Best Sex Writing 2010 (23 page)

“You know…” I began as Peaches continued her scalp-molestation, which neither Brian nor Stacey seem particularly interested in stopping, “they make sex dolls for dogs. Just little plastic things that the dog can mount.”

“I think I’ve seen those,” Stacey said. She was topless and in cotton panties, her hair pulled into a ponytail. I’d worn a matching black lace set, and felt painfully overdressed, although the cat-styled hair was mitigating that concern.

“I actually sort of, ah—I sort of have something like that. A toy.” Brian grinned boyishly, faux embarrassed. He bounced his knee against mine.

“For Peaches? I don’t think it’s working,” I said.

“No, for me.”

“What, like a blow-up doll? Did someone give it to you as a joke?” I asked.

“It doesn’t blow up,” Stacey said. She stared at Brian with a look I couldn’t decipher.

“A Fleshlight?” I tried again. I sat up straight, and Peaches finally abandoned my hair. “A Real Doll?”

“No. It’s not a whole body, it’s just…” Brian gestured with his hands, keeping up the naughty boy act. “Just her, you know, lower part.” Earlier, he’d expressed pride that people sometimes
referred to him as “Ken Doll.” He was lanky and tan with spiky blond hair; Stacey was equally blonde and tan, sans spikes. Perhaps it was only fitting that he had a literal doll partner as well as a real-life Barbie-esque one.

“She has a name,” Stacey said. “Megan. After Megan Fox. She’s very lifelike.”

“Oh…” This development was even more stymieing than the amorous cat. The coffee table candles were starting to gutter. I noticed an open package of Twizzlers amid the magazines and remotes. I hadn’t imagined my first threesome unfolding this way. But it was. Finally I said, “Well, can I see it?”

 

Megan was, in fact, impressively lifelike. Stacey and I lay side by side on the bed as I examined her. She was made of Cyberskin, or something denser, spongy yet firm, smooth, and slightly tacky to the touch. When Brian tossed her on the bed, she fell heavily, like a giant slab of thawed meat. She was almost all undercarriage, cut off at the low belly and flat on the backside. There were the beginnings of inner thighs, and her bare pubis was surrounded by realistic goose bumps, just like the mildly irritated texture of most girls’ bikini area when they shave. Her vulva was very pretty, with flowery, soft lips, and below her tiny vaginal opening was an even tinier asshole. The anatomy was actually spaced properly. It was as though she were spreading her legs wide and lifting up her pelvis, tilting it to show off her little orifices. Saucy girl.

“She has no clit,” I pointed out, distressed. It seemed tremendously perverse that she would be made so detailed and yet not given her greatest source of pleasure. (Perverse, yet entirely predictable given the sex industry’s understanding of female orgasms.)

“I think the bigger problem is that she doesn’t have a brain,” Brian said, joining us on the bed. “Let’s get her a head before we
worry about her clit.” Then, reconsidering, “Or some tits.”

“So, you watch him use it?” I said to Stacey. “I don’t even know how he fits in.” Brian had taken off his shorts while fetching Megan, once again confirming my theory about tall men and their commensurate appendages.

“Sometimes she watches,” Brian answered. He began stroking my thigh, affecting a casual air.

“Sometimes I hold her open for him,” Stacey demonstrated spreading the fake flesh with her hands. This disturbed me to an unreasonable degree, as though she were detailing a rape. “But we also play with her together.”

Of course. As if her helping him use it wasn’t bizarre enough. I had to ask, “How do you use it together?”

They exchanged glances. “Well,” Brian was firmly back in coy mode. “When we play with her…Megan is you.”

I didn’t follow up with any questions this time. I suppose it should have been flattering that they’d integrated me into their sex life during the very brief time we’d known each other. I’m a brunette, too, so it wasn’t as though Megan’s namesake and I had nothing in common.

But I couldn’t enjoy whatever ego boost Brian’s comment was intended to provide. I was too overwhelmed with images of Stacey licking the plastic non-clit while Brian was plunging into Megan, or Stacey fingering Megan’s miniature hole while trying to thrust backward against Brian. I was a little grossed out, yet intrigued. I considered asking for a demonstration, but Brian had put his hand on the back of my head and was guiding my face toward Stacey’s. I kissed her, parting my lips and putting my hand on her thigh. Her lips were closed in an exaggerated pucker, as though we were once-removed relatives.

