Best Sex Writing 2008

by Rachel Kramer Bussel

  Jamey got up from his chair, turned out the lights, lighted the stub of a candle next to the bed with a cigarette lighter. The window shade was up and I could see the marquee of the Martin Beck Theater across the street, visible in the streetlight. Jamey settled the pillows under his head. I caught myself wondering how many times a year he changed his sheets, then shook my head to banish the thought.

  I dropped to the bed on all fours and purred. He closed his eyes.

  I was in my own porn movie.

  Tough Love

  Kelly Rouba

  After the birth of his second child, my friend Jeff was surprised when his mother-in-law asked him how he has sex in spite of his inability to walk. The quick-witted forty-year-old replied jokingly that he and his wife, Monica, rely on an intricate system of ropes and pulleys in order to pull off the carnal activity.

  While the couple hasn’t actually resorted to such measures, Monica says she is resourceful in other ways to work around Jeff’s limitations.

  “There’s only one position he can do—being on the bottom,” Monica said. “So to have some more variety, we have to have some variations on that. We have to be creative.”

  Jeff, diagnosed with muscular dystrophy at twelve, said while his condition worsened as he aged, the disease didn’t dramatically affect his sexual abilities until a few years ago.

  “I could never pick up a girl and do it that way, but I could stand and do it until I was about thirty-five,” Jeff said.

  Whether they are in bed or sitting in Jeff’s motorized wheelchair, Monica’s on top, but “Sometimes Monica faces me, sometimes she doesn’t,” he said.

  Despite his inability to have sex in common positions like missionary or doggy style, Jeff said, “It’s still enjoyable because it is Monica. It’s more than just sex because we have a connection.”

  People with disabilities are more likely to achieve sexual fulfillment if they have connections with their partners, or if they are intimate with people who understand the limitations and are willing to work around them.

  As a young adult with severe rheumatoid arthritis restricting my mobility, my first sexual encounter with my on-again, off-again boyfriend was satisfactory at best. By our second rendezvous, I wondered if sex would be my downfall in every relationship to come.

  Because of my inexperience and my partner’s apprehension over hurting me, I never found much pleasure in sex. Our relationship continued sporadically over a number of years, but sex certainly wasn’t the highlight.

  Although I sought the advice of my physical therapist before losing my virginity, her suggestion to try having sex on our sides proved futile. As I wondered what to do next, my partner took control by pulling me to the edge of the bed and penetrating me as my legs rested on his shoulders. That became our routine position—and even that didn’t always go smoothly.

  I considered my hips’ limited range of motion a major roadblock to having earth-shattering sex, and accepted that intercourse would never be an orgasmic experience for me.

  Then I met Adrian.

  During our first sexual experience together, Adrian taught me I can handle more than just two positions. We successfully experimented with several, from doggy style to me on top. My confidence grew. The very next time Adrian and I had sex, I had my first intercourse-induced orgasm—and then, a few minutes later, my second.

  I took the long, hard road to finding better sex. Since then, I’ve discovered many resources and programs tailored to the sexual fulfillment of individuals with disabilities.

  “There’s always ways around the disability,” said Dr. Steve Kirshblum, medical director of the Spinal Cord Injury Program at the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in West Orange, New Jersey.

  Kirshblum’s dedication to making individuals with spinal cord injuries aware they can still have fulfilling sexual relationships earned him a spot in the 2005 documentary film Murderball, which follows members of the United States Paralympics Wheelchair Rugby Team.

  Clips from a video called Sexuality Reborn, showing individuals with spinal cord injuries having sex, were also included in the film. “That (video) was one that was done here at Kessler Institute,” Kirshblum said. “It’s a pretty graphic video for people with disabilities or their significant others.”

  “Oftentimes in the past, sexuality and intimacy—which are not necessarily the same thing—weren’t discussed,” Kirshblum said. “There’s a lot of information out there. The idea is that one has to look for it.”

