Best Sex Writing 2009

by Rachel Kramer Bussel

  There’s an age-old phenomenon known as “trade,” an exchange between two men, at least one of whom is ostensibly heterosexual, in which the recipient of a blow job or the active partner in anal sex can walk away from his hanky-panky with plausible deniability. In other words, he can console himself with the belief that he is “not gay,” because for some reason (misogyny, let’s say) a lot of men think that whoever gets penetrated is “the woman,” or more womanlike.

  Which brings us back to Senator Craig. Though the Idaho Statesman has cataloged a series of incidents that point to homosexual pickups dating back to 1967, he’s sticking to the straight story, unlike Ted Haggard, who admitted partial guilt, confessed completely and then claimed to have been “cured” after three weeks of so-called reparative therapy. So unless we can get a full, graphic report on who was planning to do what to whom in that airport bathroom stall, the senator is free to believe that he is not gay, and has never been gay. Until then, we’ll all be tapping our feet.

  Kids and Comstockery, Back (and Forward) in the Day

  Debbie Nathan

  Ah, yes, children and porn. Children consuming porn, I mean: a venerable American pastime. Did you know you can check out its history for free, next time you visit our nation’s capital? I did and here’s what I learned.

  Exactly a century ago, in 1908, a middle-aged storekeeper named Pasquale Eliseo, of 119th Street and First Avenue in New York City’s East Harlem, was busted on obscenity charges. His arrest happened after notorious vice czar Anthony Comstock, sneaking around town undercover, watched while Eliseo “gleefully showed his rot” to some children.

  What sort of rot? Eliseo, according to Comstock,“Dealt in most sacrilegious and blasphemous books & papers. Awfull!!” (Yes, “awfull” with two l’s.) According to Comstock, Eliseo kept “ob.”—Comstock’s shorthand for “obscene”—materials in his store and “took young men into [the] basement to sell them books.” Worse, he peddled ob. right on the street, where he made a habit of “exposing pictures in full view of boys and girls.” These were probably “French postcards,” and when Comstock happened upon Eliseo, the latter was hawking them at a penny apiece. It’s not clear if he had any paying customers, but he clearly attracted some very enthusiastic young window-shoppers.

  Such details come from a tall, narrow logbook that Comstock kept for decades. He used it to tabulate his obscenity arrests—in muddy, cramped handwriting, and language so fevered that it often came out misspelled and weirdly punctuated. The logbook has been microfilmed by the Library of Congress, in Washington. It’s a popular item in the rare manuscripts collection there, and recently while visiting DC, I skipped the Lincoln Memorial and instead enjoyed the fruits of my taxpayer money by perusing Comstock’s records.

  What a glorious institution the LOC is! It houses a copy of almost every book ever published in this country (and many from other countries besides). Its librarians practically trip over themselves to help patrons. Reading rooms are well-appointed and inviting, the cafeteria food scrumptious and cheap.There’s no charge to use these facilities. The LOC: a people’s palace for research and knowledge. Makes you feel downright patriotic…even as you follow the creepy archival trail of federal official Comstock as he harassed citizens and worked hard to repress our culture.

  A small town druggist turned moral crusader, Comstock came to power after the end of the Civil War, when he was appointed by New York State and the U.S. Post Office as the bigwig, antiobscenity cop. At first, he mainly went after people who advocated for and provided birth control, sex education, and other means of sexual pleasure—including toys. One such early Comstock victim is listed in his logbook as a “shrewd villain” who was “Notorious as an abortionist.”There’s also the “low ignorant laborer” who “advertised himself as an MD and celebrated physician for treatment of female complaints”—yet was really “An abortionist.” Thanks to Comstock, this man got one year and three months at an upstate penitentiary.

  Also arrested was someone named Brinckerhoff and “one Travis of Goodyear Rubber Glove Co.,” who jointly “invented a substitute for a dildoe.” Comstock gloated that he actually seized “the article.” He added that the subsequent guilty verdict made this a “test case of great importance.”

