Best Sex Writing 2012: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (19 page)

Douthat teaches us that sexual restraint leads to “emotional well-being.” Restraint is another word for: happiness! Not knowing too much is the biggest happiness of all. Little girls crave security, that’s what you have to understand. Bunnies. Baa-Baa. Binkies! Mommmmy!

Little boys—I’m not sure what Ross says they care about—except that hot porno the other guy mentioned. I’m sure he’ll write about them next time.

Little gay or trans people—HEY! This is for happy people. Get it?

Douthat wraps it all up by arguing against Planned Parenthood’s existence as the enemy of little girls’ “sexual idealism” around the world. Those PP people are so—unbabylike. Unladylike ! Does that rhyme? If they weren’t depressed before, they sure will be after they read Ross’s story.

I’m going to tell you a story about Ross himself, from his memoir, a tale from the days when he was not happy. He was in college at Harvard, at a party, where he met a tipsy, buxom blonde—he said she kinda looked like Reese Witherspoon. Re-esey kissed Rossy, and laid bare her arousal. She even reassured him that she was on the Pill, so they could just go wild. You can imagine what happened. Ross went completely limp! He’d never been so turned off in his life. So scared. So
not happy!
Boy, did he learn a lesson. College boys everywhere can relate to that!

Ross became a Pentecostal during puberty—he wasn’t born to it. His mom started following a faith healer ’cause she was really sick, and they prayed and prayed and prayed. It must’ve been really depressing, and sex wasn’t even a part of it. It’s quite the life story. Something went awry, though, ’cause the whole family stopped traveling the faith-healer circuit, and converted to Catholicism, the old-fashioned kind. You can just imagine how happy they all are now!

Ross’s biography of profound religious conversion got under my skin, the one thing that made me just a teeny bit un-happy. You see, if the subject was
anything
other than sex in the New York Times, the editors would feel obliged to preface the op-ed by revealing the writer’s religious agenda. Apparently, America’s top-shelf publishers know so little about physiology, biology, and sexual history that their authors can just say
anything
, and it sticks, no matter how absurd.

Fact-checking? Not when it comes to fire and brimstone, baby! Let’s not let “facts” get in the way of our moral imperatives. Don’t fret your pretty little heads about what really happened in the “old days.” My grandmothers and great-great-great grandmothers got knocked up young, didn’t always get hitched, and died in childbirth early—but that’s so sad to think about, let’s not dwell on it. Remember the good times, I say!

It must make Ross pout that unrelenting evidence proves abstinence programs are not only ineffective, they actually cause higher pregnancy rates than in places where young people have info and access to birth control. Eww! It can turn a smiley-face upside down if you’re a Christian religious fanatic. But sometimes the truth is—proofy.

As for women having an infantile essential nature that desires innocence and vacuity above all other sexual traits, leading to an unparalleled state of happy brainlessness—gosh, how do you even begin to document that, outside of scripture and tattered Catholic catechism pamphlets?

Douthat’s faith is based on the tenets of unapologetic misogyny, sexism, gender determinism, and an all-around “Father Knows Best” approach. I’m sure you’ve heard how well the Catholic clergy has led in this regard. In Christianity, men are the natural leaders, and must stand guard against their carnality. Grrr! Women must follow man, doting on him, caring for the hearth. Women have a lot to atone for, because they’re the reason human beans got tossed out of the Garden of Eden. That’s where God created everything in Seven Days and there was a Magic Apple and it tasted really good—which was premature and ill-advised. To say the least.

Now, in Catholicism—I was raised Catholic, brainwashed early—faith, sin, and hell are all anyone talks about! If you even
think
bad thoughts, that’s as bad as doing them. Masturbation is really, really bad. Sex is so wrong, there’s, like, a million ways to do it wrong and burn in hell forever. Only if you get in the missionary position and do it just to have babies, then it’s OK. The Virgin Mary was happy, you know, ’cause she didn’t have to go through all that sh*t. She was so full of grace.

Despite Ross’s efforts, I have nagging questions that keep me from achieving my desired beatific state:

When will we stop allowing religious doctrine and its zealots from determining public policy on sexual health?

