Best Sex Writing 2009

by Rachel Kramer Bussel

  The MPs were not sufficiently trained as to the definitions of pornography and sexually explicit material, and they were unaware that adult novelty items were not banned under GO-1a. While the military can dismiss the seizure of personal property as a mistake, absolving the MPs involved in the search of error, a memorandum for record could have prevented mistakes and embarrassment. Had CSM provided some guidance via a memorandum for record, the dildos might have been discovered, but they would have remained where they were found. Sayler’s laptop (containing personal and financial records) would not have been withheld.

  Captain William Englebert, Camp Anaconda’s Provost (the MPs’ “police chief”), indicated privately to Sayler that “mistakes were made,” which he emphasized occurred before he became Provost. In addition to taking permitted personal items, such as the laptop and dildos, the leaders of the 402nd Field Support Brigade (CSM Vela and his commander, Colonel Sorenson) allowed the names of the affected women to be leaked, making dignity the cost of a pay-check. CSM Vela did not respond to email requests for comment.

  Porn Still Supports the Troops

  Since the start of the war, the adult entertainment community has been quite vocal in its support of the troops, if not the war itself. Industry executives and performers alike have genuine feelings of compassion for those who risk their lives every day in combat theaters around the world. Carmen Luvana asks,“What is the harm in soldiers’ wanting to get off for a minute to get rid of all the stress they have…as long as they are not doing it in front of anybody?”

  In 1993, for example, Army Rangers in Somalia had copious access to such outlets, a fact that is well documented in Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down. At some point in the seven years that followed, the military reversed course. While the policy has changed, much remains the same. Soldiers face hostile fire in a foreign country. The “host nation” in each case had cultural biases against pornography. This time, though, society’s selfless are not allowed even the most primal of comforts.

  The “about face” executed since 1993 indicates a change in tolerance, but the industry remains unwavering in its support for those who defend freedom. The First Amendment rights on which the industry relies make the military’s role in defending freedom tangible, more real than it is to critics of adult entertainment.Without the free society that our military is sworn to defend, the porn industry would cease to exist, and we are left thinking, as starlet Hannah Harper does, that “it is a shame that the freedoms the soldiers cannot enjoy are the freedoms they are fighting and dying for.”

  In Defense of Casual Sex

  Tracy Clark-Flory

  Twenty-something Anna Broadway has known many men—so many, in fact, that she’s given them each an easy nickname, like Singapore Fling, Sugar Daddy, Internet Date, and Married Man. She’s met them on Craigslist, through online dating sites, and at singles bars. Broadway sounds a lot like your average member of the “hookup” generation, save for one detail: none of these men have made it into her bed. That’s because, as Broadway writes in her memoir, Sexless in the City, she’s saving herself for marriage.

  Broadway’s G-rated memoir is just one of a slew of books about chastity released in time to make everyone’s list of hot summer reads…for those planning a vacation in the Arctic Circle. The onslaught started in the spring with Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campuses, which reports that all but marriage-minded evangelical students are sleeping around—and attending Pimps ’n’ Hos parties—in hopes of meeting that special someone. Next came The Purity Code, a book for Christian teens detailing “God’s plan for sex and your body.” The catalog climaxed with the August 1 release of Hooked: New Science on How Casual Sex Is Affecting Our Children. (Hint: cataclysmically.)

  These books are just the latest result of the mounting abstinence movement, which, despite its religious roots, has recast its attack on “hookup” culture as secular, even feminist. The term “hooking up”—meaning anything from kissing to casual sex—can be traced back to the early ’80s, but only within the past few years did the hand-wringing really begin. Former Washington Post reporter Laura Sessions Stepp spent years detailing so-called collegiate mating rituals—often lamenting a tendency among young women toward boozed-up hookups instead of cross-legged gatekeeping—which culminated in last year’s retro revitalization, Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both.

