Desire

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  I ordered another coupe of champagne in order not to let my courage dribble away. When I got up to dance with the blonde there was no one on the floor but us. Any other time I would have been self-conscious, but the champagne and the way she clung to me, the dimmed lights and the solid feeling of security which the few hundred francs gave me, well. … We had another dance together, a sort of private exhibition, and then we fell into conversation. She had begun to weep—that was how it started. I thought possibly she had had too much to drink, so I pretended not to be concerned. And meanwhile I was looking around to see if there was any other timber available. But the place was thoroughly deserted. The thing to do when you’re trapped is to breeze—at once. If you don’t, you’re lost. What retained me, oddly enough, was the thought of paying for a hat check a second time. One always lets himself in for it because of a trifle. The reason she was weeping, I discovered soon enough, was because she had just buried her child. She wasn’t Norwegian either, but French, and a midwife to boot. A chic midwife, I must say, even with the tears running down her face. I asked her if a little drink would help to console her, whereupon she very promptly ordered a whisky and tossed it off in the wink of an eye. “Would you like another?” I suggested gently. She thought she would, she felt so rotten, so terribly dejected. She thought she would like a package of Camels too. “No, wait a minute,” she said, “I think I’d rather have les Pall Mall.” Have what you like, I thought, but stop weeping, for Christ’s sake, it gives me the willies. I jerked her to her feet for another dance. On her feet she seemed to be another person. Maybe grief makes one more lecherous, I don’t know. I murmured something about breaking away. “Where to?” she said eagerly. “Oh, anywhere. Some quiet place where we can talk.” I went to the toilet and counted the money over again. I hid the hundred franc notes in my fob pocket and kept a fifty franc note and the loose change in my trousers pocket. I went back to the bar determined to talk turkey. She made it easier for me because she herself introduced the subject. She was in difficulties. It was not only that she had just lost her child, but her mother was home, ill, very ill, and there was the doctor to pay and medicine to be bought, and so on and so forth. I didn’t believe a word of it, of course. And since I had to find a hotel for myself, I suggested that she come along with me and stay the night. A little economy there, I thought to myself. But she wouldn’t do that.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  And still, I would sit in professors’ offices listening to them talk about their research and think, I could totally do what they do. Certainly, that was a bit grandiose, but I was working ten-hour days, always at someone else’s whim. I envied the freedom faculty seemed to have, teaching two or three times a week, setting their own schedules and being handsomely compensated. I wanted to live that life. Throughout my MA program, I had always intended to get my PhD, but I was going to get my PhD in creative writing and write my great Haitian American novel and get a teaching job and be set for life. And then, as one of my work duties, I went to the annual conference for the National Society of Black Engineers to man a recruitment table for the College of Engineering. The woman whose table was across the aisle from mine throughout the conference, Betty, began talking to me about the school she worked for, Michigan Technological University, and how they had a great technical communication program. I had never heard of Michigan Tech, and was certain that I’d be staying at UNL. After the conference, though, she stayed in touch and she was persistent. Then the woman I thought I was in a relationship with broke up with me, on Valentine’s Day, via e-mail, and suddenly, I wanted to be as far away from Lincoln as possible. I applied to Michigan Tech, was accepted, and they made me an offer I could not refuse—enough money to nearly match my salary, teaching opportunities, tuition remission, and terrible health insurance. That summer, I moved to Hancock, Michigan, sight unseen, to attend a doctoral program at a school I had never heard of in a field I knew nothing about. My brother Michael Jr. transferred to Michigan Tech and joined me. As we drove into town, we both realized that we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. The Upper Peninsula was so very remote. The two-lane country highways we took for hours were dwarfed by trees thick with leaves. There were deer everywhere as the sun set, so we slowed to a crawl. When I met my landlord, who lived in the upstairs unit of an old building where she and her deceased husband had run a dry cleaner, she stood behind her latched screen door as my brother and I stood on the porch. She peered out at me and said, “You didn’t sound like a colored girl on the phone.” I was thirty years old. 29There was something comforting about graduate school and living a life of the mind. My body didn’t matter because I was in school, taking classes and learning things. I was learning how to teach on the job. I had very specific responsibilities that demanded nearly all of my focus, my time and energy.

