Best Sex Writing 2010 Read online

  Reader Shimmerskin again astutely notes, “…it’s so clever that these books aren’t just about sexual abstinence. Edward is fighting two kinds of lust at the same time. Abstaining from human blood has probably been good practice for tamping down his sexual appetites now that he’s with Bella.…”

  It’s arguably clever, sure, but it’s also a sad commentary on Bella’s lack of power. Ultimately, it’s a statement of the sexual politics of Meyer’s abstinence message: whether you end up doing the nasty or not doesn’t ultimately matter. When it comes to a woman’s virtue, sex, identity, or her existence itself, it’s all in the man’s hands. To be the object of desire in abstinence porn is not really so far from being the object of desire in actual porn.

  Hot. Digital. Sexual. Underground.

  David Black

  The man—or perhaps woman—dressed all in black and wearing a disturbingly realistic leather horse’s head sits apparently despondent (given the mask, it’s hard to tell, but his or her body is slumped) on a bench across from the stage where three bare-breasted women with candles taped to their nipples pose holding… are they dildos? The lighting is dim, and they are obscured by naked and half-naked dancing bodies. Through a doorway in the cavernous club—Passive Arts Studios near LAX in Los Angeles—Larry, a well-known actor, can see a man dressed like Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean using an Indiana Jones bullwhip on a spread-eagled naked woman. When Larry maneuvers through the crowd of perhaps two hundred at the annual DomCon—Domination Convention—Fetish Ball, he glimpses your average six-and-a half-foot-tall transvestite dominatrix, as well as a bent-over young man being sodomized by a woman wielding a butt plug the size of a sawed-off Louisville Slugger.

  A guy in his midseventies—clearly the oldest in the group—in full leather regalia, handcuffs at his belt, whip under his arm, rocks his walker toward the unisex bathroom. “Bet he’s seen some things in his time,” says a woman in a leather thong with studs through her nipples.

  “You mean weirder than this?” asks a man in black slacks and a blue blazer. “You have no idea,” the woman says, grinning, and sashays away, headed into the labyrinth of rooms in the back of the club. Two of the orgiasts who have joined Larry at the Fetish Ball come out of the bathroom. Betty, a blonde, and Veronica, a brunette, each take one of Larry’s arms. Veronica’s husband, Reggie, lags behind, scoping out a woman in a catsuit.

  “Can you believe,” says Betty, “someone in the bathroom line told us we didn’t look like we belonged here?”

  Both women are dressed for an evening at the Bar Marmont (casual cocktail dresses), though Veronica may pass muster at the Fetish Ball since she is wearing a long, not quite translucent white gown with nothing underneath.

  But it isn’t really their scene.

  “No one’s having any orgasms,” Veronica says. Larry takes a last look around the club and heads for the door, following Betty, Veronica and Reggie, who consider themselves a sexual trio. Betty comes to L.A. most weekends to play with Veronica and Reggie. In the past few months, Larry has been involved in orgies with both Betty and Veronica, who are part of a vast sexual underground that’s different from the erotic underground of the 1970s and 1980s, the era of Plato’s Retreat and Sandstone. It’s different in great part because of the influence of the Internet, which makes meeting easier and offers a larger pool of potential playmates.

  On the way out, Larry, Betty, Veronica and Reggie pass the smorgasbord, which is serving, among other dishes, meatballs in sauce. “If there’s a smorgasbord,” a friend told Larry, “eat only prewrapped sandwiches—and avoid the mayonnaise.”

  A few months earlier, just before Christmas, at about 11:30 on a rainy winter Friday night in Los Angeles, Larry, in sweats and a T-shirt, got a phone call from Mercedes, a dancer he had recently met at a music-video shoot.

  “What are you doing?” Mercedes asked.

  “Nothing,” Larry said. He’d just gotten home from a long day of working on a TV show. “You?”

  “I’m at the Velvet Margarita,” Mercedes said. “Can I come over? ”

  “Sure,” Larry said. Why not?

