact, before me, no one——girl or otherwise——had fucked Marta. No one had plied their lips to her clit, no one had fingered her, no one had made her come. My index and forefinger broke her hymen. We spent long, luxurious hours in bed, stealing off when we could to cheesy hotels——we met as counselors at a Catholic girls’ camp run by nuns. When we didn’t have time away, we would find each other in bathrooms and closets; Marta would rub my clit until I came, mouth upon her shoulder. I’d leave spit trails on her polo shirt.

I fell in love with Marta, briefly, intensely, and as with all of my incendiary loves——no matter how flickering and fast——it changed me. Love leaves its fingerprints. You can’t always see the traces. Sometimes, like spraying Luminol at a crime scene, you have to shine a light at a special angle to see the spatter pattern of love.

A metaphor, “straight” is also a remarkably apt term for heterosexuals, and I say this as  woman who loves dick. While my sexuality used to vibrate somewhere near the center of the Kinsey scale, over the years it has, to my eternal dismay, inched inexorably to the left. My love for my girlfriends knows no boundaries, except the libidinal. My friends are beautiful, gorgeous, intelligent women who are far finer humans than the men in my life. Regrettably, I don’t want to fuck them. I want to fuck men, a point about which I feel no pride. When I have doubt, I think of this: a photo of a comely penis makes me want to suck it; a photo of a vulva makes me consider eating oysters. I am, sad to say, straight. Men are so dull that I often wish I were not.

Heterosexuality has problems, and “straight” expresses one of the biggest. When straight people fuck, they often do so as if they’re writing a simple, declarative sentence. Subject, verb, object: done. Absent are the looping, soaring, hanging dependent clauses; rare is the parenthetical information, footnotes, and annotation; few the tangents that lead you to new, unexplored territories. Even tied to a bed and ripe with silken kink, straight sex is often straightforward.

I am going to flatten out and generalize here, the way heterosexuality does. Straight sex’s simple, direct trajectory is a simple, direct response to fucking. When humans made penetrative fucking——whether in the vagina or in the ass——the focal act in heterosexuality, all other acts were relegated to preamble. Some might argue that fucking has always been the point of heterosexual sex because procreativity has always been key. Some might be wrong. Some might inaccurately assume that people always knew what we know now about how procreation works, and some might inaccurately assume that people didn’t always have sex for pleasure. Some might think of heterosexual sex as we know it as “natural,” when in fact it is merely naturalized. Some are shortsighted.

Freed from fucking, sex ambles in circles, moves in lazy discourse, runs in great arcs, rambles freely across body parts and sensations.

Take penile-lump-in-mucous-membrane-orifice-style fucking out of the heterosexual equation, and suddenly sex becomes a far more tortuous deal. Remember, if you will, days when you had sex without fucking. Maybe you were young. Maybe you or your partner didn’t or couldn’t fuck. Freed from fucking, sex ambles in circles, moves in lazy discourse, runs in great arcs, rambles across body parts and sensations with idyllic freedom.

Put the fucking back in, and sex becomes about it, almost to the exclusion of other delicious acts. Penetrative sex defines heterosexuality. Subject, verb, object: done.

In 1984, I was living in Boston, and I took up with this redheaded girl whose skin was like vanilla softserve. I remember one time we had sex to Sadé’s Diamond Life because it seemed like the thing to do; how better could two ’80s girls express themselves? As with Marta, as with Melissa, sex with this redheaded girl (I don’t remember her name) swirled and spiraled like the tracks of a figure skater. Fingers took the place of dicks, tongues dipped and flicked, mouths placed to slits, time suspended breathless. It was no ordinary love, and it, like all the other loves, left its prints.

It has been a decade since I last had sex with a chick. This fact alone speaks to my Sapphic ambivalence. My closest emotional relationships may be with my girlfriends, but these women don’t make my heart beat faster. I don’t miss them with the same giddy rush I that I miss men; when I have sex dreams, they rarely feature women. I wish it were different, I wish I were different, if only because I like to have choice. I wish my sexuality were more fluid, but I am as gods and nature made me: straight.

