Best Sex Writing 2010 (14 page)

 

 

A couple of weeks ago, in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, prosecutors charged six teenagers with creating, distributing, and possessing child pornography. The three girls, ages fourteen and fifteen, took nude or seminude pictures of themselves and emailed them to friends, including three boys, ages sixteen and seventeen, who are among the defendants. Police Captain George Seranko described the obscenity of the images: They “weren’t just breasts,” he declared. “They showed female anatomy!”

Greensburg’s crime-stoppers aren’t the only ones looking out for the cybersafety of America’s youth. In Alabama, Connecticut, Florida, New Jersey, New York, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Utah (at last count) minors have been arrested for “sexting,” or sending or posting soft-core photo or video self-portraits. Of 1,280 teens and young adults surveyed recently by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy,
one in five said they engaged in the practice—girls only slightly more than boys.

Seranko and other authorities argue that such pictures may find their way to the Internet and from there to pedophiles and other exploiters. “It’s very dangerous,” he opined.

How dangerous is it? Not very, suggests a major study released this month by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet Studies. “Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies,” the result of a yearlong investigation by a wide range of experts, concludes that “the risks minors face online are in most cases not significantly different from those they face offline, and as they get older, minors themselves contribute to some of the problems.” Almost all youth who end up having sex with adults they meet online seek such assignations themselves, fully aware that the partner is older. Similarly, minors who encounter pornography online go looking for it; they tend to be older teenage boys.

But sex and predatory adults are not the biggest dangers kids face as they travel the Net. Garden-variety kid-on-kid meanness, enhanced by technology, is. “Bullying and harassment, most often by peers, are the most frequent threats that minors face, both online and offline,” the report found.

Just as almost all physical and sexual abuse is perpetrated by someone a child knows intimately—the adult who eats dinner or goes to church with her—victims of cyber-bullying usually know their tormenters: other students who might sit beside them in homeroom or chemistry. Social-networking sites may be the places where kids are likely to hurt each other these days, but those sites, like the bullying, “reinforce pre-existing social relations,” according to the report.

Similarly, young people who get in sexual or social trouble online tend to be those who are already at risk offline—doing
poorly in school, neglected or abused at home, and/or economically impoverished. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a child from a family whose annual income is less than $15,000 is twenty-two times more likely to suffer sexual abuse than a child whose parents earn more than $30,000.

Other new research implies that online sexual communication, no matter how much there is, isn’t translating into corporeal sex, with either adults or peers. Contrary to popular media depiction of girls and boys going wilder and wilder, La Salle University sociologist and criminal-justice professor Kathleen A. Bogle has found that American teens are more conservative than their elders were at their age. Teen virginity is up and the number of sexual partners is down, she discovered. Only the rate of births to teenage girls has risen in the last few years—a result of declining contraceptive use. This may have something to do with abstinence-only education, which leaves kids reluctant or incompetent when it comes to birth control. Still, the rate of teen births compared to pregnancies always tracks the rate among adult women, and it’s doing that now, too.

Like the kids finding adult sex partners in chat rooms, those who fail to protect themselves from pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases and have their babies young tend to be otherwise at risk emotionally or socially. In other words, kids who are having a rough time in life are having a rough time in virtual life as well. Sexual or emotional harm precedes risky or harmful on-and offline behavior, rather than the other way around.

Enter the law—and the injuries of otherwise harmless teenage sexual shenanigans begin. The effects of the ever-stricter sex-crimes laws, which punish ever-younger offenders, are tragic for juveniles. A child pornography conviction—which could come from sending a racy photo of yourself or receiving said photo
from a girlfriend or boyfriend—carries far heavier penalties than most hands-on sexual offenses. Even if a juvenile sees no lock-up time, he or she will be forced to register as a sex offender for ten years or more. The federal Adam Walsh Child Protection Act of 2007 requires that sex offenders as young as fourteen register.

As documented in such reports as Human Rights Watch’s “No Easy Answers: Sex Offender Laws in the U.S.” and “Registering Harm: How Sex Offense Registries Fail Youth and Communities” from the Justice Policy Institute, conviction and punishment for a sex crime (a term that includes nonviolent offenses such as consensual teen sex, flashing, and patronizing a prostitute) effectively squashes a minor’s chances of getting a college scholarship, serving in the military, securing a good job, finding decent housing, and, in many cases, moving forward with hope or happiness.

The sexual dangers to youth, online or off, may be less than we think. Yet adults routinely conflate friendly sex play with hurtful online behavior. “Teaching Teenagers About Harassment,” a recent piece in the
New York Times,
swings between descriptions of consensual photo-swapping and incessant, aggressive texting and Facebook or MySpace rumor- and insult-mongering as if these were similarly motivated—and equally harmful. It quotes the San Francisco-based Family Violence Prevention Fund, which calls sending nude photos “whether it is done under pressure or not” an element of “digital dating violence.”

Sober scientific data do nothing to calm such anxieties. Reams of comments flowed into the
New York Times
when it reported Dr. Bogle’s findings.
The way TV and MUSIC is promoting sex and explicit content daily and almost on every network,
read one typical post, from the aptly named MsKnowledge,
I would have to say this article is completely naive. The streets are talking and there [
sic
] saying
teens and young adults are becoming far more involved in more adult and sexual activities than most ADULTS. Scientific data is a JOKE…pay attention to reality and the REAL world will tell you otherwise.

A better-educated interlocutor, NPR’s “On the Media” host Brooke Gladstone, defaulted to the same assumption in an interview with one of the Harvard Internet task force members, Family Online Safety Institute CEO Stephen Balkam. What lessons could be drawn from the study’s findings? Gladstone asked. “What can be and what should be done to protect kids?”