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (1984)

  But, more important, the game was also open in that one could not exercise any statutory authority over the boy, as long as he was not slaveborn—he was free in his choices, in what he accepted or rejected, in his preferences or his decisions. In order to get from him something that he always had the right to refuse, one had to be able to persuade him; anyone who wished to remain his favorite had, in his eyes, to outshine such rivals as might present themselves, and for this it was necessary to highlight one’s achievements, one’s qualities, or one’s presents; but the decision was the boy’s alone to make: in this game that one had initiated, one was never sure of winning. And yet this was the very thing that made it interesting. Nothing illustrates this better than the charming complaint of Hiero the tyrant, as reported by Xenophon.22 Being a tyrant, he explains, does not make things pleasant either in regard to a wife or in regard to a boy. For a tyrant cannot help but take a wife from an inferior family, thus losing all the advantages of marrying into a family “of greater wealth and influence.” As for the boy—and Hiero is enamored of Daïlochus—the fact of having despotic power at one’s disposal raises other obstacles; the favors that Hiero would like so much to obtain, he would like the boy to give them out of friendship and of his own accord; but “to take them from him by force,” he would sooner desire “to do himself an injury.” To take something from one’s enemy against his will is the greatest of pleasures; but when it comes to the favors of boys, the sweetest are those that are freely granted. For example, what a pleasure it is to “exchange looks, how pleasant his questions and answers; how very pleasant and ravishing are the struggles and bickerings. But to take advantage of a favorite against his will seems to me more like brigandage than love.” In the case of marriage, the problematization of sexual pleasures and of the practices associated with them was carried out on the basis of the statutory relation that empowered the husband to govern the wife, other individuals, the estate, and the household; the essential question concerned the moderation that needed to be shown in exercising power. In the case of the relationship with boys, the ethics of pleasures would have to bring into play—across age differences—subtle strategies that would make allowance for the other’s freedom, his ability to refuse, and his required consent.

• From Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  And I learned why he had been such a successful hustler. “I know guys are always telling you this, and you think it’s a load of bullshit. But I’m really straight. I mean, I can get off with guys—any way till Sunday. But to do it I always have to think about girls. That’s why I like goin’ in the movies, so that I can get some good heterosexual stimulation from the screen.” Though I think a certain reticence is appropriate when discussing it, at least one reason Pietro and Kevin were memorable is that both, uncut, were hung (in a simile) like mules. Joey was not. On a scale of small, medium, and large I fall directly on the border line between the latter two. Joey was just under the middle of medium. But, sitting beside me in the Capri, talking, with his cut dick out, he explained, “I love to come, man. I mean I love to come more than anything in the world. And I like people to see me come. I like them to know I’m coming. I like them to hear me come. I like them to love it that I’m coming, too! Now: You want to suck me? You want me just to jerk off? Or what?” Between the time I’d first talked to him and now, Joey had developed a sore on the back of his left hand that was probably infected and was suppurating through its bandage. So I said: “Why don’t you jerk off?” “Sure. That’s easy.” Over the next twenty-five minutes, now losing his pants, now his shirt, now his shoes, next his socks, now standing and growling, now sitting all but in my lap, thrashing and flailing his free arm, now practically down between the seat and the back in front of him on the floor, he groaned and quivered and pumped till, lying back in the chair, ass up off the cushion, grinning and panting, he sprayed across his quivering stomach and began to rub his mucus around and over himself. “Oh, man . . . ! Oh, shit . . . ! Oh, fuck . . . !” Three of the five people who had gathered in the aisle to watch, applauded. When, finally, Joey began to sit up, collect his clothes, and put them back on, he asked, “Anybody want to contribute five bucks? I mean, you gotta admit, that was a good show, huh?” One older gentleman gave it to him. “Thanks, pops.” It went into his jeans pocket with the ten from me.