  “Depending on the types of injuries they have, I recommend that people call resource centers that are geared specifically to their type of disability,” Kirshblum said. “They’ll always have the most up-to-date information for that disability.”

  Kirshblum also suggests that individuals with disabilities search the Internet, where they can find a bevy of books, videos, and websites sharing ways to achieve intimacy in spite of disabilities. But, he advised, “The person has to discuss this with their healthcare providers to make sure what they are hearing pertains to them.”

  Writer Tiffiny Carlson offers tips in her bimonthly column under “Tiff’s Corner” at www.lovebyrd.com. Carlson, who suffered a spinal cord injury when she was fourteen as a result of a diving accident, also provides advice on a website she hosts called www.beautyability.com.

  Carlson says it’s important to find a partner sensitive to meeting special needs. Unable to walk, Carlson relies on her boyfriend, Mike Wilkes, to help her transfer into bed.

  “It’s good to have a partner that’s strong, and not everyone is going to find that,” Carlson said. “I am not strong, so I need help moving around in bed in different positions.”

  Carlson also advised finding someone open to experimentation. “I had this partner for four years,” she said, “who was really averse to trying new things. Trying new things is what keeps sex fun for me.”

  Monica and Jeff also recommend trying new locations. Before they had children, the couple said they used to seek out new places to have sex, like the nearby park or her college dormitory’s laundry room.

  “That was a game we used to play, thinking of weird places,” Monica said.

  For those resistant to sex outside the bedroom, Carlson said role-playing can spice things up at home.

  “It helps you get in the mood,” Carlson said, adding that role-playing boosts her confidence since her disability prevents her from being a “dynamo” in bed.

  “Foreplay is also essential for people with disabilities,” Carlson noted. “Being able to build up [sexual tension] before you have sex helps to increase someone’s confidence.”

  To get in the mood, Adrian and I have done a variety of things, from sending sexy text messages (even when we are two feet away from each other) to playing with vibrators.

  While I’m a fan of the Rabbit, Carlson recommends the G-Force silicone dildo. “For me, I have limited mobility in my hands. That’s one (dildo) I really like. It’s just easy to maneuver.”

  Carlson said specially designed pillows called Liberator Shapes are also helpful. “They are really good for people who don’t move around that good. It allows you to do other positions you didn’t think you could.”

  Eva Sweeney, founder of Queers on Wheels (QOW) and author of Queers on Wheels: The Essential Guide, recommends the Flex-O-Pleaser Wand Vibrator because it can mold to any shape.

  Sweeney, who has quadriplegic cerebral palsy, started QOW in 2004 to promote the sexual well-being of the physically disabled community through workshops and literature.

  QOW welcomes people from all sexual identity groups and aims to empower them with information and support, Sweeney said. Individuals can find information on dating, sex, and ways to adapt sex toys to meet their needs in QOW’s resource guide.

  Since resource guides and videos don’t exactly provide the type of personal attention some individuals are looking for, Carlson said they might want to consider hiring a sexual surrogate.

  “A surrogate partner
works with an individual who is having difficulty having physical or emotional intimacy,” said Vena Blanchard, president of the International Professional Surrogates Association (IPSA).

  While Blanchard stresses IPSA is not a sexual maintenance program for people without access to sex, she said a surrogate is trained to help individuals determine what their bodies are capable of sexually, and can help their partners work around limitations.

  Licensed or certified team therapists also work with clients, Blanchard said, because “sometimes there is a real need for assistance to help (individuals) overcome internalized resistance to perceiving themselves as sexual because of their disability.”

  “Sometimes, what we have to do is change our idea about sex,” Blanchard said. “When we broaden our concept of sex, then it’s more inclusive.”

  “And if you’ve got a good partner,” Carlson added, “so many things are possible.”

  Having met Adrian, I can definitely agree.