Brian insisted that Stacey was into girls, and that, more relevantly,
she was into me. The chemistry between him and me wasn’t an issue. From the moment he’d rolled open his yoga mat next to mine, I was game for pretty much anything he would propose. After the first meeting between the three of us, a text was sent from Stacey’s phone saying I was hot and that she couldn’t wait to get naked with me, even though she seemed practically asexual during the two hours we’d all spent talking. I assumed she was just nervous. She wasn’t entirely clueless when it came to girl-on-girl scenarios. She corrected me when I called tribbing “scissoring” instead of its apparently more proper term.

Part of the second evening’s early foreplay, which in retrospect might have been advance warning of the Megan revelation, involved Brian and Stacey going through
Hustler
spreads and pointing out which girl was supposed to be me and which one was supposed to be Stacey. There was something childlike and goofy about all of it, reminiscent of when girls assign themselves and their friends personalities from cartoons like “The Powerpuff Girls,” or “Sex and the City.” It wasn’t hot but it was a little endearing, and I had gone along with it. After all, these were two very good-looking people. Maybe this was what all conventionally attractive couples were like in bed. This was a learning experience for me.

But for all this professed girl-lust, Stacey kept her kisses chaste. When I commented that I loved her breasts, she said something about wanting to lose ten pounds. Ryan unhooked my bra, perhaps hoping she would return the compliment, and instead she said, “I think Megan might be jealous.” As much as a fake vulva can bear witness, Megan was indeed still on the bed, “watching,” where she stayed for at least an hour. In the confusion of constantly negotiating three bodies, I occasionally felt my knee land squarely on her squishy lips, or realized my hand was jammed against her
almost-thigh. But I always adjusted myself, not her. Although they weren’t attending to her at the moment, she seemed too integral to Brian and Stacey’s sex life for me to interfere. When Brian finally tossed her to the floor, he did so with a “Sorry, Megan, but you’ve got to go.” Stacey echoed him sadly: “Sorry, Megan.”

Hours later, the three of us collapsed, sticky and red-faced and sweaty. Brian put his arm around Stacey’s shoulder. “That was amazing,” he said, and began laughing in delight. Stacey stared at the ceiling. She’d kept her eyes shut for much of what had just taken place, except for one particularly charged moment when she’d caught me deep-throating Brian. I say “caught” because I’d felt like a sex criminal once she saw me. What her eyes telegraphed was not appreciation or arousal or any of the other emotions you might hope to find while in a threesome, but simply shock verging on anger. I had transgressed, done something too intimate or too unusual—something Megan would never have done.

“Uh, yeah…I better get home,” I said, lying away from them in my own island of messy sheets.

“Okay,” Stacey replied. While I was putting on my sneakers, she threw out a surprisingly maternal, “Let us know you got home safe,” from behind the couch, ten feet from the front door. Brian kissed my cheek good-bye in the foyer.

 

Over the next few days, I was bombarded with messages from Brian asking when could we do it again, wasn’t it the most incredible night ever, and what was my favorite part? I finally wrote him a diplomatic email detailing that, while they were both great people, I didn’t think I was Stacey’s taste. He vehemently denied it.

She loved it,
he texted me.
We talk about it all the time.

I didn’t reply, and eventually he wrote,
She’ll be sending you a message herself.
As promised, I did get a text from Stacey about a
day later, which ended with
Maybe we shall do it again sometime.
Brian had texted me an hour earlier asking if I was free that evening. They might have spent a lot of time talking, but they didn’t spend much time listening.

My time with Brian and Stacey was unsatisfying in a way I didn’t understand. I wasn’t a stranger to casual sex and I didn’t feel responsible for their miscommunication. It was something trickier than that. I wanted to blame it on their penchant for the pornographic, their obsession with choreographing each moment to mimic a magazine spread instead of just letting things feel good. Even Stacey’s orgasms were treated like interference. At one point, she bleated out, “Came!” and immediately returned to fingering herself. Nothing was savored. Nothing flowed.