• From Opening Up by Writing It Down (2016)

  For Josh it was a bit different. He was an independent and autonomous child. He had a highly active fantasy life, largely fueled by a great love of reading. In particular, he loved more fantastical books—fairy tales, superheroes, mythology, that kind of stuff. This fascination persisted for years and curiously matched up with some college studies years later. During college, Josh took a course that covered, among other things, mind–body processes. That is, how the mind could exert influence over the body—think mind over matter, resisting pain, controlling heart rate and other automatic biological functions, and so forth. This was tantamount to the paranormal themes that had always been so captivating for him. It almost sounds like a superpower, doesn’t it? But it raised thorny issues: How could the mind influence our physical bodies? How could some cells, some particularly important bits in our brains presumably, control all the other squishy bits in our bodies? From this point on, Josh was hooked—he had to figure out how our minds could influence our bodies. You can already see the beginnings of what will be part of the larger story—personal experiences, insights, sometimes even formal research, can each lead to observations on how things work. These observations lead to careful exploration using scientific methods, and this cycle continues over time as understanding grows. In many ways, this is the essence of science in general, and certainly has been a central theme in exploring the links between psychological experiences and our health and well-being. PSYCHOLOGICAL LINKS TO ILLNESS AND HEALTH Asthma, wheezing, congestion, and other respiratory changes have long been known to be related to psychological conflict. In fact, in the mid-20th century Harold G. Wolff and Stewart Wolf, two pioneers in the emerging field known as psychosomatic medicine, explored the links between people’s psychological conflicts and health problems in books with intriguing titles such as The Nose (together and separately, they also published books entitled Headache, The Colon, and, of course, The Stomach). In landmark studies spanning three decades, Wolff, Wolf, and their collaborators developed the stress interview, whereby volunteers would be asked a series of psychologically threatening questions while, at the same time, relevant bodily changes were monitored. The stress interview serves as a medical version of a lie detector exam. For most people, there are a limited number of psychological issues that account for most psychosomatic problems. Current stress interviews, for example, routinely touch on issues of loss, rejection, sexuality, parental problems, uncontrollable trauma, and failure. Depending on the person’s health problem, the interviewer might measure muscle tension in the neck (for tension headache sufferers), blood pressure and heart rate (for people with hypertension), breathing rate or oxygen consumption (for those with respiratory problems or panic attacks), or one of a few dozen other biological indices.

• From Three Women (2019)

  When Sloane is not around, people talk about her. In a small town it would be enough that she goes to the gym more than she stops to talk by the bags of baby greens. But that isn’t the reason why people talk. The salient bit, the gossip, is that Sloane sleeps with other men in front of her husband. Or she does it down the street, or on another island and records it, and shows her husband the video later. If she isn’t with him, she texts with him throughout, to let him know how it’s going. Occasionally she’ll sleep with another couple. Hers is a trajectory that is not immediately tenable. She’s living in this place year-round, which is strange in itself. Families like hers come for two-week stints in the summer. Occasionally they will spend the entire summer, or the mother will, and the father will come on the weekends. But to be here full-time, in the winter, one can go crazy. There are no malls, no large stores to get lost in. When you leave for the day, you make a list of all the errands you need to run out in the world. The road to her adult life began with a Christmas party at the home of her father’s boss. One of the richest men in New York City. The house, in the Westchester suburbs, had columns and Persian rugs and gold-edged crystal. Women with low heels. Outside, the tree branches were swollen with ice. The streets shone. Sloane was her father’s date and her date was a boy named Bobby. He was good-looking, like all the boys she dated. Sloane was twenty-two and taking a break from the restaurant business. She wanted to explore theater. She was going out almost every night and her social calendar was full with a range of events, from warm beer in dank music venues to chilled martinis in homes like this one. Her father’s boss’s wife, a prim, silver woman named Selma, said: We should get Keith and Sloane together. She said this somewhat in front of Sloane’s date, Bobby. It was like an epiphany. Keith, their son; and Sloane, their right-hand man’s daughter, beautiful, well-bred, thin. Deific and, like two horses, ready to reproduce. They lived two blocks from each other. How had they not thought of this before! Sloane wasn’t so interested in money but all the same this young man, Keith, had a lot of it. His family name was at the top of most of the programs in the art world. A few weeks later, Sloane went out with Keith. She was happy to do it for her father. That her sexual energy was somehow usable in his business world made her feel powerful. Keith asked her where she wanted to go for their date and Sloane said, Vong. The next place she wanted to go was always on the tip of her tongue.