  Dirty Old Women

  Ariel Levy

  The older woman. Knowledgeable, seasoned, experienced. Hot! The fantasy creature who embodies full-blown female sexuality in all its mysterious glory. Of course, she’s out of reach; it will never happen. She inhabits her own complicated realm of emotions and responsibilities and lingerie, and you are just…a kid. But imagine the initiation! The possibilities! (Sexually, sure, but also for bragging.) It would be awesome.

  Or would it? What if the impossible happened and she started paying unmistakably romantic attention to you. What if “she told me that she had feeling for me. She told me that she was thinking about me a lot and had feeling for me [and] she didn’t know what to do with them,” as twenty-four-year-old Debra Lafave told one of her fourteen-year-old pupils, according to his statement to the police. What if you had sex in the classroom? What if she fell in love with you? What if she wanted to marry you? If it stopped being a fantasy and started being your actual sex life, your actual life, would it be thrilling or upsetting? Or both? Would you be scarred for life or psyched for months?

  These are questions we’ve had plenty of opportunities to contemplate lately. A few months ago, thirty-seven-year-old Lisa Lynette Clark pleaded guilty to statutory rape of her son’s fifteen-year-old close friend, whom Clark married and whose child she recently gave birth to. In January, a twenty-six-year-old math teacher from Kentucky named Angela Comer was arrested in Mexico with one of her eighth-grade male students (who had allegedly stolen eight hundred dollars from his grandmother for trip money). They had been trying to get married.

  Dirty old(er) women do not reside exclusively in states with alligator problems; we have our fair share in the New York area. In August, Sandra Beth Geisel, a former Catholic-school teacher and the wife of a prominent banker in Albany, was sentenced to six months in jail for having sex with a sixteen-year-old, and she has admitted to sleeping with two of her seventeen-year-old pupils. (The presiding judge in the case infuriated the youngest boy’s parents when he told Geisel her actions were illegal but that her youngest sexual partner “was certainly not victimized by you in any other sense of the word.”) In October, Lina Sinha, an administrator and a former teacher at Manhattan Montessori on East 55th Street, was charged with second- and third-degree sodomy and third-degree rape for allegedly having sex with a former student—who is now a cop—for four years starting when he was thirteen and she was twenty-nine (she denies the charges). And last May, Christina Gallagher, a twenty-five-year-old Spanish teacher from Jersey City, pleaded guilty to second-degree sexual assault of a seventeen-year-old male student.

  The story that probably set the most imaginations in motion is Lafave’s. Debra Lafave, a twenty-four-year-old middle-school teacher who looks like a Miss America contestant, is currently serving three years under house arrest for having sex repeatedly with one of her fourteen-year-old male students. After a hearing, Lafave’s lawyer, John Fitzgibbons, notoriously said that his client, a former model, was too pretty for jail: “[T]o place an attractive young woman in that kind of hellhole is like putting a piece of raw meat in with the lions.” As in several of the other cases, Lafave’s beauty and youth blurred the lines of her narrative. What were these stories about? We couldn’t tell if they were instances of abuse by adults in positions of power who were badly harming children or if they were American Pie/Maxim magazine–style farces about lucky little dudes.

  When I was growing up, my father used to say as a joke (sort of), “Teenage boys: the lowest form of life on earth.” He was probably imagining some combination of his adolescent self and Philip Roth’s Alexander Portnoy, a character who revolved around a tight coil of urge and surge and shame, whose repertoire of obsessions ranged from onanism to defilement and whose actions seemed almost piteously in thrall to his loins rather than his head (which was too busy processing anxiety and guilt to offer much guidance). Portnoy’s Complaint was a best seller in 1967, but to this day its protagonist is for many people besides my father the epitome of adolescent-male sexuality: desperate, reckless, insatiable. The horny little devil.

  If you conceive of teenage boys as walking heaps of lust, you probably conceive of attractive adult teachers who hit on them as public servants in more ways than one.