  Comstock was also obsessed with protecting children from dirty materials. He wrote that he arrested a man who “used to loan the vilest Books, to young boys & girls, and sell to school children His wife to girls & he to boys & young men. He was convicted in Special Sessions, in Summer of 1868, by myself.” Comstock dissed this defendant as the “Worst man in N.Y.” He was sent to Blackwell’s Island.

  But Comstock’s prosecutions were partly a losing battle.

  By the 1870s, sexy pictures, texts, and tchotchkes were everywhere, in full view of the kids. In 1875, for instance,Thomas Early, twenty-three, was arrested by police in Yonkers and given three months at hard labor. His crime: distributing handbills for Kahn’s Museum, on Broadway in Manhattan. Kahn’s was where the public went to look at fetuses in jars, preserved cadavers, and medical specimen genitals. In Victorian America, this was how ordinary people—including women—learned about anatomy and the biology of sex. Comstock caught Early giving Kahn’s flyers “indiscriminately to boys & girls.” As a result, he noted in his crabbed handwriting, one child “found a book & took it to her mother to know what ‘penis’ meant.”

  Another log entry, from 1877, describes the arrest of Timothy P. Ide, nineteen, for mailing obscene pictures and books. “He advertised for ‘Boys only’ in various ‘Boys Weekly’ papers. He had three new books & was getting up another. He is a cool deliberate villain.Young as he is he surpasses many older criminals.”

  That same year, Mrs. Sarah E. Summers got a year of hard penal labor after Comstock’s investigators found hundreds of letters and circulars in her possession, as well as articles “to prevent conception [and] procure abortion.” Not only that, Comstock wrote, but Mrs. Summers had, in a popular publication, advertised the following offer: “‘Girls. Secret. How to gain the love of any man for $1.00.’” For each dollar she received, Mrs. Summers sent out “her circular&apowder with written instructions to girls to mix with their own menses and administer in cold drink.” Most of the letters seized were from young females, Comstock noted, including “a 16-year-old minister’s daughter.” Comstock must have raided this teenager’s bedroom: the log notes that when discovered, she had already “sent for and administered one powder & another all prepared was found on her person.”

  The year 1877 also saw hanky panky with magic lanterns—contraptions that projected images in sequence to create the illusion of movement. Tremendously popular, they were forerunners to the motion picture camera. Comstock recorded that a NewYorker,An-drew Trosch, age sixty, who sold stereopticons and magic lanterns on Broome Street in Manhattan, gave a magic lantern show on the Bowery. Apparently he was projecting French postcards, or maybe just Kahn’s Museum fliers. “His obscene views,” Comstock wrote, “disgusted spectators. He was arrested for selling same views.”

  A year later, Kahn’s Museum tormented again. It was displaying “wax figures of females life size, some pregnant & some otherwise & 37 cases of filthy penises. These cases were disposed of before Judge Gildersleeve.”

  As time passed things only got worse. In 1895,Alfred S. Thompson, of 106 E. 14th Street, was arrested for being the “manager of 6 fat women at Huber’s Museum who dress in tights and ride bicycles. A nauseating display.”

  Alfred’s wife, Alice, was also charged. Comstock listed her occupation as “Show Woman” and went after her because she “Sells pictures of herself in tights in a bawdy attire and posture.”

  Not long after, thirty-six-year-old Pauline Sheldon, of W. 98th Street, was apprehended for working at clubs such as the Black Rabbit’s and the Maquet Union, on Bleeker Street. Comstock’s log describes Sheldon as “A hermafadite [sic] & exhibited herself at $1 per person.” She was charged with indecent exposure. Her destination was the T
ombs.

  During Comstock’s earlier years, his busts were lauded by the establishment, including the New York Times. By the turn of the twentieth century, though, he was going stale. That’s around the time he went after Ida Craddock—who today could well be described as this country’s first “Dr. Ruth.” A former shorthand instructor and head of “The Church of Yoga,” Craddock was famous for her sex education classes and pamphlets for married couples. They extolled foreplay as vital for female pleasure, and gave detailed instructions on how to accomplish it.And to avoid unwanted pregnancy, Craddock taught men how to prevent ejaculation. All this infuriated Comstock. Craddock was busted and imprisoned so many times that the last time it happened, she couldn’t take it anymore. She committed suicide by gas oven in an apartment on 23rd Street in 1902. The public was remorseful. Comstock was widely seen as a villain.