  The abstinence movement has been successful in securing federal funding for abstinence-only programs—to the tune of eight hundred million1 over the past eight years—but the spectacle of father-daughter purity balls, chastity rings, and virginity pledges has failed to make abstinence appear even marginally cool to the mainstream. More recently, activists have begun borrowing from the feminist arsenal—using words like “empowerment” and “respect”—in their assault on uncommitted sex.These books add to a loud cautionary chorus: Young women are hooking up and tuning out emotionally. And, increasingly, young women are being told they are either respecting or exploiting themselves; they’re either with the Girls Gone Wild, sex blogger set or with the iron-belted and chaste. A few months back, a New York Times Magazine piece about chastity on Ivy League campuses relied on this false binary: it pitted a prim Harvard abstinence advocate against a campus sex blogger (who recently posted a photo of her face covered in splooge).

  Choose a side? No thanks. I’m a twenty-four-year-old member of the hookup generation—I’ve had roughly three times as many hookups as relationships—and, like innumerable twentysomethings before me, I’ve found that casual sex can be healthy and normal and lead to better adult relationships. I don’t exactly advocate picking up guys at frat parties and screwing atop the keg as the path to marital bliss. It’s just that hookup culture is not the radical extreme it is so frequently mischaracterized as in the media.There is sloppy stranger sex among people my age, sure, but sometimes hooking up is regular sex with a casual acquaintance; sometimes it’s innocent making out or casually dating or cuddling, and, oftentimes it involves just one person at a time. In a sense it’s all very old-fashioned—there’s just a lot more unattached sex involved.

  Like most twentysomethings, I’ve had online pornography and unregulated chatrooms at my fingertips since I hit puberty. But I also grew up during the Girl/Grrrl Power explosion, which taught me to demand respect, and play handball (and, later, hardball) with the boys. And it taught me that I didn’t need to cake myself in makeup or teeter along in foot-disfiguring heels—unless, of course, I wanted to.

  From the very start, my love life has embodied that seeming paradox. I lost my virginity at sixteen with my first love and best friend; it was all champagne and roses. It was also as-porn-ational sex: I enthusiastically guided us into nearly every position I’d long marveled at online. At one point, midcoital, I actually pinched my chin and asked aloud, “What positions are left?” Afterward, he observed: “That wasn’t what I’d imagined, exactly.” He had imagined: 1) the missionary position and 2) ceremonial crying.

  I didn’t do much hooking up in college; I went to a single-sex school. But after I closed the gates to that cosseted women’s school—and all of its unsexy talk about misogyny and the patriarchy—I opened those other, um, metaphorical gates of mine. Okay, screw the modesty: my legs, I opened my legs. That’s not to say I had a host of one-night stands—I’ve never had a one-night stand, only several-nights stands. But I went through a dressing room phase of trying on different men to see how they fit. (This one makes my control-freak quotient look big but has a slimming effect on my ego.) Like Anna Broadway, I can easily and embarrassingly categorize these men: Lonely Lawyer, Sociopathic Spaniard, Testosterone-Poisoned Pilot, and Bellicose Bartender, for starters.Together, they’re like the Village People for straight women. During this time, I told my friend Sarah and her boyfriend about the latest person I was seeing. “Which one?” he asked, smirking. I laughed, but I wondered: Shit, am I that girl?

&nbs
p; For a while, I was. First, there was the cartoonist.The first night we hooked up, he took me back to his house and played guitar, sang every song he’d ever written, and juggled his collection of vitamin pill bottles.

  Then there was the lawyer. We would have passionate, hours-long debates, as though we were opposing counsels in court; the first of such debates ended with him throwing up his hands and announcing, “Congratulations, you’ve worn out a professional litigator.” He owned his own three-story house with a panorama of the Bay Area, drove an SUV—with a shiny hood ornament that made me cringe—and wanted to sweep me off my feet, rescue me from my one-room apartment, as well as the dishes piled up in (and under) my sink, and my bipolar upstairs neighbor whose monologues are the constant soundtrack to my home life. I told him, “No thanks,” and moved along.