Still, the imprints of Melissa, of Marta, and of that redheaded girl linger, and I can see those lasting susurrations in how I construct the “best” sex. What I treasure most about sex is not the inexorable will to penis-in-whatever penetration. It’s the loops, the digressions, the discursive moments that interrupt and return, that retreat and advance, that move with a baroque, florid prose. It’s the moments that suspend my lover’s body and mine in fluid time. It’s the twinklings of dawdling and misdirections, the cracks of weird rhythms and strange cadences, the ticks that are unexpected and challenging. It’s straight fucking, sure, but it’s fucking that isn’t straight.

It’s hard to find men who will pause their stampede to orgasm and let it linger——and I say this as a woman who enjoys being fucked righteous and senseless. Sometimes a simple declarative sentence is a beautiful thing. But not always. Sometimes the flesh calls for expression that’s purple or pained, luscious or euphuistic, rich or aureate, and what the flesh wants, the flesh should sometimes get. And that, in a thousand or so words, is what I learned from lesbian sex. You should try it, even if you’re a straight boy.

Image: screenshot from Lost & Delirious (2001).

The post What I Learned in Girls’ School appeared first on Adult Mag.

There will be cheese cubes. There will also be a plate of desultory fruit, and another with careful loops of store-bought chocolate chip cookies. At the end of the night, as the columnist from [redacted] rides the young bro journalist from [redacted], her red g-string pulled to the side, her breasts plumped out of her corselet, mouth smeary-drunk with nuzzling and champagne, the cookies will be undisturbed.

But the cheese, orange as a kindergartner’s sun, gets eaten. I can think of few foods less conducive to sex than cheese cubes——chili, I suppose——yet there I am, at a sex party, and there are cheese cubes.

I have attended precisely two sex parties, and both have featured cheese cubes.

I have attended precisely two sex parties, and both have featured cheese cubes. One was about a decade ago. Its crescendo had a very handsome foot fetishist rubbing my feet and sucking my toes, and while I adore having my toes sucked, it grows dull, so I wrote haiku in my head. I witnessed some rather tepid knife play, and when I ordered a drink, I found that I was standing on a human carpet. This was also when I saw the cheese cubes. It’s possible that people did eventually, actually have sex, but I didn’t see it.

The second sex party was this past weekend, and it was billed as the poshest of the Very Posh Sex Parties, a veritable Queen’s English of orgies, one promising a rich banquet of nubile, swinging flesh for heterosexual (and female bicurious) delectation. A friend invited me to be the plus-one of the journalist from [redacted], who then declined to show. My friend brought her boyfriend. They are monogamous. I am single. None of us had sex.

The invite to the Very Posh Sex Party came with a schoolmarm’s list of do’s and don’ts, wills and won’ts. You must wear a mask. Anyone seen with an active phone will be forced to leave. Men must wait for women to ask them. No means no. Proper cocktail party attire must be observed, at least until it is shed.

The main room of the Very Posh Sex Party was black and bare except for a pool table, several large couches, and a few armchairs. At one end of the room were the bathrooms and a patio; at the other was the fuck room. Near the bar and the patio sat a big square foam-covered platform. When we arrived, a woman in a black leather bustier lounged as a man gave her strident cunnilingus. She stared at the ceiling, distracted. Later, a man with an ad executive’s short ponytail would, unbeknownst to him, sit in her wet spot.

The crowd was largely white. White men in boxy off-the-rack business casual suits squired white women in body-con dresses. The men were older than the women; the women were better looking than the men, and there were more of them. The men looked like customers at a strip club; the women looked like they’d once or twice done a pole class because it was naughty. Everyone seemed cut from the same bolt of corporate cloth. Were I pressed to guess, I’d say the men were all, to a one, straight; the women were largely “homo-spectacle,” what Portlandia calls women who “kiss other women to get attention.”

