Action: A Book About Sex (30 page)

I have a Celibration when I’m approaching the limit of having “too much” sex. Overdoing it has nothing to do with some ratcheted-up naked-body-count. It stems from the perpetually reshuffling alignment of variables like my self-esteem (am I having sex to feel good about myself, even once? that’s too much sex); time (is my work lagging because I’m busy being a slag? sexcess); and scarcity of people I desire (every time I’ve had sex with a person from my hometown = critical-mass overload of sex, with the additionally injurious scents of hair gel and shame overlaying my
over-laying). The bottom-line question: Do I straight-up
not want to
right now, “reason” or not? Then I’m on break. If the thought of sex bares itself in a way I don’t feel is good news for my overall life zone, it’s Celibration time.

This has meant lots of things for me in the past: periods of full-blown sexual abstinence, meaning NO DATES, NO KISSING, NO MASTURBATION, EVEN, as well as conversations amounting to, “Oral only—I’m taking the L on taking the D,” with one of my long-term partners of yore. (We broke up for unrelated reasons long after my sex-break broke, before you ask, and he was cool about it—if he hadn’t been, we’d have split for
highly
related reasons, namely that I don’t ever want to be with someone who takes access to my body for granted.)

The first time I came down with a persistent case of celibacy, I tried to fight it. I was like a mulish office cold sufferer insisting she’s just fine, saying
of course I can work
, as sodden tissues explode from her pockets and her eyelids hover at sunset-horizon-level. Is that person likely to nail a big account capably, given that her head feels like the contents of her overtaxed nostrils and she’s not giving herself time to let it pass? No, and I was even less likely of capable nailing during that bout of sexual indifference and all the ones that followed.

In that case, I was twenty-one and had just completed my customary three-week, post-ruinous-breakup seminar on how to bone people who aren’t actively in love with me, which is a bit what I imagine an extended continental vacation (a real one, this time) feels like. By the end, the novelty wears off, just as it’s intended to: Three weeks is time enough to tire of your trip abroad, which is a necessary part of returning to the normal keel of your life without constantly being all wistful, like,
Man, wish I were in perfect old France right now. Fuck this apartment—there aren’t even croque madames at any of the restaurants in my neighborhood.
Similarly, it’s the exact right duration of time for noticing,
Huh–why is it that I’m not actively salivating over this obviously gorgeous person in my bed? Oh, right. It’s because it has been my singular myopic focus to do just that, with as many people as possible, for the same amount of time that it would take me to complete an accredited Harvard extension class called “Gene Expression: A Hands-on Approach”; I miss edifying myself about more than just other people’s bods… and I also haven’t checked to see if my apartment is still there, for that matter, and isn’t rent due pretty soon?
Congrads!! Now that you’ve relegated sex back to the equivocal plane of all the other lovely ways to spend your time, it doesn’t seem so intimidating. When I do this, I am reminded that there’s no such thing as being “rusty,” which can bear repeating after long-term monogamous sex.

Flicking through my sex-based mental archives (i.e., spank bank), when I finally made it back to my (intact) apartment that time around, I realized it had been a full two and a half years since I had gone without sex for longer than a week running, and I wondered how it might feel to be a single adult who was not seeking out all-new ways to come as one of her more robust priorities. This was a region uncharted in my life, at that point. I had always had boyfriends and girlfriends, or else was rejoicing that I didn’t and bopping around with others for whom that was also true. I decided to put my education to the test and explore the farthest-flung reaches of celibacy I could:
I nobly abstained from sex for an entire two weeks
. And it didn’t even kill me that hard.

This first Celibration meant: no dates, no flirting, no contact, no Hitachi Magic Wand or other fantastic onanistics. I still went out alone or with non-beaus a lot, but I felt domesticated at first, like a dog tag–collared timber wolf glowering at the invisible electric fence in the front yard of a condominium, except hornier. I was my own captor—I wanted to gnaw my own arm off rather than hold out and suffer, but I also wanted to clock what happened when I quarantined the sometimes-rabid species of my own desire and watch how it behaved. I thought about sex a lot, but in the way that I think about going to the beach when it’s cold out:
It’s going to get hot again, and I’ll be drunk on light beer for some of it. It never really goes away completely.

I found that it agreed with me to live in a world of which sex was a faint, unobtrusive part, like the sound of cars that you can’t see passing outside an open bedroom window. Both are greatly beneficial to my productivity: I am able to maintain the soft-edged awareness that life’s transportational difference is just outside, but also that I don’t have to witness those adventures firsthand
that very second
if I’m content to sharpen the blades of my own restorative privacy by reading, or figuring out how to build a shelf for my microscope, or lugging a bottle of vodka into my bathroom and taping fake hair onto my head for three hours, aka “drunxtendoing,” or writing letters to my friends. The promise is still there, waiting to be kept whenever I’m ready to keep it. Not all favors are sexual. Sometimes they’re ones you’re content to do for yourself.

Taking a break from sex doesn’t irrevocably strip you of the ability to be sexual. (In fact, it doesn’t strip you at all.) Celibrations are worthy endeavors because not only do you discover how kind you can be to yourself, by yourself, but they also have the funny effect of making (s)external largesse seem like even
more
deliberate and mutual acts of generosity.

On Sluts

The Bylaws of a Very Noble Political Cause: Skank Advocacy

Credit: Esme Blegvad

•
Bicameral system of legislature? Please. It’s the new times, these days. More like
bisexual system. Hell Yea.

