Best Sex Writing 2010 Read online

  He said yes.

  “Ask me anything!” I said brightly. “Anything!”

  He said, “What would have happened if you were a person, and Dad was an eagle, and you guys had sex, and there was an egg, a gigantic egg, and when it hatched, a baby came out, and the baby was me. Would I have a beak? Would I have talons? Would I be able to fly? It would be cool if I was half a human and half a predator bird.”

  “Wait right here,” I told him, and I pulled my copy of Bulfinch’s Mythology off the shelf and opened it to Leda and the Swan. While he played with Legos, I told him the story of Zeus in the form of a long-necked bird raping the beautiful Leda. I fully intended to use this as a launching point for talking about sex that’s consensual and sex that’s not consensual, but something in the boy’s face stopped me. I think he was imagining himself emerging from a cracked egg, complete with wings, talons, a beak. I think he was imagining himself flying high above the earth, swooping down to spear a fish or a rabbit, then swooping back up to the tallest tree.

  “Hmmmmmp,” the boy was saying, shaking his head, as in wouldn’t-that-just-take-the-cake, as in wouldn’t-that-just-bethe-greatest-thing-ever.

  I didn’t stop talking to the boy about sex. Every so often, something would inspire me—the banana I was about to slice over his Cheerios, say, or the cigar the old man at the bus stop was chewing on, or the tubelike water balloon he was itchy to throw at me—and I’d point at the boy, I’d remind him, “You always wear a condom! Do you hear me? You always wear a condom!”

  As the boy got older, he grew sick of hearing about it. “I know! I know!” he’d say. “You don’t have to keep telling me that.”

  “You’re torturing him,” my friend Steven told me. “Ten years from now when he’s finally having sex, he’s going to hear his mother’s voice in his head. And that’s not something any guy wants to hear.” Steven looked mournful. He was thirty-four years old and spoke to his mother every morning at seven o’clock; if he didn’t call her at seven, she called him at seven oh five. Steven patted my hand, saying, “It’s not good for a guy to learn about sex from his mother. Let him learn from his friends. That’s how I learned, and that’s where my son will learn. It really is the best way.”

  When my son came home from the sex ed talk he received in fifth grade, I asked him how it went. I was feeling pretty smug, pretty satisfied with my parenting skills, but the boy was furious with me. He said, “You said you told me everything! You did not tell me everything!”

  Apparently, I’d neglected to tell him about his vas deferens, a part of the male anatomy I’d never given much thought. In fact, I wasn’t even sure where they were or what they were for. Later that night, after the boy had gone to bed, I’d look “vas deferens” up on WebMD.com.

  But right now, I was playing it cool. “Vas deferens?” I said. “Oh, yes. That’s the German rock band, right?”

  The boy did not find me amusing.

  “A Swedish pastry chef?”

  He glared, and I couldn’t help myself, I said it: “Between men and women, there is a vas deferens.”

  The boy said if that was supposed to be a joke, he didn’t get it, and I told him you will someday. I have always hated the you-will-someday response. It’s another way adults can say I know something you don’t know, but it’s also a way adults can avoid discussing matters for which they have no answers.

  It was easier to talk to my son when he was too young to do anything with the information. Now that he’s older, it’s more worrisome. I’ve been trying to think of what I could say to the boy about sex that I haven’t already said. If he feels like he’s justified to call a girl a slut, then I feel like I’ve done something wrong, like I haven’t said the right thing, I haven’t said enough, like I’ve somehow done him a wrong. I’ve talked plenty about penises and vaginas but maybe I haven’t talked enough about the heart. Maybe I haven’t said enough how easy it is to confuse love with lust, loneliness with longing. Maybe I need to say something about how important it is to be kind and careful with someone else’s heart.

  I was younger than my son is right now the first time I got my heart broken. I got my first kiss from Mickey Galileo who claimed he was a direct descendent of the Italian astronomer who invented the telescope and studied the stars. For a twelve-year-old’s pickup line, it wasn’t so bad. In fact, it must have had its charm because Mickey Galileo planted first kisses on all the girls in my neighborhood.