These were not my people. Actually, wait——there was one adorable couple, a young ponytailed girl in a Black Milk Lycra cartoon dress, white thigh-highs, and creepers who led her fey boyfriend about on a thin silver leash. I kind of love her a lot.

Look, I’ve nothing against sex parties, and I’m not opposed to having sex at a sex party. I’m fond of anonymous sex, public sex, and performative sex, so while I’ve never had sex at a sex party, I feel like I’d want to have sex at a sex party. I certainly cast no aspersions at people who regularly enjoy sex parties; far be it from me to judge others for their delights. But this was, as far as I can tell, a bad sex party——and by that I don’t mean a sex party that was bad. I mean a veritable celebration of bad sex.

As it turns out, bankers seem to grow a uniform sort of ass. It’s flat and white and faintly floury as naan bread. The asses pump, pump, the rhythm of some anarchic drummer, and I have seen them pumping, and yet I live. I saw on Saturday night a man, flush with fresh concupiscence, stomp flat-footed across a room of strangers, jacket, shirt, and pants unbuttoned, his pelted chest thrust out like a silverback gorilla. I saw a room of naked women, expensive shoes in the air, being fucked by men who couldn’t bother to remove their sport coats.

I have seen a hand job that breathes life into the word “epic.” Empires have fallen in less time than the duration of this handie. I admire the woman who gave it, her wrist butterfly-fast, her focus laser-like. She stroked, cajoled, massaged, entreated, jerked and manually stimulated this man, a sixty-something year-old banker with a belly like the round pale top of an undercooked muffin, for about forty minutes. It was like the Schrödinger’s cat of hand jobs: neither could I look away nor did I want to see its natural conclusion. I never saw any lube. I suspect chafing.

It was like the Schrödinger’s cat of hand jobs: neither could I look away nor did I want to see its natural conclusion. I never saw any lube. I suspect chafing.

I saw a lithe Asian woman ride the cock of a lithe Asian man. He sat on a couch, and she dutifully moved back and forth and up and down, like a lithe little horse on a merry-go-round. Her posture was exquisite. In the gloaming of the sex room’s crepuscular light, his cock looked exactly like the eggplant emoji: weighty, purple, faintly curved, and slightly tapered.

In the main room, a white, bare-breasted woman with lofty implants played pool with fully dressed men. A couple of thin lesbians made out on a white leather couch for hours, one on top, then the other, a fluid Möbius strip of hot girl-on-girl action. One was naked; the other never did remove her g-string; both were brunettes. A man with yellow Peter Frampton curls donned a condom to fuck a skinny wan blonde wearing nothing but one knee-high tan boot. A brunette wandered over, pulled her g-string aside and sat on the wan blonde’s face. I didn’t see her asking, but by this point, no one was wearing a mask and everyone was using their phones.

In the fuck room, the speakers blared, “Are Y’all Ready for This?” BWAH-BWA BA-BA-BA-BA, the room hummed and resonated like a sports arena. Whoever had assembled the play list was carbon dated to the end of the twentieth century. Rihanna will always be a toddler to the Very Posh Sex Party’s DJ. Aside from the electronic UNZT-UNZT-UNZT, the fuck room was oddly quiet. I heard two different women cry out in orgasm, or in “orgasm,” other than that, I heard no pet sounds.

I witnessed a lot of aggressively mediocre sex. Which leads me to wonder whether I too have sex that looks mediocre to the casual spectator, or do I know something these people do not? Are porn stars like the professional skaters of the sex world, able to transform an act that looks plodding and pedestrian when done by amateurs into stunning feats of acrobatic beauty? Or, as I suspect, do I observe the fucking of these bankers and executives and lawyers and sugar-babies and rightfully despair?

Is it perhaps the sexual Hawthorne Effect, where people fuck differently because they are being watched——and watched they were, a scrum pooled at the fuck room’s tatami doors, while we observers ranged on couches, lounged against walls, and stood in the corners of the stygian fuck room. If a couple screwed in the corner and no one watched, would it still be a sex party?