• From Three Women (2019)

  Someday, Sloane wanted to run her own place. There was a colleague at the bookstore with whom she talked of buying a space they might turn into a restaurant and club. It was her dream, at the time, to combine food with music at a cutting-edge venue. A one-stop location for a group’s entire evening. After eating steak frites and stuffed artichokes, a table of friends would stay to drink and dance and watch a band play. She was looking at West Broadway below Canal, which back then was parking lots, smoke shops, thick shakes, Rollerblades. Now that part of the city is doorman buildings with rooftop gardens, boutique markets selling hydroponic butter lettuce, and boys in Ray-Bans taking selfies in front of Hook and Ladder Number 8. It was typical of Sloane to see the promise of something before everyone else did. In the slender strips of time when she was not working, Sloane would go and see an ex named Judd, or a young woman named Erika. Judd had dark eyes, pale skin, and a motorcycle. Sloane liked how her hair felt dirty in the morning, after she’d been with him. He didn’t always call her back as quickly as she’d have liked. With Erika, it was a little more predictable. Even when there is tumult with women, there is a baseline of certainty. They call more, respond more quickly. Erika wasn’t Sloane’s first woman. There’d been a girl at Hampshire named Lia. They dated, as much as one can date in college. On a winter evening, Lia said she needed a penis. They called up a young man they had each seen, individually, in the past. As a trio, they did more laughing than anything else. It was a blur of messing around. She was turned on by the multiple trails of saliva on her thighs. With Erika, in New York, it was more serious; plus, Erika wasn’t at all into men. Sometimes, Sloane saw, there could be an imbalance in a relationship between two women, when one also likes to sleep with men and the other doesn’t. Sometimes the one who doesn’t can feel that the other woman is a betrayer. She might worry that the other woman wants more, not just the penis, not something a dildo can’t sate, but the idea of a man, the idea of someone who is larger, the idea of being ecstatically subjugated by masculine energy.

• From Three Women (2019)

  Sloane didn’t want or need a man in that way. But she did want more from life than what it seemed one person could give her. She wanted bigger experiences. She always wanted an evening to evolve into something more complex. She brought Erika over to Vong to work as a server. Sloane had always mixed her worlds. She didn’t fear contamination; if anything, the potential chaos was exciting. After work they would all get together and drink and go over the failures and successes and, being in thrall to the energy of the place, they would discuss how to make the experience better for the patrons the next evening. There was a sexual vim involved. Table-setting a world made Sloane feel alive. When occasionally the biosphere of the restaurant felt small and stifling, when she felt Erika pulling closer, Sloane would disappear for a few nights to go to Judd’s. With Judd, she drank a lot, did drugs, fucked in the pitch black. Judd was like a loft apartment, stark and cool. Often the Sid and Nancy of it was appealing. She never knew if he was her boyfriend, or if she wanted him to be, but she liked the way she worried about whether or not he was going to call her. She liked getting ready to go and meet him. Mascara, straws in clear liquid. For several months it was a whirlwind; they broke up and got back together and lived together and left each other and came back. He was crazy and she acted crazy around him. And eventually there came a third relationship, with Richard the chef, even though at first it didn’t feel like one. There was no grand fuck, no night of Scotch and weirdness that kicked it off. The chemistry between Richard and Sloane was hot but it was also clear. He was not a child. He had an eight-month-old daughter at home, by a woman with whom he was still close but no longer romantically involved. And though he was a father, Sloane did not really think of him that way. Mostly he seemed like something healthy. Sloane felt she needed to grow up. Or rather, she knew that she needed to grow up. Though she didn’t entirely know who she wanted to be, she had always known the benchmarks she needed to hit. It was a by-product of coming from her type of family.