• We’re bringing back the monarchy. Prince is our ruler now, so everyone stop voting. It’s not like that does anything anyway. God

• Pick up a paintbrush because 1600 Pennsylvania is about to get purple as fuck

• Affordable school lunches for kids

• The national bird is a water bed now

I do not believe that the quantity of sexual partners a person has, or the frequency with which a person takes different partners, hollows out the sacral nature of sex. I was nineteen the first time I had sex with three different people in a day. This felt adventuresome in the way of a scavenger hunt: What new experiences could I collect in the given timespan? (
1. Make out with a Rolling Stones mouth tattoo on a dude’s bicep.
Check!) God, it wasn’t even that deliberate. I just happened to find myself in bed accompanied by three different partners, eyes open to eyes closed. (
I just happened to find myself
having triple-sex by seeking it out and being wild into it. So funny how these totally serendipitous coincidences work!!)

The first was Ahmed, whose bed was puffed, perfectly white, and unfamiliar, like one at a slightly upscale chain hotel—maybe a Hilton Garden Inn? I woke, turned to kiss him, and then rotated him on top of me as he whispered kind things about my body. We had been seeing each other for a few weeks. I felt like he was impermanent—like a person-shaped continental getaway, just as I did the rest of the cabal of people I had been dating and sleeping with following my first real trial of a breakup, with Chris. Ahmed liked to go to raves, which augmented this feeling. So did the fact that he was a breed of babe with an unclassifiable eye color—Pantone would drool over the challenge. His physicality was all-over compact, save for his aquiline nose, which jutted from him in the way that gorgeous natural
landmarks invade their surroundings: a mountain on a plain; that one tree in the neighborhood with the knothole you hold weirdly dear. I ran one hand along his chest and trailed the other across his neck as he came. I didn’t, but I would later. Exchanging the courtesies expected of us in this generic-hospitality setting, I affirmed that we’d had a blast, rescued my T-shirt from where I’d flung it into a corner, and dipped into the June air, feeling mad good.

My own bed belonged more in a dorm room than a Hilton, which was appropriate, as it was, in fact, college-housing-issued. Will didn’t mind since he shared my age and unfamiliarity with upper-middle bedding—the first time we had sex was in his basement room at his parents’ house in Park Slope, just after he cooked me a steak with a cherry-balsamic reduction, counted the swans that still lived in Prospect Park’s gummy waters before the city’s animal control murked them out two years later, and showed me his handgun. Besides owning an automatic weapon, another of his flavored boasts was that his grandfather was a famous American poet, whose writing I found bland in a patriotic O-the-snow-and-water-fowl-of-this-nation way. Outside of noting the seabirds, Will hadn’t taken up the family trade, preferring instead to pursue the bifurcated career of model/Golden Gloves boxing champion/preschool teacher. He sang me Johnny Cash songs, described me as “a piece of candy” (I found this somehow charming?), and daydreamed about chartering a helicopter to show off Manhattan to me from where we could see it all at once. Unfortunately, he was also chokingly vain and sometimes used baby talk, which, against all likelihood, did not dissuade me.

When I called Will to come over on Three-D-Day, he was at my building in Brooklyn Heights within twenty minutes. I answered the door naked, hoping it’d expedite one more commonality we could enjoy on our other, aka my lumpen single-wide mattress. He peeled off his black henley. He was my height plus half, and—shocker—built like a Golden Gloves boxing champion. I loved looking at his legs, but avoided eye contact with his inflated biceps, since his fanged 40 Licks tattoo took up most of one of them. He smoothed my legs together
over my torso and fucked me seriously and hard, like he was training. I came almost immediately, and he followed my lead there, too.

I told him I had a lot to do and would see him later. He left me grinning and perspiring, sitting cross-legged in the buff on my sheets, snorting the open-window perfume of a fresh day. My roommate unlocked our bedroom door not three minutes after he had maneuvered it closed with a combat boot behind him. “Hey?” she asked, used to catching me naked a bit later in the evening. “Hi! Oh. Chris just left,” I explained absently, since she knew I was still seeing my ex and I didn’t feel like telenovela-ing my situation to the person with whom I lived. “Oh, cool,” she said vacantly, lighting a joint—I honestly don’t know why I thought she or ANYONE would look at my sex life with consternation, or any opinion at all. I got dressed and opened a book, whiling away some time before “still seeing my ex” was expressed more honestly a few hours later.

Chris picked me up on the sidewalk and we stole into a diner and ordered hamburgers on English muffins (an ancient aphrodisiac, so I have heard, or would like to pretend I have heard). We hated being broken up almost as much as we hated being a couple, so we agreed to reinstate the mock-casual rituals of preliminary dating, when you don’t know someone yet, so are able to make yourself sick gorging on your crush on them. We dutifully visited parks and photographed each other among their blossoms, plus ate at places with homey linoleum-paved tables, like this one, the location of which made it convenient to hop right back up to the room my roommate had vacated some hours earlier. Chris, like Ahmed, was wiry and avian-boned, but tall, and the nice thing about going on these impostor first dates with him was that, after, we got to skip the tentative nametag–style HELLO MY BODY IS introductory sex, since we’d already been fucking for two years. All of the excitement, none of the awkwardness, I’d say if I didn’t think those two things were inextricable. I didn’t think of Will or Ahmed while I was with Chris, but I was flimsily aware of their participation in the memory this day would become underneath the moment unfolding, in which Chris had his palms on my lower back.