If a couple fucked in the corner and no one watched, would it still be a sex party?

It was, in short, the nakedest middle school dance I’d attended in decades, and while, as a diminutive, hirsute man said to me in the elevator “people hooked up,” it was mostly that the couples who came together came together, and perhaps added an accessory from the fleeting flock of unattached girls wafting through the crowd.

The Very Posh Sex Party offers a ripe paddock of the unicorns of heterosexuality——bisexual females——and not much else. It was the most conventional of orgies, one where men were men and women were available, and small pink dicks swung mighty and high. It was, at the Very Posh Sex Party, as it ever was, and there was no challenge posed to those who could afford to attend.

Thus I, unlike the cheese, stood alone. I watched. And I lost heart. And I exited, untouched and unquiet into the night.

Image Credit: Cecily Brown, “High Society,” 1998.

The post Are Y’all Ready For This? appeared first on Adult Mag.

Let’s talk about the sex I’m not having. There’s a lot of it. It’s copious, the sex I’m not having. It could fill the Houston Astrodome. The bountiful nothingness of the sex I’m not having would echo across the playing field, curl up in the soft seats of the owners’ box, and slither across the visitors’ team’s locker room, where it would turn the knobs of the showers futilely. The sex I’m not having smiles at the camera. It waves the big foam finger, and it builds a human pyramid. It does an end-zone dance.

The sex I’m not having spikes the ball, the crowd goes wild. The crowd is also the sex I’m not having. See those seats, ranging in serried rows, stretching to the rafters? The asses that fill them belong to all the sex I’m not having.

The sex I’m not having flows in waves of undifferentiated people. Human forms as anonymous as bathroom door symbols parade across my imagination when I envision the sex I’m not having. Every once in a while, I think I recognize a face. Maybe him, I think, maybe he will be the end to the sex I’m not having——but he files by, face impassive and blank. He doesn’t look in my direction, but then, he doesn’t have eyes.

The sex I’m not having spikes the ball, the crowd goes wild. The crowd is also the sex I’m not having.

When was the last sex I had? I’m unsure of the exact date. I deleted the texts from my last lover in a righteous fit of pique, but I’d guess that I’m closing in on three months since the last time I had sex. I can tell you that were this not the last time, it would not be worth writing about. It was rushed, and it was unsatisfying. It was rough fucking done with more anticipation than actual pleasure, and it is most notable for being the last time I had sex. For one thing, I didn’t orgasm. He did.

In the interests of full disclosure, I have visited the congressional district——if not the zip code——of sex. I have lain on my bed and made out with a young Marxist scholar, who stopped me before I could suck his prick. Which was sad for me and sad for him, but mostly sad for me. His cock was nicely hefty and so cute in its little turtleneck sweater. There was another guy, younger even than the Marxist scholar, who, ginned up on Dutch courage, sent me a sweet dick pic; we flirted a bunch and then he ghosted, skating white on the ice into great unseen.

I realize that three months is not long. I realize this both in terms of my own history and in terms of objective fact. I know that to complain about a three-month sex drought will make many play “Hotel California” on the world’s tiniest violins, but I also realize that, ninety days into this sere desert wasteland, I’m afraid I may never have sex again.

And I’m not alone. It is, I suspect, an unpalatable truth of the human condition to hit a dry spell and think, “Okay, so I’ve had a good run. I guess I’ll be hanging up my junk now.” Some people, I hear, never have dry spells——fucking bully for them. Most mortals experience periods of time when we don’t know a man’s——or a woman’s——touch. At 52, I’ve suffered multiple fuck famines. Twice during the time I was stripping, I went upwards of ten months without fucking. Tanned, blonde, ripped and six-packed, I felt like an exquisite banquet left to spoil in the sun.

Then, after my last serious boyfriend and I broke up in 2007, I went almost a year before I had sex again. I found solace in the arms of cookies, so I had some company. I also feel like I remember a nine- or ten-month fuckless stint in my early forties. In short, I am no stranger to lack.