• From Three Women (2019)

  Awareness. You may think you understand the word, but you have to absorb the word. Your husband must be aware of you as though he is in your brain. This is about turning you on, and not the other woman. So even if he is fucking this other woman, he needs to be fucking you, in his mind. Each pump is going through this woman, and into you. It’s been a long while of swinging, if you could call it that, because it is not actually swinging. Swinging is a word that belongs to another time, to people who are not Sloane. She is refined and so are her world, her bedsheets, her brain. It is more like sexuality without boundaries, but not in a hedonistic, hipster sense. If you were to liken their sexual life to the setting of a dinner table, the table itself would be long and thick, decorated with antlers and other bones and flowers. To drink, there would be wine and port, and the guests would eat their dessert and salad at once. There would be velvet chairs and simple wooden bar stools, but guests could also sit on the table, naked, or in baroque dress. It all began on her twenty-seventh birthday. The first week of July, over a decade ago. The restaurant had been open for two years. White cornices, sunshine. She was pleased with what she had built. She felt that everything she had done up until now had a reason. It was hot and Newport was humming with the force of the holiday weekend. The Fourth of July is the first lucrative weekend of the season. The summer people buy up the flowers from the farmers’ market. They carry dripping stems back to their air-conditioned beach cars, their green station wagons, and their vermilion antique convertibles. The rust on the undercarriage is a statement. Long-haired girls in their early twenties wear bikini tops and soft pants. Every year there is one kind of sandal that is favored over another. In the morning Sloane went to the restaurant to fill out some paperwork. She ran her hand along the stainless steel in the kitchen, admiring the refrigerator full of cold summer vegetables. All the machines, the industrial blenders. She owned these things. She could feed hundreds of people a night. A noise startled her at the other end of the room. She looked up and saw Karin, a server who also worked on the restaurant’s books. Sloane knew little about Karin, only that she had recently graduated from college. And, like many young women who weren’t sure what they wanted to do or where they wanted to live, Karin had come to work in Newport, where her friends’ parents had vacationed. She had come as a preteen several times and learned what to covet. She had very dark hair and dark lips. They were vampiric, almost. As though full of congealed blood.

• From Three Women (2019)

  They drove to Napatree Point with the champagne and Sloane’s dog. The two women laid out towels. Their toes were painted and their legs and feet were tan. The ocean was rough yet quiet; the way a snowfall blots out the world with its blanket, the ocean will do the same with its white noise. The two women played music from a little wounded boom box. They drank the champagne and ate grapes and Sloane felt like a girl. Something about Karin made her feel not just young but childlike. Also, Karin was somewhat in charge. Perhaps because Sloane had allowed it, but in any case, it was nice, that she could rely on someone else’s personality to outweigh hers for a change. Around sunset they returned to Sloane and Richard’s home. After a day of drinking on the beach, walking into her home with this stranger felt foreign. It smelled acidic, like decaying roses. The taste on Sloane’s tongue was pink and ashy. She was burned from the sand and the sun, her skin felt at once coarse and moist, and the night looked as if it could go anywhere, though of course the path was much more knowable. It was, in fact, immutable. The two women were, at first, alone in the house. Sloane thought of sending Karin home before Richard returned. But something stopped her. The alcohol, for starters. But also the way that sometimes doing something bad can feel homeopathic. Within the hour they heard a car pull up. Richard joined them on the deck. He hadn’t brought a cake. There wasn’t one in the house. Sloane’s birthday was several days after the Fourth of July, and she owned a seasonal restaurant in a place where the Fourth of July was the most important holiday. She didn’t remember having had a birthday cake in a very long time. The three of them drank cocktails and wine. Drinking was important, Sloane knew, for this kind of event. It was almost more important than the people involved. She knew she had to be the perfect kind of inebriated. Wine was good, a soft white. And in addition to alcohol, Sloane would say there is one other component involved in how a threesome begins. It is these words. One thing led to another.