  Media representations of grown women who pursue teenage boys have hardly been scary in recent years. Phoebe’s brother on “Friends” married his home-ec teacher and proceeded to live happily ever after. Jennifer Aniston’s affair with little love-struck Jake Gyllenhaal in The Good Girl would be difficult to describe as abuse. He pined for her, he worshipped her, and if he ended up destroyed, we couldn’t blame her…a lost little girl who happened to be in her thirties.

  The most famous older woman is, of course, Mrs. Robinson: sinister as well as smoldering, coolly and mercilessly manipulating Benjamin to get what she wants and keep what he wants out of reach. But the fictional figure who is really more representative of our stereotypes is Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. Tennessee Williams made her a skittering, simpering hysteric. Where Mrs. Robinson unfurls her silk stocking with utter confidence in her own allure and smoky erotic power, Blanche rushes to cover the lightbulb with a paper lantern so nobody will see the years creeping over her face. (For the record, her advanced age was thirty.) She is desperate for attention and dependent upon the “kindness of strangers,” and, it is suggested, she hit on her seventeen-year-old male student because her own maturity was stunted and only a young boy would make an appropriate companion for the young girl still living within her withering skin. By the end of that play, she is raped by Stanley Kowalski, then carted off to the loony bin: a victim.

  It’s jarring, however, to think of a teenage boy—say, a sixteen-year-old—who’s been seduced by a female teacher as a victim. It clashes with our assumptions. A teenage boy who gets to live his fantasy? What can be the harm?

  As it happens, that is a very dangerous question. In 1998, Bruce Rind, Philip Tromovitch, and Robert Bauserman (professors at Temple University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan, respectively) published a study that has resounded through the psychological Establishment ever since. The article, published in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin, was what’s known as a meta-analysis, an overview of the existing science, in this case on the long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse. The authors concluded that “negative effects were neither pervasive nor typically intense” and that men who’d been abused “reacted much less negatively than women.”

  Though Rind and his colleagues bent over backward to emphasize the difference between something’s being wrong and something’s being harmful (it’s wrong, for instance, to shoot a gun at someone, even if you miss), the study was spectacularly demonized. Dr. Laura Schlessinger had three psychologists on her show who declared it “junk science.” One of them compared its authors to Nazi doctors. The Alaska State Legislature passed a resolution condemning the study’s conclusions and methodologies. In May 1999, the Family
Research Council along with Tom DeLay held a press conference in Washington demanding the APA retract the Rind study. (Schlessinger was teleconferenced in.)

  About a year after the study’s publication, Congress passed a formal resolution condemning Rind in an uncontested vote. The president of the APA initially defended the paper and pointed out that it had been peer-reviewed and determined to be scientifically sound, but as the resolution was being debated, he sent a clarification to DeLay saying that child sexual abuse was always harmful and—though the study has never been scientifically discredited—the organization has been trying to distance itself from Rind ever since.

  Although it is tempting to assume that the finding that childhood sexual abuse is not as damaging for boys as for girls confirms various widely held beliefs about gender—that boys are tougher and hornier than girls, that males enjoy sex in any form—the issue is more complicated. For one thing, when men seek out sex with underage girls, they are more likely than their female counterparts to have more than one victim and to utilize methods like coercion and threats to secure complicity and secrecy. Women who seek sex with underage boys are more likely to focus on one person and to proffer love and loyalty and a sense of a particular and profound bond. In many of these cases, the woman has floated the idea of marriage.

  We (still) like to keep our understanding of masculinity connected to our understanding of maturity. We’d never had a female anchorwoman deliver our news until recently, we don’t often let female columnists explain the news, and we’ve never had a female president to make the news. For many Americans, being a real grown-up requires a penis. And if you’ve got that, even if you’re only fifteen, you must have the maturity and the manliness to know what you want to do with it—even if that involves intercourse with a forty-two-year-old. Who among us would say the same thing about a fifteen-year-old girl?