Best Sex Writing 2008

by Rachel Kramer Bussel

  In earlier times, that kind of false advertising would have gotten a girl stoned to death. Those bloody sheets had to be hung out as proof. If the marriage was deemed void, she might be sent into a life of prostitution or perhaps, worse, back to her father’s house, shamed.

  If nothing else, the number of sexually experienced brides today makes punishing all of them impractical. It was with the invention of latex and dependable condoms that women in the Western world began taking the risk. Reports from 1920 show only 50 percent of brides in this country at that time were virgins. The difference was they didn’t sleep with the men they were marrying. Tricky chicks, eh? Makes you wonder over their wedding night scenarios. Maybe they fooled their new husbands too. Maybe they learned to fake not having an orgasm. But more likely they were just like us.

  “Too exhausted,” for intercourse. Planning a wedding is said to rate in the top five for stress, along with air-traffic controlling and death of a spouse.

  “Too hungry.” Only those who elope get to eat at their weddings. And brides typically don’t eat for weeks before either.

  “Too preoccupied.” Partying.

  “Too drunk.” If too preoccupied.

  “Too hungover.” If the wedding was over before nightfall.

  “Too many buttons. Forty or more buttons. I swear, I gave up.”

  “He couldn’t get it up. All of a sudden.”

  I heard all these reasons and most of them thrice. But all I really heard was that no one is having sex on their wedding nights anymore. It’s the best kept undirty secret around. So why is it secret? It’s not rational. It’s ritual. And when you examine it (which is exactly what is not done with rituals), the whole subtext of the celebration is sex. Once that veil goes up and you may now kiss the bride, you must keep kissing her whenever a spoon hits crystal. You must dance the first dance to your song. You must cut the first slice of cake and take turns smooshing it into each other’s waiting mouths. There’s the high jinx with the garter and the getaway in the vandalized, shoe-festooned vehicle.

  It’s a performance—flirting for an audience. It’s pretense and foreplay. It’s one outdated formality after another, leading to the ultimate climax—sex. Even my ride over the threshold (a vestige of marriage-by-capture) had cheerleaders, though their presence ruled out the very act for which they rooted. Regardless of what the customs or trappings suggested, I’m sure not a single one of them believed I was a virgin. And why should anyone, most of all myself, care? Marriage is a public declaration of love. Sex is a private declaration of marriage. Or should be.

  But if we no longer measure a bride’s worth by her chastity, then why do we continue to behave as if we do? Why suffer old men who wink and tell the groom they hope he gets “lucky?” Why sit through the never-ending tasteless jokes and tactless toasts or worry, as I did, over scary old wives tales, i.e., “The first in bed will be the first to die.”

  Maybe the place to start would be an update of that all-important mother-daughter “chat.” Brides-to-be still need to know the score. So tell her marriage requires work and compromise, humor and friendship, trust and lust. And if you don’t manage to have sex on your wedding night, rest assured. Someone else will. Weddings are, after all, notoriously romantic for the guests.

  Take the pressure off and fresh customs would have room to evolve. Modern newlyweds might start to, say, share a banana split, exchange foot massages… Talk.

  But when I found myself fully dressed the next morning, I wasn’t thinking so clearly. Was the marriage off to a bad start? I fretted. Would our plane crash, our passions wane, our eyes wander? Were we doomed to a future of peck-like kisses?

  Fluorescent light dinners? Twin beds? What if we’d married our fathers, our mothers, our childhood pets? What if we’d projected or settled? What if we never had sex again?

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” my new husband said as I repacked the unused peignoir set—peach thong and bra with push-up features—I’d so carefully selected. Ridiculous, exactly. If only I’d known that the lingerie bridal shower would turn out to be a practical joke, I’d have asked for appliances. I’d have never paraded around wearing that paper plate hat stapled high with bows. If only I’d known that the rites were expendable, I’d have skipped the embarrassment of the first dance and kept my bouquet. If only I’d known not to believe the age-old wedding-night hype that this would be my fantasy night.