  During our senior year of high school, Mickey would mullet his hair, and then he would perm his mullet, but now it flopped flat in a long shaggy cap over his head. I didn’t like Mickey’s hair, or the way he stared at my chest, or how he ran his hand up and down my back to feel if I was wearing a bra, but I did like when he pressed his chap-lipped mouth against mine, and because I liked it, I really liked it, I thought I really liked Mickey Galileo. I thought I might even love him. When Mickey told me he needed his mom’s gold bracelet back because he didn’t like me anymore, he was Brenda Tucci’s boyfriend now, I cried. I was sad because Mickey didn’t love me, but what really got me down was without Mickey, there would be no more kissing. There was no one else for me to kiss.

  But then, one day after school, Nathan Evans and I stood in my backyard, and while Nella and Dutchess and Schmitty, our family mongrels, wagged their tails and watched, Nathan pushed me up against the steel gray siding of my house so he could uncurl his tongue in my mouth. Nathan was not particularly good-looking. His eyelashes and eyebrows were so pale he might as well not have had any at all. His face was long and narrow. His teeth were humongous, and his neck was skinny except for his Adam’s apple.

  Only I didn’t care how he looked. I only cared about the kissing, how it made me feel a feeling that at the time seemed indescribable though I would now identify that feeling as horny. Very horny. I was thirteen years old.

  I thought I was in love with Nathan Evans. I imagined we’d get married so we could kiss like this every day, but I’d have to adopt children since I wouldn’t want any kid of mine to inherit those icky invisible eyebrows. As his mouth slurped and sucked at mine, I tried it out, those words. I murmured I love you, Nathan Evans. We kissed and kissed. We kissed from 3:30 to 5:00, which was when Nella and Dutchess and Schmitty started barking for their supper. Once their barking turned into howling, my mother hollered for me to feed them, and Nathan Evans, whose lips were red and puffy and swollen from all that kissing, rode away on his bike. I’d never been so happy.

  Until the next day at school.

  There was noise rising out of the hallways at John F. Kennedy Junior High School, and there was noise rolling out of the lunchroom and slamming off the walls in the gym, the library, my homeroom, my math class, English, Social Studies, Home Ec., and everywhere else in the school. The noise was loud and it got louder, and it all seemed to be about me. How I had sex with Nathan Evans. How I fucked him right there in my parents’ backyard.

  Bruce Carleton, a boy I’d known since kindergarten, licked his tongue across his lips when I passed him in the hall. Jonas Jones stuck his tongue out and wagged it at me. During lunch, Raymond Dantico kept his tongue in his mouth, but thrust it against his cheek while making throaty little moans. Billy Argot and Mark Haven and William Evans moaned and grunted while Freddie Stone asked me did it hurt.

  All day that day, I kept it together. I was humiliated, I was heartbroken, but I kept my head up, I didn’t cry. While I was putting forth the notion that the very idea of Nathan Evans made me want to vomit, Nathan Evans was avoiding me, going out of his way not to look at me. As far as he was concerned, his work was done. In the eyes of his peers, he’d become a man, while I became a slut. A tramp. A whore. A Girl with a Bad Reputation.

  I think back to that day, and there he is, I see him, the boy. Not Nathan Evans, or Freddie Stone or Bruce Carleton, but the only boy who matters. My son. I see him wandering through the hallways of John F. Kennedy Junior High with the rest of them. He’s wearing jeans and a white T-shirt and a
Penn State hat even though it’s against the rules to wear a baseball cap in the school. He’s chewing on a toothpick. He’s slouching against the lockers. He’s admiring his biceps. He’s as arrogant as only a thirteen-year-old boy can be. He’s sure of himself and his place in the world, just as he’s sure that girl walking by is a slut. Hey, he shouts at her. Hey! Did you remember to use a condom? Well? Did you?

  There are still other things I could tell the boy.