I seem to remember various small wastelands in my twenties too, but maybe those were deliberate; it was so easy to find a fuck partner in those days. Even before Tindr, my friends——we young folk——got laid early, easily and often. It’s different now. To be a sex writer but to not have sex is a strange state. It would be one thing if this were a conscious decision; it is not. I have tried and tried and tried again, tried in multiple ways and with multiple guys to find a new lover. I have shaven my vulva no fewer than three times in the hopes that this night will be different from all other nights, and all three times, I took off my expensive lingerie and sighed myself to sleep.

Drag any sex drought along a long enough timeline and you will ask ontological questions. Am I cursed? (I have asked a witch friend to investigate this theory for me; thus far, she has turned up no hex bags.) Who am I if I’m not sucking cock? (I suck, therefore I am, or so Descartes would have said were he me.) As it turns out, it’s pretty easy to mimic the feeling of being fucked. Dildos are marvelously efficacious. Even if their disembodied state gives dildos an apparitional quality——hey, I’m fucking Casper!——you can’t argue with their design. Like a hammer, the penis is a pretty simple tool.

Or so you would think until your kink is sucking one, and, driven by desperation, you cram your maw chock-full of silicone. Let me report on this experiment. Sucking a rubber dick is akin to drinking roasted-grain coffee substitute: it is almost exactly unlike the real thing. I would imagine that people who really, truly get off on licking pussy feel something similar. You can ape the act on any number of objects; you can find a shadow of verisimilitude; yet you will be left feeling nothing so much as mixed parts shame and a want of fulfillment.

I miss rimming my lips with scarlet lipstick and seeing it trail like funhouse gore down my lover’s shaft.

I miss kissing. Lips are surprisingly nice, tongues remarkably agile, and the snicker-snack of potential teeth makes them both nicer. I miss the pleasurable weight of a body on top of me. I miss the kinetic feel of skin under my hands and the electric feel of another’s flesh pressed against my own. I miss the secretive grumbling of inside voices and the wet sucking splats, the gutter utterances, and the sudden climactic eruptions of long, susurrating chains of vowels. I miss arousal’s scent of hothouse earth and tea leaves. I miss rimming my lips with scarlet lipstick and seeing it trail like funhouse gore down my lover’s shaft. I miss making the face that only my lovers see, and I miss having any lovers who make them for me.

Three months in, I wonder how much longer. I wonder who, and when, and how. I wonder why I’m not getting properly fucked, rewarded for my skills, treated like the goddess/object I am. I know that I could find someone to fuck me with relative ease, but I’ve never wanted just anyone. I may be a slut, but I am a highly discerning slut, and so I sit, a sex writer without sex, an adult without the consent, my pubes bristling a reminder of how I almost felt rain, my anxious head whirring, my dildos clean and dull, and my heart sighing… whenever.

Chelsea G. Summers is a regular columnist. She can also be found dirtymouthing on Twitter and via Tinyletter. 

Image: Still from Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970).

The post Drought Catalog appeared first on Adult Mag.

In my life, I’ve known only two men who didn’t kiss. One refused to. When I put my mouth close to his, he’d pucker wanly, like a kindergartener forced to brush his dry lips against his disliked aunt, or he’d turn his head, like a toddler. He took no pleasure in silky, languid hours making out on couches or in beds, swapping spit with a pubescent’s abandon of playing Crazy Eights. He took the clichéd whore’s approach to kissing, which is to say he preferred not to. He fucked readily enough (I did it only once, on his Hell’s Kitchen studio apartment bed, his baby grand piano looking down on us like a disapproving guardian), but kissing was not his gig.