  “But how could you have known?” my new husband said. “It’s not the kind of thing you read in magazines or books. Anyway, we have the honeymoon to make up for it, not to mention the rest of our lives.” And so we did. And so we do.

  How Insensitive

  Paul Festa

  Late in the summer of 2005, I visited a nondescript medical office in San Francisco’s fog belt, lay down on an examination table, and had eleven regions of my penis poked by various gauges of monofilament. It wasn’t quite what I’d envisioned when I’d signed up for the Penile Sensitivity Touch-Test Evaluation Study—“touch test” had conjured something a little sexier than a retired MD coming at me with medical-grade fishing line. But by the age of thirty-five, the human penis is nothing if not well schooled in disappointment, and so, for the good of science, I went through with the exam.

  The science in this case concerned one of the most controversial and common medical procedures practiced in the West: circumcision of the penis. The study, published in the April 2007 BJU International (the former British Journal of Urology) under the title “Fine-Touch Pressure Thresholds in the Adult Penis,” is the latest research salvo in the war for the neonatal foreskin.

  Pro-circumcision forces have been getting the upper hand on the research front in recent months, brandishing high-profile studies associating male circumcision with significantly lower HIV-INFECTION rates in Africa. And while the American Academy of Pediatrics continues to call the evidence “complex and conflicting,” several older studies claim a link between male circumcision and lower rates of specific sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV, syphilis, and cancer of the sexual and reproductive organs.

  Anti-circumcision advocates cite methodological problems with the STD studies while raising a separate question about the ethics of discarding a body part to prevent its becoming infected. In order to establish what, exactly, a male person loses when he loses his foreskin, the study set out to compare sensation in the cut and the uncut organ. Its conclusion may seem obvious to those of us with only a lay interest in the penis, but it’s controversial, nonetheless: uncut dick feels more. A lot more.

  “The study shows that the foreskin is the most sensitive portion of the penis,” said study coauthor Robert Van Howe, a pediatrician at the Marquette General Health System in Marquette, Michigan. “It’s not like you’re chopping off plain old skin. The analogy would be like removing your lips, because the lips are more sensitive than the skin around them.”

  The study, organized by the anti-circumcision advocacy group NOCIRC (National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers), isn’t the first to compare the sensitivity of the cut and the uncut. Masters and Johnson found no difference between circumcised and uncircumcised men’s glans sensitivity, but they didn’t subject that finding to peer review. Another dozen studies cited in the BJU International report compared sexual function of cut and uncut men, and some looked—from an anatomical, rather than sensory, perspective—at the loss of sensory tissue in circumcision. But the study authors say they’ve achieved something new with their study: a comparative sensory mapping of the male organ.

  This new cartography of the penis proffers nineteen zones. Missing from the circumcised male are eight of these penile destinations, four on the dorsal side (the outer prepuce, the orifice rim, the mucocutaneous junction, the ridged band) and four on the ventral (frenulum near ridged band, frenulum at mucocutaneous junction, orifice rim, and outer prepuce). Missing from the uncircumcised anatomy are two regions on this new map, and they’re both scars.

  In the ar
eas that cut and uncut men have in common, the study showed a sensitivity deficit of between 2 and 33 percent. In those areas peculiar to the intact penis, the deficit is by definition 100 percent. And it’s in those areas, the study concludes, where most of the sensory action is. Perhaps the most salient of the report’s findings is that “the transitional region from the external to the internal prepuce is the most sensitive region of the uncircumcised penis and more sensitive than the most sensitive region of the circumcised penis.” If the penile map were of New York City, the equivalent cut would be Manhattan from Fourteenth Street to Battery Park.