  They had dated a few times. Successfully. “She’s very sexual,” Larry says about Mercedes. “She’s ‘All I want to do is fuck you. I don’t want to cuddle. I don’t want a boyfriend.’ She has a boyfriend”—a minor celebrity—“and she’s involved in a culture that is very sexually open.” Larry grins. “Incredibly sexually open. Completely sexually open.”

  Mercedes is part of the Los Angeles Lifestyle, or swingers, scene. For her business she travels frequently and widely. She has contacts in the Lifestyle in most major cities. It’s like being a member of a lodge, the Masons or the Elks: no matter where you go, all you have to do is signal your insider status and you’re at home. If she visits a city where she doesn’t know anyone, she can go on the Internet site she prefers, LifestyleLounge.com, and hook up with people who are into her scene: moderately kinky heterosexual and lesbian encounters.

  Larry thought a night with Mercedes would be an uncomplicated way to unwind. Uncomplicated?

  Larry had no idea what he was in for. “It was pouring rain,” Larry says. “One of those five times a year it rains in L.A. A torrential downpour.”

  Larry lives in the hills, with a lot of cement steps leading up to his front door. He heard clack clack clack…the sound of one… two… three sets of high heels approaching his place. Mercedes couldn’t get the front door open. “Larry,” Mercedes explains, “is an obsessive door locker.”

  The worst rainstorm of the year. Mercedes pounded on the door. When Larry finally opened it, he saw Mercedes drenched, her blonde hair wet and pasted to her forehead and cheeks, in a black trench coat. With another beautiful woman, Betty, also drenched, in a black trench coat and high heels. And a beautiful Asian woman, Kathy, also drenched, in a black trench coat and high heels. Their hair, before it was soaked, had been done up so they all looked like librarians. Larry said, “Hi, hi, hi. Whatever is going on here?”

  The three women came into his foyer, each pulling a rolling suitcase containing whatever she thought might come in handy during the night. “Everyone came with her own toys,” Larry explains. “Vibrators, dildos, this little vibrating handy thing. I don’t know what it was. It looks like a computer mouse.” The Mouse, the Butterfly, the Rabbit, the Penguin—vibrators come with names that make them seem as innocuous as Disney cartoon characters.

  Larry offered to take their coats.

  “He was trying to be a gentleman,” Mercedes explains.

  She, Betty and Kathy got the giggles. They knew what the coats covered: underneath they were wearing nothing but lingerie. Larry says, “I was like, Why, I never! I do declare!”

  But, Larry says, “I knew exactly what was going to happen.” He grins. “Dreams do come true.”

  “Larry didn’t miss a beat,” Mercedes recalls.

  His face registered no shock. No surprise. “What did Bear Bryant say about scoring a touchdown?” Larry says. “Act like you’ve been there before.”

  Mercedes and her friends looked, Mercedes says, “like drowned rats. It wasn’t sexy at all.”

  Larry disagrees.

  At dinner, before Mercedes called Larry, she had suggested to her two girlfriends that they surprise him with a spontaneous foursome. She told Betty and Kathy, “Let’s ruin his life. We’re going to ruin his life because once someone has a taste for this it’s hard to go back.”

  “We thought we were going to ruin him for straight girls,” Betty says, “which didn’t turn out to be the case.” Like many women in the Lifestyle, Betty refers to women as girls. “We were disappointed,” she says. “We wanted a little more shock and helplessness,” as though Larry had no idea this kind of thing—threesomes, foursomes, orgies—existed. “Instead,” Betty says, “he took the reins.”

  Typically, Mercedes says, you put a guy who is not part of the Lifestyle scene “in that situation and he’s going to go for his comfort zone. He’s g
oing to go for me,” the woman he knows. But Larry didn’t. “He grabbed my girlfriend Betty,” Mercedes says, “threw her on the couch and started eating her out. Kathy and I looked at each other. The party was on!”

  Mercedes told Larry, “No fingers.”

  “What do you mean?” Larry asked.

  “No fingers,” Mercedes repeated. “What did I say? No fingers.” Those were the rules Mercedes laid down. “You can suck only,” she explained.

  Betty started laughing.