The other man who didn’t kiss danced around it. He dodged and parried. He pressed his mouth long enough and with his lips open far enough to create an illusion of kissing, but he was acting. He performed the kissing motions with the flourish of an actor trained in stage combat. He made just enough contact to bring believability to the act, but his kisses were drive-by affairs, shadowbox kissing, with little contact and even less passion. This man, unlike the pianist, I knew well enough and long enough to love, at least a little. His kisses should have been a sign to me, for he was like dating a stray cat. He was a man who was absent more often than he was present, and his mere appearance felt like a validation. I lived with the lack of kisses because he was all about lack. Loving him felt like loving stage directions: the form was there, if not the substance.

It’s hard to look back on these two men and not read into their reticence to kiss an issue with intimacy. But I love to kiss, even as I do everything I can to avoid intimacy, so let us then consider the kiss itself. Not the movie kiss, not your first kiss, not even your lover’s kiss. Not the fantasy kiss for which your lips itch, nor the ones that leave bruises——those kisses that make you run your thumb over and around your lips like you’re some sort of Jean-Paul fucking Belmondo. No, let us pause and think of kissing, the biological act. That meeting of two mouths, which announce two digestive systems, which lead to two pairs of lungs. The biological kiss smashes mouths, while tongues spelunk, spit churns, and teeth crash in near collision. The most intimate sexual act that’s totally acceptable almost everywhere, the kiss also collapses the public and the private. Let’s face it: kissing is revolting.

We’re conditioned to see kissing as a sign of something larger than itself, perhaps because it is so repulsive when you parse it.A kiss may be pleasurable but it will never escape being a symbol. It is, in this respect, like the heart. An actual human heart may be a fist-shaped bloody bit of convulsing muscle, but the heart shape, that doubly round and pointed bottomed figure that any child can draw, stands in for the full range of human love. The one is not the other, just as an actual kiss is not the feeling of a kiss, and humans are more invested in the romantic symbol than they are in the sanguine reality.

Lots of things live in one’s mouth, lots of stuff lingers; other stuff grows; yet more stuff accumulates. It’s not pretty, the human mouth, not once you part those red lips and move into the sacred maw. The lips themselves are lovely enough, round and plump and red, tempting as berries, but beyond them rests a right horror-show. Skinkling mucous membranes, that eel-thrashing tongue, those teeth that clash by night; saliva, plaque, and tartar, strings of beef or rotting bits of kale, the festering flotsam of your last meal. Contemplating the pure biology of a kiss will arrest it before it begins. A ten-second open-mouth kiss transfers 80 million bacteria, says one 2014 study, and that statistic skates over viruses, halitosis and saliva itself. Ask not what is in his kiss; you truly do not want to know. 

Kissing is the microcosm of myriad minute grossnesses coming together in a resounding, disgusting smack. It is the willing choice to lick and suck and nibble everything your parents taught you not to touch. It is the willing acceptance of other people’s germs and partially masticated food, all conveyed in the slick viscous body of saliva. Humans like to watch baby birds be fed from their mother’s mouths because we enjoy the frisson of revulsion, yet without qualm, we will let our lover’s mouths press our own, morning breath and all. Given the innate grotesquery of kissing, it’s yet more shocking that it is almost always the first sexual act.

Skinkling mucous membranes, that eel-thrashing tongue, those teeth that clash by night; saliva, plaque, and tartar, strings of beef or rotting bits of kale, the festering flotsam of your last meal. Contemplating the pure biology of a kiss will arrest it before it begins.

Have you ever listened to another couple making out? It’s repulsive. All those snacky-smacky-sucking sounds leave too much to the imagination. Listening to another couple kiss pulls the curtain back from the willful denial that kissing requires. Listen to another couple making out, and it’s hard to delude yourself about the nauseating aspects of two open mouths pressing together, two tongues twirling like mating leopard slugs, two humans depositing long, glistening trails of spit in one another’s mouths, two mucous membranes rubbing slick and dirty and full of smells. It’s difficult to forget all this mess, and yet we do, every time we kiss.