How long will these same people remain the arbiters of taste and convention in sexual relations?

Last I checked, George “God-Is-Speaking-Thru-Me” Bush is no longer the POTUS. The Christian religious right is not remotely the majority in this country. Why do we listen to them, over and over again, on the front pages of our country’s most prestigious newspapers, preaching what’s best for men, women, and children?

It’s such a bummer. The perps who write these stories and lead these campaigns always seem to get revealed as disgusting closeted perverts. And I don’t mean that in a happy way. How many more humiliations in the public square, starring avowedly chaste evangelicals, do we have to endure? It was bad enough reading about Ross’s nausea at female flesh in college—I don’t want to read the next chapter!

I’d like to see an atheist’s op-ed on sex in the NYT, or even one from a recovering Catholic. I’d be happy, very happy to do it myself. Here’s what I’d say:

Our cute little species desires both sexual familiarity and sexual variety. That’s why we are so rarely monogamous over a lifetime, although we often enjoy its benefits for episodic periods. When unencumbered by religious shame, we feel perfectly fine about “having it all.”

I’ll use myself as an example!
Je ne regrette rien
. May I take a moment to thank all the lovers I’ve ever had for everything I learned from you? You-all are the best, and it makes my heart just want to burst with—oh, you know.

When young adults, past puberty, remain sexually inexperienced with their peers, it is because of dysfunction, not virtue. Something is wrong, and it’s not happy. Sexual self-knowledge is a huge part—perhaps the biggest part—of growing up. Like taking your first steps, or speaking your first words, you gain enormous intelligence and independence every time you figure out another piece. You fall down and cry sometimes, but you can’t wait to get back up. To learn that things are not black and white, to hold contradictions, ambiguity, and empathy in your body and mind at the same time: that’s sexual maturity. You don’t achieve it from cutting out paper dolls and keeping your knees crossed.

Fun clue: Men are sensitive creatures. They like to feel safe and adored, just like, you know—everyone else. Sometimes they don’t always know what to do and don’t feel like having the answer to everything.

And women? They can be total thrill-seekers; when they get sex on the brain, they’ll get off with their fingers or their pet bunny or whatever else is around. They have brilliant ideas and can march into the battlefield with a double-sided ax.

It’s dangerously stupid to talk about men and women as if they were different animals—when we have so much more in common, in our capacities, than we have differences. Hasn’t everyone been a lot happier now that we no longer live our lives based on superstition? Why, at this point, do we ignore primary evidence—at our peril—and cling to shaming, stunted fairy tales?

I had a dream about Ross. He was eating an apple and he was happy. His mom got better and she didn’t need him to take care of her anymore; she was happy, too. Men and women gathered around Ross and started kissing him. Tears ran down his cheeks. He was scared that everyone would find out, but the sexy happy people said, “No, Ross, it’s okay, you’re not crazy. You can have this, but you have to be honest about it, ’cause that’s only fair.”

And then Ross took a big giant bite.

Losing the Meatpacking District: A Queer History of Leather Culture

Abby Tallmer

The recent history of Manhattan’s Meatpacking District is a story about the homogenization of our city and the erasure of a generation of its people and their history. It is a story of how the intersecting forces of rising real estate prices, the Disneyfication of Times Square and Manhattan at large, the conservative national shift over the past two decades, and the onset of AIDS and the panic surrounding it have effectively eclipsed memories of a time when “Meatpacking District” was not a real-estate term.

Instead, the term was ironic shorthand for the patch of West Village blocks, centered roughly at 14th Street and Ninth Avenue, to which countless visitors flocked, seeking the alternative sexual universe that existed there before the invasion of slumming heterosexual tourists looking for Stella McCartney’s latest couture designs.

At the height of the feminist, gay, and sexual revolutions of the 1960s and 70s through the mid-80s, the Meatpacking District was home to the city’s thriving and mostly queer SM and sex club scene.