  “We tell people what we want them to do,” Mercedes says, “so you don’t have to do the fishing expedition.”

  “Next thing you knew,” Larry recalls, “I had Kathy sucking my cock. Mercedes was underneath me, licking my balls. I was like, fantastic! I’d never had a threesome or foursome before.”

  It was, Larry decided, geometrically better: each added person multiplied possibilities. “There’s so much stimulus,” Larry explains, “everything gets sensitized.” It became hard to focus on any particular body part—his or his partners’. “You just join the aroma around you,” Larry says. As in a square dance, they changed partners—and positions. Although Kathy told Larry, “I’m sorry I can’t let you fuck me in the ass. I broke my tailbone the other day playing roller hockey.”

  “Kathy’s great to play with,” Mercedes says. “Easy to play with. Never gets upset about anything.”

  There was a lot of bending, but no breaking, of rules. “Three rounds,” Mercedes says. “Amazing fun. I set it up purely for me, the most selfish moment in my life.”

  “You should be selfish more often,” Larry laughs.

  That rainy night Larry also didn’t leave anyone out. “Whoever I was with at the time,” Larry says, “it was like she was the only one there, not like I was looking over her shoulder at who was next.” He shrugs. “I only have one cock!”

  Mercedes thought Larry was special not just because he took control but because he didn’t assume this was his birthright. A guy who isn’t wired right will expect an orgy “every time he sees you, rather than understand this isn’t easy to pull off.”

  Still, the instantaneous and ubiquitous communication available because of the Internet and texting makes it easier than ever to pull off, as Larry would soon learn. After the women left, at 4:30 in the morning, Larry sat gazing into space, thinking, I have a very good life…

  Since the arrival of the Internet, the swingers scene Mercedes, Betty, Kathy, Veronica and Reggie—and now Larry—are part of has exploded both numerically and geographically. In the past, people interested in alternative sex had to find partners through ads in the back of specialty magazines like Connections, Spectator and Select, which were hard to find in some areas. They had to send letters and wait for responses. After a number of exchanges, when everyone felt safe and comfortable, people might make phone calls to get a sense of the others from the sound of their voice and the immediacy of the interchange. After enough phone calls, people might meet in bars or, if they lived in large enough cities, seek out swingers clubs. All that effort was shaded by a sense of potential ostracism.

  Now, with the Internet, Craigslist, MySpace, Yahoo or any of the many adult-oriented sites like LifestyleLounge.com, Alt. com, Blissparty.com, AdultPartyQuest.com, Fling.com, Swap-pernet. com, PrivateSoiree.com, SwingLifeStyle.com and Adult-FriendFinder. com (which Peter Cook visited, according to his ex-wife Christie Brinkley), people can instantly be put in contact with hundreds, even thousands of potential swing partners, for either hard swinging (parties where it is assumed couples will trade partners) or soft swinging (parties where swapping is available but not assumed).

  One typical site—SwingersClubList.com—advertises itself as “the most up-to-date free worldwide directory for the swinging lifestyle, with listings in the following categories: swingers clubs, parties/groups, hotels/B&Bs, shops, online business and literature, easily sorted by name, location, reviews and ratings.” Its “Favorite Swinging Places Rated by Swingers” includes “personals, parties, gangbangs.…” “For those who want more than just one bite of the apple”—presumably the apple Eve offered to Adam—the North American Swing Club Association International, or NASCA, offers information about “on/off premises clubs, travel and resorts, publication listings, conventions and events, Internet services… breaking news, frequently asked questions… and swing club franchise opportunities.” This is no back-alley sneak-around community.

  The Internet has turned swinging into a multimillion-dollar industry that is growing every year, involving—according to Dr. Robert McGinley, founder of NASCA—at least four hundred clubs in the United States with perhaps three million American participants. AdultFriendFinder.com claims to have 31,959,644 members. Even smaller and less metropolitan states boast sizable subscriber numbers, like Alabama, which allegedly has 226,661, and Utah, which allegedly has 135,219.