To kiss a new person is not unlike parting the pages a new novel: it requires a suspension of disbelief. Just as a novel requires you to let your world slide and enter that of this writer’s creation, so too does kissing a new person require you to forget yourself. Kissing is a subsuming of self in a new, alien, sometimes inhospitable world.  Like parting the pages of a book with your fingers, kissing is as close as you can get to fucking in public. Whether reading or kissing, you’re vulnerable, and it’s fragile, and it’s the most human thing to do.

And that’s the thing about the kiss. It’s the relationship writ small. It’s all the gunk and all the ooze and all the ick and all the funk and all the detritus you have to shove to the side to find room for a person in your heart and in your life. It’s the literal body and all its disorderly biology. It’s the figurative untidiness of emotional intimacy. It’s the wet, soft, warm realization that you care about this person——or it’s the cold, hard, dry shock that you don’t. It’s the first sign that you desire someone, the figurative signature on the public marriage contract, the performative act that repeatedly designates couplehood.

A kiss is a poem, a wet, sometimes sloppy text that hides its work and its guts with signals to a larger mystery. The first great intimacy, a kiss requires reckless courage. It says that you’re willing to take a wrong step, to perhaps stumble, to perhaps fall, to feel pain, and to do it all again, for a relationship is never without risk, not even when you’ve whispered “I love you” again and again, out loud or to yourself, with your mouth or with your mind, and every time we kiss is a reminder that you’re taking this chance, and it could go horribly wrong——or unimaginably right. 

Chelsea G. Summers is a regular columnist for us. She can also be found dirtymouthing on Twitter and via Tinyletter. 

Image: Still from Marilyn Minter's Green Pink Caviar, 2009.

The post Every Time We Kiss appeared first on Adult Mag.

“In [New York], sensuality completely turns into sexuality——no objects for the senses to respond to, no beautiful river, houses, people. Awful smells of the street, and dirt… Nothing except eating, if that, and the frenzy of the bed,” Susan Sontag scrawled in her journal in early 1959. She might’ve been writing the epigram for Fucking New York, the new 190-page art book by photographer Nikola Tamindzic. New York is a disgusting, dirty, rude, unpleasant city, and we who live here and love it want it in us, on us, and about us. Tamindzic’s book celebrates these conflicting urges with aggressively glossy style.

Fucking New York, as the title suggests, blurs lines. The 190-plus color-saturated photos show women pressing their breasts against the glass window of McDonald’s in Times Square, women shiny and naked on a surreally empty Lexington Ave, women face down and open-mouthed in snowdrifts, women awash like nude sirens on the tops of roofs. At once an epithet, an exhortation, a desire, and an active state, Fucking New York is a dizzy swirl. The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down, and the women are humping concrete all over town.

Tamindzic launched the book on Kickstarter about two weeks ago, and although the campaign doesn’t end until June 21, 2016, it was fully funded in less than a week. I sat down with Tamindzic to ask him about four photos in the book——two I really loved and two he favors——and to talk about how the inside becomes the outside, the naked gets dressed, and the well-dressed get undressed in the four-color, shiny glory that is Fucking New York.

Chelsea G. Summers: One of my favorites is probably everybody’s favorite, which is the cop car. Talk to me about how did the cop car shot come about?

Nikola Tamindzic: I’m going to blame this one completely on the model. She lives in Brooklyn near the police parking lot, which is where those cars are. There was a bunch of police cars, like S.U.V.s, regular cars, even one of those ridiculous traffic tricycles, but it was much more fun when she jumped on top of a big-ass car. There wasn’t much to it conceptually because there never is. I’m always hoping to work on a gut level: “This works for me.” “This gets me off.” "This speaks to me.”

One thing that I brought in [to the shoot] was improvising on the spot and getting into the neighboring building to get that very Fucking New York angle where you're looking straight down instead of being stuck on the ground. It's a testament to foolishness on both our parts that we did this thing. It was 45 seconds, snap, snap, snap, snap, snap, “Okay we’re done,” and crawled out on the rooftop. It was one of those things with the ladder and a trap door. It wasn't the easiest thing to get into. Then we're down there, and we're like, “Let's go again.” We came back four times that day.