  At age sixteen, during the National Academic Games Championship Competition, I lost my virginity to a boy named Keith from the New Orleans team, something about that Louisiana accent, something about the way he called me honey like he was a grown man, and I was a small child. He’s a doctor now.

  When I was seventeen, I dated a guy named John who was majoring in chemical engineering at Youngstown State University. Every Friday night, he took me to a movie, he bought me an ice-cream cone, he made out with me in his basement, he took me home in time for my curfew. It never went any further than that. He said he respected me too much to have sex with me, though I didn’t see what respect had to do with my pounding heart, my hot skin. Years later, I ran into his best friend Ed at a Rolling Stones concert. Ed informed me that after John took me home, he went to a strip club, he spent his student loan money on lap dances. John is a mailman now, and I wonder does he know that after the Stones concert, I made out with his best friend Ed, out of spite and years too late, payback for all those lap dances.

  At eighteen, I was crazy about a philosophy major named Rick, who was long and lean, black-haired and green-eyed, who I let condescend to me just because I liked the way he looked. He’s the unemployed father of daughters now, but back then he was so smooth.

  I could tell my son that I said yes a lot, but I did sometimes say no.

  I did!

  I said no to a guy named Jimmy who asked me out during a parenting class. Such a class was required by the state of Colorado when a divorcing couple has a minor child. Jimmy was fat. Hairy. Wearing a thick gold chain. He wanted to know would I like to go out dancing with him after parenting class?

  I said no to the boy who asked me out while standing in line at McDonald’s. This was, of course, when I still ate at McDonald’s, before I saw Supersize Me, when I was still greedy for a McDonald’s cheeseburger and chocolate shake. I was twenty-eight years old, my would-be suitor was maybe sixteen.

  I don’t know what I said to Teddy Zeigler, a boy I knew in college. I don’t know what I did with Teddy Zeigler. I don’t know what happened that night except that I drank a lot, too much, I passed out, and when I woke up, blurry and stiff, sticky and fuzzy-headed, Teddy Zeigler informed me it wasn’t rape, he did not rape me. “You better never say I raped you,” he said, “because I didn’t.” Then he said here’s your coat, I’ll walk you to your dorm.

  I try not to think about that night, what may or may not have happened.

  There are still other things I could tell him, the boy, my son.

  Things like:

  If I had fucked Nathan Evans, then you’d have no eyebrows! The point is, if a girl’s been nice enough to let you touch her boob, the respectful thing to do is keep it to yourself.

  And:

  Though your father and I did have sex in the car on the first date, and I did throw up afterward, he was really sweet about it, holding back my hair and offering to buy me some Seven-Up. Of course, none of this is why we got a divorce.

  And:

  It really is very simple. When a girl is too drunk to know she’s having sex, one should not have sex with her.

  And:

  I liked falling in love with boys. I fell in love easily, happily, a lot. I fell in love with gay boys and bad boys, boys I’d met at the bar, frat boys and the boy my college roommate liked. From the ages of thirteen to the present, I fell in love with a redheaded paraplegic and a balding mathematician and the French student who bagged my groceries. I fell in love with a logger, a poet, a colleague. I was smitten with the doctor who delivered my son, I had a crush on an arrogant dark-haired musician with a trust fund, I was so wildly infatuated with a potter who had big hands and long fingers that in an attempt to show him how desirable and fun and sexy I was, I came on to his friend the filmmaker right in front of him. Two days later when the filmmaker invited me to go away for a weekend, I didn’t go.

  See? I could say. Sometimes I really did say no!

  But only sometimes, the boy might point out. There were still a lot of guys. There’s no denying you’ve been with a lot of guys.

  I could ask him if he thinks “a lot” means the same as “too many.” I could prepare myself for his answer. I could try to change his mind about sluts, like me, like the girl in his eighth grade yearbook, like so many girls he’s yet to meet. I could tell him that he shouldn’t call a girl a slut because someday she might be somebody’s mother. I could tell him maybe she’s a slut because she’s lonely, she’s sad, she’s hoping someone or something will make the lonely and sad go away.