• From Three Women (2019)

  The individuals involved can rarely tell you the precise moment. That’s because it’s impossible. One would have to admit seeking something that feels unsavory, alien. A husband who desires to enter another body, to hold another breast. A wife who wants to see her husband want someone else, so that she may want him as much as she’d like to. A third person who is not frankly loved in the world, who enters a room as a cipher in a tank top. A husband who makes the first move. A wife who closes her eyes to the first move. A third person who has eaten nothing all day. Someone turns on the music. Someone pours a drink. Someone reapplies lipstick. Someone positions her body in such a way. Someone is less hurt than he should be. Someone is afraid of her carnality. Someone is worried about not being sexual enough. Someone lights a candle. Someone closes a French door. Someone’s stomach drops. It is everything to do with bodies and it is nothing at all to do with bodies. One thing led to another, and Sloane was messing around with Karin. The phrase messing around means making out, feeling up, being physical with someone with whom you are not in a relationship. The connotation is that it’s a flimsy thing, it does not have holy meaning. There is also the idea of something being sloppy, mistaken. It was a phrase, with good reason, burned into Sloane’s memory. One thing led to another and Sloane was messing around with Karin, and then Richard approached, and he would kiss Sloane’s shoulders while Karin kissed Sloane’s mouth. Sloane always found it alluring to mess around with a girl. Even more than it was alluring, it was easy. It had never been, OMG I’m gonna kiss a girl. Not even in college, her first time with Lia. For Sloane there had always been something mature about not drawing a severe line between genders and marking your predilections on either side. But this time she was married. It wasn’t about the girl, it was about her husband and another girl. She rationalized it. She said to herself, This girl came on to me. It wasn’t that Richard said, I want you to make out with this girl. It was her and me, at the beach. And it’s him and me first, and this girl is just an additive. She is something fun.

• From Three Women (2019)

  She saw him again at her sister’s wedding in the late summer before her junior year. The wedding reception was held at the Gardner Hotel and Mark came, uninvited, with some buddies. Since he wasn’t a dancer, she knew he’d come for her. He brought her outside by the arm. It was a pleasant September evening and Arlene was wearing a long dress and he kissed her inside a telephone booth. The moment the kiss ended she knew the boy she was dating was nothing, a friend. She knew this is what it was supposed to feel like. Desire. Mark and her boyfriend decided to meet in a nearby park to have it out over Arlene, but Arlene said it was only up to her, whom she would date. And she had made her decision. Arlene and Mark’s union had lasted forty years. There were a good number of problems, marijuana and alcohol and depression, but in moments when life was good and Mark was at peace he would look at her and listen to her and make her feel she was the best woman in the world. He would say this to her. Lene, you’re the best woman in the world. When Mark’s attention was on you it was the sun. And if things were not going your way, this man gave the most restoring hugs. If Arlene had a bad day at work, Mark would put his hands out and say, Come here. She would melt into them, and hell would fall away. Maggie felt her love story with Aaron wasn’t measuring up to her parents’. Nothing was evolving in their weird relationship. Aaron wouldn’t kiss her and she couldn’t tell her friends and so she felt like one-half of something stodgy. But life knows when to throw in a plot twist. It is an idle but seasoned screenwriter, drinking beers alone and cultivating its archery. That night, Aaron texts her: I think I am falling in love with you. This resuscitates her dwindling obsession and infuses it with fresh vitality. Suddenly she feels it all over again. She stops him from going any further over text and says, I want to tell you how I feel in person. They are in luck, because Marie is going out of town. Aaron doesn’t give Maggie much lead time. He tells her on a Thursday that Marie will be gone on Saturday. For two days she can’t concentrate on anything else.