  The genesis of the study was the day in May 1979 that nursing-school student Marilyn Milos witnessed a circumcision for the first time. Milos describes the experience on the NOCIRC website in excruciating detail: a newborn, strapped down spread-eagle on a plastic board, shrieking and wailing as his foreskin is clamped, incised, and finally amputated.

  “I had not been prepared, nothing could have prepared me, for this experience,” writes Milos, whose three sons were all circumcised before her stint in nursing school. “To see a part of this baby’s penis being cut off—without an anesthetic—was devastating. But even more shocking was the doctor’s comment, barely audible several octaves below the piercing screams of the baby, ‘There’s no medical reason for doing this.’ ”

  Now Milos, the founder and executive director of NOCIRC, is a sixty-seven-year-old grandmother who proudly boasts of being thanked for her work by her “intact grandson—and his wife.” Since her fateful afternoon in nursing school, says Milos, she has devoted every day of her life to bringing an end to what she describes as “an anachronistic blood ritual.”

  Harrowing narratives, many illustrated, are a staple of anti-circumcision websites, where doctors detail procedures gone awry and complain of poor documentation of the practice’s true risks and consequences. (If parents had to do a Google Image search on “botched circumcision” before consenting to the procedure, its prevalence would surely plummet.)

  Dispassionate analysis could sweep aside personal accounts like Milos’ and dismiss accidental castrations, disfigurements, and deaths to the margin of error. After all, male circumcision is or has been routine in the United States for much of the last century, has been spiritually mandated among Jews for millennia, and the purported victims of this preputial pogrom are impregnating their wives and running the country and writing the very words before you. If there’s a problem with snipping the foreskins of newborns, its manifestations are subtle.

  I consider the fate of my own foreskin with ambivalence. Apart from bypassing a few Craigslist ads stating a preference for intact dick, I’ve never been aware of being discriminated against for lacking one. As a secular American Jew born in 1970, I’ve found myself for the most part in the company of men who were either ritually or routinely circumcised. While I take seriously the methodological qualms the anti-circumcision lobby raises about studies showing an STD-foreskin link, that research at least jibes with my own experience, in which sexual contact with some unimaginable number of sex partners has yet to manifest so much as a pimple on my dick. (Coming of age at Ground Zero of both AIDS and condom awareness may also have something to do with it.) I’ve heard people complain that their intact partners were too quick to orgasm, or were so sensitive they could barely be touched by another person. These are problems I’m happy not to share. So what are we, what I’ll call the silent and ambivalent circumcised majority, really missing?

  Nothing, I tell myself. But then I remember those moments, so routine in my sex life I barely notice them, in which I’m supposed to be approaching orgasm and the goal seems a long, long way off; in which I jerk myself off until I’m chafed; in which I’ve run my hands through the hair of someone giving me what has every appearance of being a splendid blowjob and yet I am detached from the experience. And I am detached for the reason that I just don’t feel it very much. The thought occurs to me that we who lost the most sensitive parts of our sexual organ to a ritual or routine procedure in the first days of life are detached and apathetic and ambivalent because we do not know what we are missing.

  The Study of Sex

  Amy André

  In a large classroom packed with students, Professor Nick Baham is teaching a course called African-American Sexuality. The course has been taught in the Ethnic Studies Department of California State University, East Bay since the mid-’80s, with Baham taking over as professor in 2000. The students settle in as he turns their attention to a guest lecturer, who is visiting to discuss images of people of color in feminist pornography.

  Most of the students in the class are themselves black and mostly female. They range in age from late twenties to early thirties, and between fifty and sixty people take the class when it’s offered several times a year. Most students identify as heterosexual. As far as Baham knows, it is the only course in the country specifically on African-American sexuality. For today’s lecture, Baham and his guest field questions about black female sexual agency, the involvement of black people in alternative sexual communities and even representations of pleasure and orgasm.