  But he still had an ace in the hole: the danger of “ob.” to children. Yet the kids themselves were now starting to make and distribute ob. Already in 1900, for instance, twelve-year-old Emil Grossmann, of 81 E. 11th St., had been picked up by Comstock because he “Used foul language in school room. Sent obscene letter to his teacher.” Emil, Comstock wrote in his log, was “Very bawdy. A bad fellow.”

  Next year, Dominick Gavarse, of East Harlem, got canned for “sending obscene writing by mail to a lady teacher” at the school he attended, PS 83. “A bad boy,” Comstock reiterated in his log. Dominick, twelve years old, was sent to the Tombs.

  Things were getting so out of hand by then that even honor students were going wild. Louis Evenson, age thirteen, was arrested in 1902 for sending “2 ob. Letters & 1 postal card.” Comstock seemed puzzled: “A well behaved boy in school,” he wrote in his log. “Influenced by bad boys. Father is a Rabbi.”

  Perhaps if Louis and his ilk had all been unwashed, Eastern or Southern European immigrants, Comstock could have kept on going full speed. But the lad was a “German Jew,” noted the logbook, and the Evensons lived right off Fifth Avenue.This junior “ob’ber” came straight out of “Our Crowd,” and when New Yorkers of his stratum started crossing paths with Comstock, it couldn’t have boded well for the latter’s career.

  Still, little Louis was a minor. Moral panic about ob’s dangers to the tender aged has fueled many an inheritor to Comstock—in the bloom of the twentieth century and hard into the twenty-first.The new porny-kid “German Jews” of Fifth Avenue may be those who reside in the tony suburbs of the whole nation, or the techno-luxe cyberville of YouTube, MySpace, Facebook—or even, as in the case of Justin Berry, on their own private websites.

  The Immaculate Orgasm: Who Needs Genitals?

  Mary Roach

  Marcalee Sipski is an expert in a field with few experts. When I tell you what the field is, you will understand why the experts are scarce. Sipski, a professor at the University of Alabama School of Medicine, is an authority on sexuality among people with spinal cord injuries and diseases. Most people, even most MDs, are uncomfortable sitting down with a paraplegic and having a talk about, say, how to have intercourse with a catheter in your penis. Sipski is fine having that talk1, and she is fine with me coming to her lab while a subject is there.

  Very little fazes Dr. Sipski. For her video Sexuality Reborn: Sexuality Following Spinal Cord Injury, she managed to recruit four couples to talk frankly (“…and there’s the stuffing method”) about how they have sex and even to demonstrate on-camera.They participated because they, like Sipski, were aware of the potentially ruinous effects of a spinal cord injury on a couple’s sex life and how hard it can be to find doctors willing to address the issue in a constructive, nuts-and-bolts manner.

  Sex research is a relatively recent development in Sipski’s career. For years, she maintained a private practice in rehabilitation medicine. (Christopher Reeve was one of Sipski’s patients, as was Ben Vereen.)2 Over time, she grew curious about the surprisingly high percentage of patients who said they were still able to have orgasms. For decades, the medical community—being for the most part able-bodied—had assumed that people with para- and quadriplegias couldn’t have them. It was a logical assumption: If a person’s spinal cord is broken at a point higher than the point at which nerves from the genitals feed into the spine, then there should be no way for the nerve impulses to make their way past the injury and up to the brain. And thus, it was further assumed, no way for the person to reach orgasm.

  Yet 40 to 50 percent of these men and women, according to several large surveys, do. Sipski decided to investigate. She recruited people with all different degrees and levels of spinal cord injuries for a series of studies, to see if she could find any patterns.

  People with spinal cord injuries provide a unique window onto the workings of human orgasm. If you examine lots of people—some whose injuries are high on the spine, some down low, some in between—you can eventually isolate the segments of the nervous system that are crucial to orgasm. You can begin to define what exactly an orgasm is. (A recent review of the topic listed more than twenty competing definitions.) Once you have an accurate definition of what orgasm is and how it happens, then you will, hopefully, have some insight into why it sometimes doesn’t. Studying people with spinal cord injuries might benefit the able-bodied as well.