• From Three Women (2019)

  They begin to kiss when she gets there, at the table by the cupboards. She’s wearing sweatpants because he likes it when she does. Sweatpants, he once told her, are “easy access.” He takes one of her hands and moves it onto his chest and says, Feel how fast my heart is beating. Then he takes her other hand and moves it onto the bulge of his dress pants. Feel how hard you make me. She’s heard that line in movies before and has always wondered why men say it. Did Aaron want her to be captivated by the heft of his penis? Or proud about the absolute Good job! on her end, that she’d inspired an army of blood vessels to fatten the flesh out to this length and stiffness? Some days they don’t do anything but talk and kiss. Like the day of parent-teacher conferences. Aaron wears a suit because he will be meeting parents all afternoon. He will speak to Maggie’s father, Mark. He tells Maggie he’d like her to stick around for the conference. At the time Maggie will think it’s because he just wants to see her as much as possible. In hindsight, she will wonder if it’s because Aaron got a rush from talking to her in front of her father, who was ignorant of the affair. At the meeting Aaron will say that Maggie is doing very well in school, that he’s aware she has not yet decided where she wants to go to college, but that good things will come, in time. During their lunchtime date Maggie doesn’t eat but Aaron has some leftover spaghetti. She makes fun of him, says it looks nasty. They kiss after he’s done eating. She says, I didn’t realize we were sharing lunch today. She means that his breath, the whole room, is thick with the smell of his leftovers. The Tupperware is stained orange with the sauce. Another time they meet in his classroom before school. He starts to kiss her, then he moves his hand down her pants. He turns her face and body away so the front of his body is pressed up against her back. Then he moves his face against the back of her neck. He lightly kisses her there, making her knees buckle with the sensation. Then he begins to finger her and to simultaneously grind himself against her backside. She casts her head back and moans. For seven minutes this goes on and she feels she might come at any moment. Then someone wiggles the knob on the door. Aaron jumps back like he’s been burned, deftly retrieving his hand. Like a man doing a parlor trick; he hands her a quiz—there is suddenly a quiz in her hand—and she sits down, breathlessly, and pretends to be taking it. Anyway, he didn’t have to be so careful. As it turned out, he’d remembered to lock the door.

• From Three Women (2019)

  He was down there for a long time until there was a knock at the door. He rose, his whole face wet and smiling like a wolf’s. She scooted up to the headboard and used two stiff pillows to cover her naked body. In the floor-length mirror by the door she saw the reflection of the food deliveryman. She caught him looking at her. She smiled and flushed and covered her face with the corner of one pillow. Aidan closed the door and set the food down on the desk. He climbed onto the bed, crawling up between her legs, but she pushed him off. She rolled him over so that he was lying down. She sucked him for a long time. He gently fingered and rubbed her while she slid her mouth and hand up and down. She stopped and climbed atop him. He hesitated a little, which made Lina think that maybe he’d wanted to have only oral sex. She figured he probably made little deals to absolve himself of some guilt. She was hurt because she always wanted to go all the way with him; she was never satisfied until they imploded into each other. She took his penis like a gearshift and ran it between her legs to lube him up and then slid down on him deeply. After a few minutes he started to moan. She’d never heard him moan that way. Oh, Lina! Lina, Lina. He looked at her and she looked back. She usually averted her eyes. She couldn’t handle the intimacy. She loved him too much to have intimate moments during sex that would dribble down the shower drain after they were done. She was also self-conscious about the way her face looked up close. She had averted her eyes when they were kids, too. But this time she fully looked at him as they fucked and she mourned all the times when she had not. All that wasted life. At one point he paused her motion, steadying her hips, and asked, Best you ever had? She nodded slowly. Yes of course. She rode him a long while and he asked if she was about to come and told her he wanted her to. The fact that he wanted her to come made her feel she would explode. I’m close, she said. Her eyes were closed and she was biting her lips. She was focusing on riding him well, on acting hot. Stop it, Lina, she said to herself. Lose yourself, Lina.