  Contrary to some students’ expectations, the ten-week course is not a sexual “how-to.” Baham’s challenge is to get students to step out of their comfort zones, as they cover topics such as BDSM, black LGBT issues, sex work, media hype around the “down low,” marketing of black female bodies on television, representations of black sexuality in pornography, interracial sexuality, and black male patriarchy.

  Rethinking What’s Natural

  Students enroll in the course with a variety of ideas about sexuality, Baham says. Among his students, he finds that “certain things are considered taboo because they’re considered things that white people do. For example, gay and lesbian identity is considered white, introduced to blacks during slavery and not organic to Africa. Religiosity also comes up; sexual practice is conflated with religious prerogatives.”

  Representations of black sexuality, especially black female sexuality, in popular culture are also an issue. “They’re very aware that their sexual bodies are objectified and commodified,” Baham says. “And there are clearly demarcated lines between [women who are] virgins and sluts. [The students’] sexual self-perception is bounded by race, gender, and religiosity. Every erotic activity that they’re engaged in becomes a contested cultural terrain, where [they’re] fighting the legacy of colonialism.”

  For one of the class assignments, Baham has the students conduct a mini-ethnography. He asks students to interview people whose sexuality is different from that of their own. “So, if they’re heterosexual and vanilla, they go to the Folsom Street Fair (an annual leather community event in the nearby city of San Francisco) and chat with people,” he says.

  “I’m not trying to indoctrinate them. I’m not trying to stop them from looking to the Christian church every time they have sex. I’m looking to get them to think critically about what they do and what they think is ‘natural.’ ”

  The Color of Sexuality Studies

  The existence of Baham’s course itself—and its high enrollment numbers—indicates a departure from the norm in the field of sexuality studies. Rita Melendez is a professor in the Human Sexuality Studies Department at San Francisco State University and a research associate at the school’s Center for Research on Gender and Sexuality. Both at sexuality studies conferences and in her own classroom, she often finds that she is one of a handful of people of color. Most of her colleagues are white, as are most of her students.

  The field of sexuality studies is small but growing, having emerged from an interdisciplinary social sciences arena. Academics and theorists dating back to Freud popularized the notion of studying human sexual behavior, and its development has been shaped by everything from the early psychologists to the birth of feminist theory, from the advent of HIV/AIDS to the creation of women’s and gender studies, and more.

  Melendez contends that “when you study sexuality, race and ethni
city are pivot points. Who you study and what you find will be influenced by race. There needs to be a lot more people of color doing sexuality studies.” Sexuality studies has immediate relevance to communities of color, she argues, because of historical and contemporary intersections between sexualized racism and racialized sexism, and because of the ways in which sexuality can be a particular source of joy for persons of color as well.

  Race “hasn’t been dealt with very well” in sexuality studies, Melendez says. Despite the fact that many people of color are interested in the topic, “there has been mainly a large group of white men and women in the field of sexuality. A lot has to do with the word ‘sexuality’; it gets associated with white people.” Melendez finds that when the word “sexuality” gets added to a course title, people of color don’t enroll.

  Part of that word-association has to do with the fact that many white sexuality researchers are researching people of color. For example, Melendez says, most research being done today on people with HIV is done on people of color with HIV. For that reason, a notion prevails that sexuality studies is something that white people do and something that people of color have done to them. This paradigm sets up a power dynamic that can leave people of color dissociated from the sexuality research field.

  Another reason for the low numbers of students of color in sexuality studies courses may have to do with the way race plays out in the mostly white classroom. “I spend all day talking about sexuality. I can say anything in my classes, and nobody will be shocked. But when [I] start talking about race, it often becomes a sensitive subject for my students,” Melendez says. “When we really start talking about what race means, we get uncomfortable. Students tend to think that if you know somebody’s race, you know a lot about them. I think that’s not true. Everybody experiences race and ethnicity differently. If you’re white, does that mean we can presume to know everything about you? It’s really important to de-teach [my sexuality studies students] about race. [I] constantly try to bring race and ethnicity into the conversation.”