  It is a testament to Sipski’s reputation in the disabled community that more than a hundred men and women with spinal cord injuries have traveled to her lab to be part of a study. Unless you are extremely comfortable with your sexuality, masturbating to orgasm in a lab while hooked up to a heart-rate and blood-pressure monitor is, at best, an awkward proposition. It’s even more daunting when you have a spinal cord injury: among those who can reach orgasm, it takes on average about twice as long to get there. Though Sipski’s subjects are alone behind a closed door, they can hear voices and sounds on the other side of the wall.They can tell that people are out there, timing them, monitoring them, waiting for them to finish.

  The people out there this morning are uncommonly disruptive. This is because one of them is me, and because Sipski’s colleague Paula Spath said that by climbing up onto her desk and pressing my nose up to the one-way glass, I could get a peek at the experimental setup. I have on a skirt that does not lend itself to scaling office furniture. I lost my balance and crashed into Paula’s monitor, which slid across the computer it was standing on, knocking off a row of knickknacks, and causing Paula to leap back and let out the sort of high-pitched exclamation that might more appropriately be heard on the yonder side of the wall. It’s a wonder anyone invites me anywhere.

  A woman I’ll call Gwen is under the covers inside the lab. Aside from a caddy in the corner that holds the physiological-monitoring equipment, the lab resembles a scaled-down hotel room: there is a bed with a tasteful bedspread and extraneous throw pillows, a chair, a bedside table, a framed art print, and a TV for viewing more erotic videos. Helping Gwen with her assignment is an Eroscillator 2 Plus, a vibrator endorsed by Dr. Ruth Westheimer and developed by Dr. Philippe Woog, the inventor of the first electric toothbrush.3

  While Gwen eroscillates, Sipski explains what transpired before I arrived. All her subjects are given a physical examination to determine the extent and effects of their injury and its precise location in the spinal cord. One theory held that the people who could still have orgasms were those whose injuries were incomplete—meaning the spinal cord wasn’t completely severed and that some of the nerve impulses from the genitals were squeaking through and reaching the brain. Another possibility was that the orgasmic ones were those whose breaks were below the point where the genital nerves feed into the spinal cord.

  It turned out that while both these things can make a difference, neither was an ironclad deciding factor for orgasmicity. People with high spinal cord injuries could have them, and so could some with complete spinal cord injuries. Based on Sipski’s data, only one thing definitively precludes orgasm: a complete injury to the sacral nerve roots at the base of the spine. Injuries here interfere with something called the sac
ral reflex arc, best known for its starring role in bowel and bladder function.The sacral reflex arc is part of the autonomic nervous system, the system that controls the workings of our internal organs. “Autonomic” means involuntary, beyond conscious control. The speed at which the heart beats, the peristaltic movements of the digestive system, breathing, and, to a certain extent, sexual responses, are all under autonomic control.

  Sipski explains that when you damage your spinal cord, you primarily block the pathways of the somatic, not the autonomic, nervous system. Somatic nerves transmit skin sensations and willful movements of the muscles, and they travel in the spinal cord. But the nerves of the autonomic nervous system are more complicated, and not all of them run exclusively through the spinal column.The vagus nerve, for example, feeds directly from the viscera into the brain; Rutgers University researchers Barry Komisaruk and Beverly Whipple have posited that the vagus actually reaches as far down as the cervix, and that that may explain how people with spinal cord injuries feel orgasm. Either way, autonomic nerves seem to be the answer to why quadri- and paraplegics can often feel internal sensations—menstrual cramps, bowel activity, the pain of appendicitis. And orgasm.

  “Think about it,” Sipski is saying. “Orgasm is not a surface sensation, it’s an internal sensation.” Sipski routinely asks her spinal-cord-injured subjects where they stimulated themselves and where they felt the orgasm. Of nineteen women who stimulated themselves clitorally, only one reported that she’d felt the orgasm just in her clitoris.The rest ran an anatomical gamut: “bottom of stomach to toes,” “head,” “through vagina and legs,” “all over,” “from waist down,” “stomach first, breast tingle, then vaginally.”