After a week of unanswered pleas to recreate the threesome, Brian sent me a message telling me he was alone and I should come over. I considered it. I thought about his flat stomach and shaved chest, of the tone he’d achieved all along his body so that one expanse of flesh hardly felt different from another. I thought maybe it would be better with him and me alone, without Stacey’s lukewarm lesbianism to get in our way. And, god willing, without Megan.

Then I realized I couldn’t recall the feel of his skin under my hands. Had I once touched him anywhere besides his cock? I couldn’t remember what it felt like when he touched me. I couldn’t even remember where he touched me. The threesome was a blur not because it was a steady stream of pleasure but because it was empty, with no memorable moments to cling to. And if Brian had been posing and Stacey playacting, it was because I allowed it and had done the same with them. That night, we had all been like children with dolls. I didn’t want to play that game again.

 

 

Let’s just get this part of the discussion out of the way: I’m not even going to pretend that John McCain has a broken condom of a chance at a term in the Oval Office. Barack Obama is going to be our next president, and our next first lady is going to be the coolest grande dame in United States history. The first couple, incidentally, is going to burn up the presidential bed.

The Obamas are a hot and cool couple, and they seem to be more in touch with the real world outside of D.C. than any presidential couple to hit the White House sheets. But Barack’s going to have to don a hazmat suit and a full-body condom to even begin to clean up the mess he’s inheriting. Iraq, for starters. But let’s not forget about the children, shall we? You know, the ones getting pregnant and contracting STDs at jaw-dropping rates and at younger ages than previous generations in spite of…perhaps, even because of federally funded (read: “state strong-armed”) abstinence
education. In which “education” should always be in quotes.

Recently I was at Philz Coffee with a nineteen-year-old friend who grew up in the South Bay. He was telling me about the sex ed he very recently got in high school. They separated the genders (um, that’s another column). The principal brought in a locked—locked!—briefcase with tapes (tapes!). The students watched cartoons about reproduction and puberty, and that was that. He told me, “It was so dumb. Everyone already knew that stuff. It didn’t tell us anything about what we were all really doing.” I asked him where kids went to get their questions answered. He said, “Well, I went to your website.”

Good thing he’s nineteen. But recently in Australian schools, researchers put together a groundbreaking sexual health program for sixteen- to twenty-five-year-olds. Associate Professor Moira Carmody from the University of Western Sydney’s Social Justice and Social Change Research Centre did something totally shocking: she asked teens what they needed from their sex-ed programs. Carmody interviewed young people about their sexual activity, experiences and concerns. Instead of telling them that sex is bad or sinful or that you can catch AIDS from a public library computer someone once used to look at porn, she used the kids’ feedback to create a six-week program, subsequently run in six communities in Sydney and regional New South Wales.

That’s quite a bit different than what our federal government pressures public schools to tell kids—and this is certainly where Obama should be taking notes. Like I said last year, abstinence education is a failure, but at the eleventh hour of 2007 it still got a huge pile of federal cash. In most American public schools it focuses exclusively on reproduction and marriage, and only shows students illustrations. Abstinence has always been taught on one level or another, but when George W. took office, an
“abstinence-only” focus was aggressively pushed as the primary—the only—way to give kids information about sex.

Here, no one asks kids what they’re experiencing and what information they could use to help navigate decision-making in sexual situations. What’s worse, according to the curriculum content guidelines for funding recipients, the required federal sex ed states that “Material must not promote contraception and/or condom use (as opposed to risk elimination). A curriculum must not promote or encourage sexual activity outside of marriage. A curriculum must not promote or encourage the use of any type of contraceptives outside of marriage or refer to abstinence as a form of contraception.”

Additionally, “The curriculum must have a clear message regarding the importance of student abstinence from sexual activity until marriage and must emphasize that the best life outcomes are more likely obtained if an individual abstains until marriage. Throughout the entire curriculum, the term ‘marriage’ must be defined as ‘only a legal union between one man and one woman as a husband and wife,’ and the word ‘spouse’ refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife. (Consistent with federal law.) The curriculum must teach the psychological and physical benefits of sexual abstinence-until-marriage for youth. Information on contraceptives, if included, must be age-appropriate and presented only as it supports the abstinence message being presented. Curriculum must not promote or endorse, distribute or demonstrate the use of contraception or instruct students in contraceptive usage.”