  Alt.com claims to be the “world’s largest BDSM and alternative lifestyle personals” site. It has, according to its own accounting, 2,932,224 members—again, not just in large cities. Even Guam has a membership of 716. American Samoa has 34. The Lifestyle scene changes from city to city. “It’s very geographical,” Veronica explains on the way to the Fetish Ball. “Some cities don’t have a scene.” Other cities have scenes that are specific to the particular erotic DNA of the local culture. Los Angeles, not surprisingly, tends to be into exhibitionism and voyeurism. New York, the financial capital of the country, tends to be more into S/M, BD and DS: power. Reggie dismisses New York. “Not happening,” he says. “From the neck down, nothing happening.” Too intellectual—although that may betray his Los Angeles bias. Maybe in the suburbs. Westchester County. Connecticut. New Jersey.

  San Francisco is “more artsy,” Veronica says. “Unusual. Eclectic.”

  “Miami is very into drugs,” Reggie says. “Late nights. Ecstasy.”

  Dallas?

  “Very stratified,” Reggie says.

  “Denver has a good scene,” Veronica says.

  “Denver,” Betty agrees, “is a free-spirited, open-minded city.”

  They circle back to New York and agree that Giuliani destroyed the scene.

  From the moment Larry and Mercedes spotted each other on a music-video set—Larry was visiting a friend, Mercedes was training dancers—it was lust at first sight. If this had been one of Larry’s movies, everyone else would have faded into the background. The soundtrack would have become muffled, and they would have moved toward each other in slow motion as the camera made a 360-degree pan. Their relationship also developed quickly because Mercedes was ready for an adventure. “Three weeks earlier,” Mercedes says, “I’d been at a business meeting with a guy and his partner, who was ridiculously good-looking.” They were at the bar at the Standard, on Sunset Strip. The man Mercedes had met for business had an early call the next morning. “You guys keep talking,” he said—and left.

  “I knew I wasn’t going to have any dealings with this guy again,” Mercedes explains, so she set out to bed the good-looking partner.

  “So,” Mercedes asked, “you live around here?”

  “As a matter of fact,” the partner said, “I live in a loft right down the street.”

  Mercedes thought, Hmmm… “Are you married?” she asked him.

  “No.”

  “Do you have a live-in girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to go back to your place?” Mercedes asked.

  “What?”

  “I have a hall pass from my boyfriend,” Mercedes explained.

  “He says I’m welcome to go home with you if I want to. And I want to.”

  “Shouldn’t we do the responsible thing and get to know each other first?”

  “Absolutely not,” Mercedes said. “I don’t want to know you.”

  He ordered another drink. Mercedes said, “Check, please.”

  This became a running joke between Mercedes and her boyfriend: I give you a hall pass, and you can’t close the deal! So when Mercedes
met Larry, she thought, I’m going to get this one done! She was intrigued. She liked Larry. He didn’t seem needy. He was laid-back. Honest. Which, Mercedes says, is “very, very rare among single men. He never told me what he thought I wanted to hear. He never looked like he had an agenda.”

  “So,” Mercedes asked Larry, “what do you do?”

  “I’m an actor,” Larry said.

  “You make a living as an actor?” Mercedes asked.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “I was a bitch,” Mercedes later says.

  She gave him a hard time, but she didn’t much care who or what he was. They went out three times before she thought to Google him and discovered, “Oh, he’s for real.” He was a successful actor. As Mercedes left the shoot, she was already texting Larry: HOW SOON CAN WE GET TOGETHER?

  WHAT ARE YOUR FANTASIES? she texted.

  WHAT ARE YOUR FANTASIES? he texted.

  “I’d tell him a story,” Mercedes says. “He’d add on. Then I’d add on. Then he would.” Through texting and email Mercedes almost instantly discovered Larry “liked the side of sex I liked.” Master-slave role-playing.

  “I think people feel more free texting,” Mercedes says. “I definitely talk more freely in text. I don’t do phone sex so well. I change the subject.”

  “When we first met,” Larry says, “I was out of town a lot. Texting kept the interest growing. We had a bet to see who could make the other masturbate first using email and text. So when we got together it was explosive.”

  Texts flashed back and forth between them.