  Then there was the pilot, whom I would see whenever his flight schedule brought him into town. I’d stay the night at his utilitarian airport hotel, order room service, watch planes take off right outside our window, and talk about sexy things like black boxes, plane crashes, and thunderstorms. He was cartoonishly masculine and he made me feel stereotypically feminine, which I am not; it made me constantly want to challenge him to an arm-wrestling match. It was amorous antagonism.

  As far as I can tell, these choices don’t form a pattern, other than a refusal to really choose. I was like a college freshman filling out the Career Center’s job placement questionnaire, making an enthusiastic check mark next to every box; except, in my case, I was checking off men. Most of them were great; others led me on and made me cry. In a few cases, I felt used, but other times I felt like a user.There were some I wanted to date but who wanted to keep things casual, and vice versa.

  There’s nothing unusual about my experience. The New York Times recently ran a “Modern Love” essay by Marguerite Fields, a college junior, about her search for a boy willing to commit. Like me, and like Broadway, she has worked her way through a number of men and says, “I think what I have been seeking in some form from all of these men is permanence.” Near the end of her essay, she ends a third date by asking the guy when she’ll see him next. “That’s a loaded question,” he says, offering a meandering explanation: “He said he had just gotten out of a long relationship, and now he was single and didn’t really know how this whole dating thing works, but he was seeing a lot of other people, and he liked me.”

  I’ve heard that speech before; I’ve given that speech before. It shouldn’t be mistaken as a symptom of a generation unable to commit; it’s simply what you tell someone when you realize that you don’t like him or her all that much. For all the anxiety about “hookup culture” the truth is that for many people older than twenty, “hookup culture” will sound remarkably like, well, “college.” Indeed, students shifted from dating to what was essentially hooking up during a wild time—perhaps you’ve heard of it—called the ’70s.

  But, as the median age of marriage continues to climb, young women are spending a lot more time romantically vetting—and being vetted. It isn’t just that hooking up is becoming a common preamble to dating, either—living in sin is increasingly a prelude to marriage. Hopefully, by taking several test-drives before buying, we’ll be happier with our final investment.

  Of course, there are also very real hazards to hookup culture: namely, rising rates of unplanned pregnancies among young women and sky-high STD rates. It’s safe to say many don’t take the latter very seriously: Moe Tkacik, a blogger for Gawker Media’s feminist blog, Jezebel, recently stirred the pot by writing that condomless sex “feels awesome” because she has “only really engaged in bareback sex with the types of dudes…whose diseases I don’t particularly fear, because the worst thing I can think of about most of them is the ensuing lifetime of awkward conversations.” (And, occasionally, sexual empowerment is overplayed to the point of farce, in the case of a recent incident in which Moe and fellow blogger Tracie Egan shrugged off the seriousness of rape.)

  But much of the finger-wagging over hooking up neglects those very reasonable concerns. For example, abstinence advocates are fond of the saying: “There is no condom for the heart.” But heartbreak isn’t always sexually transmitted. In the New York Times Magazine piece on chastity, prominent Harvard activist Janie Fredell lamented the hurt she’d seen women go through in their pursuit of relationships via hooking up—as though abstaining from sex would have saved them a broken heart. If only.

  I learned something from all of the men I dated. Sexually, I learned plenty about what turns me on. More important, by spending time in uncommitted relationships, what I wanted in a committed relationship became clearer—and it wasn’t amorous antagonism but a partnership that didn’t trigger self-protectiveness.

  I also discovered that a lot of young men are scared shitless—of women, themselves, and their future; that, contrary to our cultural imaginings, they are just as desperate to figure things out as young women. I found that a lot of the pains in the relationships of us twentysomethings can be blamed on cultural prescriptions for masculinity. Yes, there is the stud/slut double standard—but there’s also an expectation that men, unlike women, will not seek safe harbor in a relationship. No, they are supposed to bravely sail their ships beyond the singing sirens and silted waters of their quarter life until they miraculously hit land in the Real Adult World.