Chelsea: The other favorite is probably the Standard Hotel because I live near The Standard. I feel as if the tagline for The Standard should be, “The boutique hotel for exhibitionists.”

Nikola: My involvement in [the process of shooting Fucking New York] is very much to set the boundaries of the playground, "This is where we play. Now you bring your toys, and I'll bring my toys, and we're going to make a mess out of this and see what happens”….For me, the playground always had these two opposite ends and you could find yourself anywhere on the spectrum. One was people who were thinking of Fucking New York as a very literal exercise, like, “I’m so horny I could rub myself against the lamp post,” that kind of literal expression. You could say that maybe the cop car thing was along those lines. The other one were people who were thinking of New York more as the energy that's streaming between the buildings.

The Standard photo is along those lines. She’s not very performative, for example. She's not doing much other than just standing there opening her mouth wide, as if to inhale all of the city, all of the stuff that's kind of coursing between them, like Ghostbusters.

Chelsea: Cool. Tell me about two of your favorites.

Nikola: “Stoya One,” untitled in parenthesis. It’s a particular delight for me. It was pretty cold. She was wearing a parka. Here’s a porn star, a well-known porn star, and she’s completely clothed, at least in this photo. Nudity was not necessary at any point here——it was life force that was crucial here. The way her eyes roll to the back of her head brings us to that slightly dark, slightly grotesque place.

Then there's the parka, which is so everyday, so plain, and there’s this famous person who is hidden by that passion that she's depicting. It sort of shows in a single photo a bunch of contrarian impulses that are involved in this venture: fun, and whatever existentialist subtext is going on; playing with people who are well known, but then burying their identity so that you don't lean to hard on it.

The surface of Fucking New York is playful. The surface is beautiful. The surface is fun. The surface is occasionally slightly disturbing. The themes were slightly more intense. I usually think of Bernini’s “Ecstasy of St. Teresa,” as a good point. You can’t quite tell——rapture? Ecstasy? Pain? The scene actually came from previous explorations of that kind of subject, and then me being, like, "This is so pretentious and fucking boring, and self-consciously artistic. Let’s do something fun with it.” So you take a theme like that but then you apply a very life-affirming position to it, and then you get this.

Chelsea: And the other?

Nikola: First of all, the woman in that photo is a fairly well-known fashion editor, but her identity is slightly obscured. As much as it is a delight to have Stoya clothed in that book, it is also a delight to have someone who is not normally in that position just go all out. It’s defying expectations——my own and everyone else’s. Stoya takes to nudity like a fish to water; this woman, exactly the opposite. She’s never photographed naked, as most people who are in the book have not photographed naked. When you’re working with a person, you want to be true to them but also push them slightly into a position that is, if not uncomfortable, then unfamiliar, so there's an edge there. It’s kind of like being comfortably uncomfortable.

The other thing about the photo is capturing something that preoccupied me about Fucking New York as far as New York itself goes. How do you avoid all landmarks? You know The Standard, but I don’t think it’s that much of an architectural landmark. There was a strong desire to present New York as texture, rather than the low-hanging fruit of well-known chestnuts. “Let’s hit the rooftop.” “Let’s do the fire escape.” “Let’s do the graffiti.” The list goes on——the Statue of Liberty, the bridges, all fascinating places. I love them, I live here, but this one somehow manages for me to get New York perfectly across without showing anything of New York.

There’s a bit of concrete. There’s the steam, just so people will be reminded of steam coming out of New York’s manholes. I happen to know that the steam is coming from the woman herself because——fucking New York. She is spontaneously combusting.

Actually, there is a sequel to that photo that I have not shot yet. It will be the last photo I will take for the book. Just ashes in the outline of a reclining body. Perhaps maybe some lighter fluid on the crotch, the aftermath.

All images by Nikola Tamindzic, from Fucking New York, available now through June 21.

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