“There’s no silver bullet that’s going to solve this issue,” Balkam replied. But “far more cooperation has got to happen between law enforcement, industry, the academic community, and we need to understand far better the psychological issues that are at play here.”

It’s unclear from this exchange what Gladstone believes kids need to be protected from or what issue Balkam is solving. But neither of them came to the logical conclusion of the Harvard study: that we should back off, moderate our fears, and stop thinking of youthful sexual expression as a criminal matter. Still, Balkam wants to call in the cops.

Maybe all that bullying is a mirror of the way adults treat young people minding their own sexual business. Maybe the “issue” is not sex but adults’ response to it: the harm we do trying to protect teenagers from themselves.

 

 

I’ve decided to have an affair. Probably more than one, probably over the course of years to come, and certainly not with anyone I like. I’m not looking for a love affair; I’m looking for a hard fuck. I am not unhappy in my marriage. I’m not angry with my husband. Once the affair is underway I won’t leave crumbs here and there in the secret hope that my husband will find out so that our relationship will change. I want no drama. I will do everything in my power to make sure he never has even a hint about it. My decision to have an affair is calculated, thoughtful, and years in the making.

I like my husband. I adore him even. We are great friends. We rarely argue and we have interesting conversations. We want the same things for our children, and we love one another deeply for the ways we love our children, for being good parents to them, for always putting their needs first. My love for my husband is
based on the things that matter. On our shared pain and loss—from when we had a miscarriage, and much more so when we had to learn to come to terms with our child’s special needs—on having moved through difficult and joyful experiences together, on supporting each other when we needed it most and knowing each other better than anyone else.

We’ve gone long periods of time without having sex, like many couples with small children. Often our lives together are more about running a children’s compound than anything else.

A typical conversation:

Him:
Did you tape that show for me?

Me:
Shit. I forgot.

Him:
Great. All I wanted to fucking do tonight after the kids were asleep was watch that fucking show.

Me:
I’m sorry!

Child:
I need help!

And that’s the end of that.

By the time we fall into bed, we are exhausted. One child has a nightmare and comes into the bed with us. The other wakes up early, dragging one of us from bed. When we do have sex it is rote and rushed, a physical release, or else it is after a great conversation about our lives and is based on our mutual love.

I don’t want 1950s-style advice about “date nights” and lingerie and role-playing. I don’t want to “spice up my marriage.” I want rough sex. Dirty, spit in his mouth sex. Wet, disgusting, nasty talk about pussies and cum and fuck-me sex. The kind of hate fucking where afterward you can’t move. And the bottom line is that I don’t want that kind of sex with my husband, this man I love.

For a number of years, of course, I assumed I would forgo this
sort of sex. It was worth it to keep my marriage intact. Marriage is about compromise. It’s about some degree of sacrifice. Honestly, if what I would have to sacrifice were something other than the sort of sex that most fills me, I’d be happy to oblige. But sexual desire is so intensely personal, so completely something you don’t control. I can’t just decide that I will no longer crave that sort of sex, and our desires don’t always fit well with the monogamy our culture demands.

The running psychological theory is that we eroticize what has shamed, hurt, or frightened us, that our “lovemap cartographic systems,” as described by John Money, the famous John Hopkins psychologist, are learned. If that’s true, it could be argued that I spent my childhood feeling helpless, unable to control the ways in which my parents emotionally wounded me. As the years went by I tried to control the world where it felt out of control. I pursued men vigorously. I yelled at them when they hurt me, tried to force them into being who I wanted them to be. These were the men I had the best sex with, the ones who wanted to make clear who was really in charge once we got in the bedroom, the kind who made me go blind mid-orgasm, who told me my pussy was so wet and their cocks were aching with need for me, who smacked my ass while we did it from behind. These were the kind of men I never would have married. I wanted to get married, to share my life with someone.

I chose my husband because he was not one of these men. He was the kind of man I didn’t feel the need to push or pull. He loved me in a healthy way, without drama. I want to keep it like that. I don’t want an open marriage, where you and your partner agree that you can have sex with other people. I don’t want hurt feelings and jealousy, all the inevitable trouble that would come with such an arrangement. In fact, my husband and I once agreed
that if such a thing were to happen, if one of us were to have sex—just sex—with another person, we’d just as soon not know.

Yet still, that craving, that crazy desire that—yes—comes from a source that wouldn’t be there had I not been damaged in the ways I was, is still pushing just beneath my skin.

Maybe, too, it isn’t damage. Maybe I came into the world with a unique curve in my temporal lobe, a tiny laceration or swelling that led me to want the kind of sex I do, and to want it outside the confines of my marriage.

Whatever the reasons, I’m going to have an affair.

I’ve already had one, sex with a man I knew for many years. It was entirely unsatisfying, not worth the infidelity, because he was gentle and kind with me, he said nothing, and he even apologized when were done. Ugh.

Next time, I will choose more carefully. And actually, I’ve already chosen him. He is twenty-four years old, just a baby really. When I was in college, he was in kindergarten. He found me on Facebook because he liked my book. He writes status updates on there in his generation’s lingo that I couldn’t begin to interpret, even if I wanted to, which I don’t. He made himself a fan of “Partying” and “Beer,” and he encourages the fake-tanned, desperate, LOL-ing girls who make flirtatious comments on his page. He’s at an entirely different time in his life than I am. But… once he told me he wanted me so badly he could practically feel my hair in his hand. He told me, “I own you,” and he calls me his little whore. He warned me to eat lightly and to clear my bowels before we have sex, which we will have when I meet him in New York this summer. He described for me in full detail exactly what he plans to do to me, and I almost came just reading it.