Far from being a desirable destination, the Far West Village, as it was known back then, was unknown territory to most New Yorkers except for butchers, neighborhood residents, and the select group of queer and kinky people who roamed the streets and filled the clubs there in the late-night hours, staggering home in the early morning as the sun was rising and most others were heading off to work. During the day, strong men dragged animal carcasses through the garbage-filled streets. It was an area reserved for those with iron stomachs, given the stench of dead flesh and rotting trash that permeated the air.

Growing up in the neighborhood, I was ashamed to invite my grade-school friends over for fear they would think I lived in a garbage dump. But at night, the place came alive and the unlit, otherwise desolate streets were filled with other men, also tough-looking, but clad in leather chaps and motorcycle jackets, with hankies protruding from their rear pockets and keys dangling from their sides. They lingered on street corners, purposefully eyeing one another, striking up conversations, offering each other a light, and often disappearing down mysterious alleyways or spilling through unmarked but much-trafficked doorways.

There were other characters as well—adventurous male/female couples; groups of nervous young gay men and women clearly new to the area and intent on a mission, often clad not in leather/fetish gear but in regular clothes; and the ever-present trans hookers, who were mostly black or Hispanic. Many of the hookers almost completely passed as women, as stunning as they were scantily dressed. They could often be seen awkwardly climbing into and out of the limos and trucks driven by the married men from Staten Island or New Jersey who traveled there just for them.

In the early 1970s, I lived five blocks north of Christopher Street and three blocks from the Hudson River. I was then about nine years old, a queer kid waiting for the right time to spring this news on my parents. I was raised in a very permissive household and often walked the streets alone even after dark. Needless to say, the night action in my neighborhood hardly went unnoticed by me and, in fact, served as the object of much curiosity.

I remember riding my bike around the neighborhood, making special trips past the piers and the bathhouses and through the deserted side streets west of Greenwich Street, and down 14th Street and the short blocks just below. Though I wasn’t quite sure what exactly went on behind these hidden, locked doors, I knew somehow—God knows how—that whatever it was had to do with being gay, with being sexual, with a particular form of gay sexual expression that I gathered was in some way shameful. The very same men who cheerily said hi to me in my building’s elevator usually looked more horrified than happy to see me when I greeted them from my bicycle as they loitered, regaled in leather, in alleyways or in front of dimly lit clubs or bathhouses.

As I would learn later, the unofficial center of all of this action was the “Triangle Building” on 14th Street and Ninth Avenue, which now houses Vento, a popular Italian restaurant opened in 2004, but was then the site of some of the most notorious leather bars in the city. Entrances to a stunning array of SM and sex clubs and backrooms lined both the Eighth and the Ninth Avenue sides of the Triangle. Those directly on the Triangle included the nationally known Hellfire Club, the Vault, J’s, The Man Hole, and many others.

Queer clubs within strolling distance included the notorious Mineshaft, the Anvil, the Asstrick, the Cellblock, the International Stud, the Glory Hole, and, later, the Lure. Patrons migrated between them all night long, every night of the week, back when sexual freedom defined an era.

Nearly all of these clubs, except the Hellfire Club and the Vault, were predominantly gay, though a few stray women could be spotted here and there in some of the less strict men’s clubs. The Mineshaft’s door policy, however, was notoriously strict, and many gay men were turned away each night for violating its strict leather/macho dress code. That didn’t keep some inventive women from testing whether it was foolproof.

I know this to be true firsthand, for one night just after I turned 18, my best friends, Saul and Brian, decided that it would be fun to dress me up and sneak me into the Mineshaft with them. As I am rather the femme type of lesbian, I was terrified about passing the rigid door inspection, but the boys picked out my outfit—white T-shirt, black leather jacket, jeans, and boots, with a sock in my pants prominently displaying package—and did my hair expertly; they even gave me a fake five o’clock shadow. I remember shuffling in line behind Brian and ahead of Saul—I pleaded to be last, but Brian said this would look suspicious—and I vividly remember trying not to stare at the floor too obviously as the doorman inspected my ID. After what seemed like forever but was undoubtedly a matter of seconds, the doorman muttered, “Next” and that was it. I was in. But poor Saul, who stood behind me in line, was barred at the door because there was something “too effeminate” about him.