  As Kathy Dobie wrote in reviewing Stepp’s Unhooked: “We learn less about intimacy in our youthful sex lives than we do about humanity…Perhaps, this generation, by making sex less precious, less a commodity, will succeed in putting simple humanity back into sex.” Indeed, and perhaps young women are putting feminist ideals of equality into sex by refusing shame and claiming the traditionally male side of the stud/slut double standard. Also, the idea that a woman has to test a man by withholding sex—as many abstinence advocates actually argue—relies on a paradigm of inequality in which women are forced to rely on such desperate power plays. It isn’t that feminism has taught women to have sex like men, as the argument commonly goes, but that withholding sex isn’t women’s sole superpower; coitus isn’t women’s kryptonite.

  With that in mind, I put my academic and career achievements ahead of romantic relationships, and allowed myself plenty of uncommitted entertainment along the way.

  Like Broadway, I happily stayed single until I found someone who seemed truly worth the commitment; unlike Broadway, I wasn’t abstinent.These can be different paths ultimately converging on the same plateau of partnership. By the same token, though, you can chastely date more men than you can count—or sleep with every man who offers you a drink—and not learn a damn thing about how to find a healthy relationship. We feminists do, indeed, love words like empowerment and respect, but there’s one we like even more: choice. The problem is that, too often, the abstinence movement prescribes a particular path, rather than encouraging young women to blaze their own trail.

  A year ago, I decided to take a brief hookup hiatus and then, unexpectedly, met a man who is emotionally available and comfortably, not defensively, masculine—I’ve never felt the need to challenge him to an arm-wrestling match. We’re in a relationship now and he has become my best friend. He openly calls himself a feminist and, smilingly, describes our relationship as “respect run amok.”

  Oh, and we had sex the first night we met.

  NOTES:

  1 http://www.nastad.org/Docs/Public/Resource/200759/_Abstinence Fact Sheet.pdf

  Soulgasm

  Dagmar Herzog

  Antimasturbation and abstinence guidance is not the only graphically detailed evangelical advice out there. Obsessing over orgasms has also long been an essential ingredient of the evangelical sex advice business. For at least a quarter-century, evangelical sex advice-givers have recognized that every man and woman wants bigger and better orgasms.They know this is as true for their flock as it is for the average forsaken nonbeliever. And so they have turned their attention to techniques for intensifying climax.

  God wants His devo
ted followers to have boundary-dissolving ecstasy each and every time. There is no need to feel unfulfilled and frustrated after sex with a spouse. Evangelicals deserve the very best in sex, and so evangelical experts offer the happy news that holy sex means orgasmic sex. Dozens upon dozens of evangelical publications rehearse the basic facts of life. Cosmo meets the Bible.

  Evangelicals Linda Dillow and Lorraine Pintus provide one of the most popular guides for Christian women and their orgasmic lives: Intimate Issues (published, like the “Every Man” series, by WaterBrook Press, an evangelical Christian publishing house based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and a division of Random House). Coining the term “soulgasm” as the desired result of sex with your husband—incredible orgasms plus intense emotional connection with your husband plus God’s spiritual presence—Dillow and Pintus describe the experience variously:“Waves of pleasure flow over me; it feels like sliding down a mountain waterfall.” Or: “It’s like having a million tiny pleasure balloons explode inside of me all at once.”

  Orgasm equity is key to the Dillow and Pintus vision. They are unapologetic in their insistence that Christian women make their own pleasure a priority. They recommend that women “EX-ERCISE YOUR LOVE MUSCLE.Your PC muscle (pubococcygeal) is your love muscle.” They describe the “SIX SECRETS OF HIGHLY ORGASMIC WIVES,” which include not only “grab your Nikes” (because a well-exercised woman is also a pleasure-primed one) but also “educate yourself” about your own body. Above all, they urge women to “let yourself feel”:As Christians, we often think that focusing on ourselves is wrong, that we should concentrate on giving, not receiving. But in order to move toward physical orgasm, we must give ourself [sic] permission to dwell on our physical responses and emotional feelings…It is not selfish…There is a fascinating paradox as your selfish inward journey to orgasm and intense personal excitement become a mutual experience and a marvelous turn-on for your mate.