  It won’t, of course. It never does. But nonetheless, there’s not a girl who’s more hopeful than a slut, more optimistic. She may give in but she doesn’t give up. She keeps looking, she keeps hoping, she’s always waiting for that someone who will say it: I love you, too.

  Secrets of the Phallus: Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?

  Jesse Bering

  If you’ve ever had a good, long look at the human phallus, whether yours or someone else’s, you’ve probably scratched your head over such a peculiarly shaped device. Let’s face it—it’s not the most intuitively shaped appendage in all of evolution. But according to evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup of the State University of New York at Albany, the human penis is actually an impressive “tool” in the truest sense of the word, one manufactured by nature over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution. You may be surprised to discover just how highly specialized a tool it is. Furthermore, you’d be amazed at what its appearance can tell us about the nature of our sexuality.

  The curious thing about the evolution of the human penis is that, for something that differs so obviously in shape and size from that of our closest living relatives, only in the past few years have researchers begun to study it in any detail. The reason for this neglect isn’t clear, though the most probable reason is because of its intrinsic snicker factor or, related to this, the likelihood of its stirring up uncomfortable puritanical sentiments. It takes a special type of psychological scientist to tell the little old lady sitting next to him on a flight to Denver that he studies how people use their penises when she asks what he does for a living. But I think labeling it as a “crude” or “disgusting” area of study reveals more about the critic than it does the researcher. And if you think there’s only one way to use your penis, that it’s merely an instrument of internal fertilization that doesn’t require further thought, or that size doesn’t matter, well, that just goes to show how much you can learn from Gallup’s research findings.

  Gallup’s approach to studying the design of the human penis is a perfect example of “reverse-engineering” as it’s used in the field of evolutionary psychology. This is a logico-deductive investigative technique for uncovering the adaptive purpose or function of existing (or “extant”) physical traits, psychological processes, or cognitive biases. That is to say, if you start with what you see today—in this case, the oddly shaped penis, with its bulbous glans (the “head” in common parlance), its long, rigid shaft, and the coronal ridge that forms a sort of umbrella-lip between these two parts—and work your way backward regarding how it came to look like that, the reverse-engineer is able to posit a set of function-based hypotheses derived from evolutionary theory. In the present case, we’re talking about penises, but the logic of reverse-engineering can be applied to just about anything organic, from the shape of our incisors, to the opposability of our thumbs, to the arch of our eyebrows. For the evolutionary psychologist, the pressing questions are, essentially, “Why is it like that?”
and “What is that for?” The answer isn’t always that it’s a biological adaptation—that it solved some evolutionary problem and therefore gave our ancestors a competitive edge in terms of their reproductive success. Sometimes a trait is just a “by-product” of other adaptations. Blood isn’t red, for example, because red worked better than green or yellow or blue, but only because it contains the red hemoglobin protein, which happens to be an excellent transporter of oxygen and carbon dioxide. But in the case of the human penis, it appears there’s a genuine adaptive reason that it looks the way it does.

  If one were to examine the penis objectively—please don’t do this in a public place or without the other person’s permission—and compare the shape of this organ to the same organ in other species, they’d notice the following uniquely human characteristics. First, despite variation in size between individuals, the erect human penis is especially large compared to that of other primates, measuring on average between five and six inches in length and averaging about five inches in circumference. (Often in my writing I’ll relate the science at hand to my own experiences, but perhaps this particular piece is best written without my normally generous use of anecdotes.) Even the most well-endowed chimpanzee, the species that is our closest living relative, doesn’t come anywhere near this. Rather, even after correcting for overall mass and body size, their penises are about half the size of human penises in both length and circumference. I’m afraid that I’m a more reliable source on this than most. Having spent the first five years of my academic life studying great ape social cognition, I’ve seen more simian penises than I care to mention. I once spent a summer with a 450-pound silverback gorilla that was hung like a wasp (great guy, though) and babysat a lascivious young orangutan that liked to insert his penis in just about anything with a hole, which unfortunately one day included my ear.