• From Three Women (2019)

  They walked around to the back of her truck and she pulled the box of toys to the edge of the trunk. Tickle Me Elmo. Talking Dora. A bright green-and-white plastic lawn mower. There is a formula, Lina believes, for when men see women they don’t want to see. It has to do with the level of a woman’s doggedness syncing with a married man’s self-loathing. Perhaps he had not paid a bill on time that month and his wife looked at him like he would never measure up to even her lowest expectations. Even though they have already had sex at the hotel, the first time at the river Lina felt she was losing her virginity all over again. From start to finish. They stood for a while between their trucks. He was quiet as always and staring ahead. After what felt like hours, she moved toward him and took his face in her hands. She shook her head and said, Gosh you’re such a handsome man. Damn it. She pulled his face to hers and kissed him. She knew that if she didn’t, he never would. He smiled a little and walked over to the driver’s side of her truck. Without looking, he leaned his big arm into the open window and turned off her dome lights. Then he came back and pushed Lina up against the back of her truck. She grabbed the box of toys in the trunk and was about to toss them to make room for their bodies. Tickle Me Elmo fell out of the box, giggling. She swept it onto the ground at their feet. She wanted to clear the whole world out of the goddamn way. Hey, Kid, calm down a minute. Don’t just go throwin’ the toys. It was the first time Aidan had spoken. He carefully placed the toys back in the box and put it into the trunk. Chastened, she climbed over to the second row of seats. He followed and sat down beside her. Then she straddled him. Is this all about sex? she asked, looking into his eyes. Aidan didn’t say a word. Because it is not for me. I only just wanna be with you. He nodded. She undid the button of his jeans and he lifted his rear up and off the seat to help her shimmy his pants down. He wore boxer briefs and his penis was hard. The top of it was coming out of the waistband of the briefs. We shouldn’t, Kid. Hearing her nickname come out of his mouth made her so happy. Then she realized he was trying to back down again. She noticed that his erection had begun to soften. She was cold because the ignition was off and she didn’t know how to keep the heat on but the lights out and she didn’t want to ask Aidan because she didn’t want to break the mood. Whatever mood was left. Kid?

• From Three Women (2019)

  She pretended not to hear and took off her pants and her underwear and pulled his briefs down around his ankles so that it looked like he was using a toilet. She knelt down before his erection and put her lips to the head. She gave it soft, flicking kisses. He got hard again quickly. She loved that it was out of his control—her rapport with his penis. He had barely touched her at all at this point, but now slowly and coolly he reached around and slipped a finger inside her. I want to eat out your pussy, he said. The word pussy made her feel strange. He positioned her so that she was lying down as much as she could on the seat. He moaned as he brought his mouth between her legs. His shirt rode up and she pulled it back down because she knew he was self-conscious about his belly. Even when Lina got lost in the moment with Aidan she still had to keep an eye out for something that might spook him. Eventually she straddled him again and reached behind her back to grab his penis. She lubricated it against the opening of her vagina then lowered herself down and began to ride him. She felt so tall, felt that her head was bursting through the roof of the Suburban and floating up among the stars. A few minutes later she felt him go soft inside her. She knew it was guilt, that he had gone back inside his head. It’s okay if you wanna stop, she said. She pushed herself up so that she was kneeling on his thighs. He shook his head and grabbed her shoulders and shoved her back down. Her legs were burning by this time. Then he flipped her around on his penis so that they never came apart. Lina had tried executing this move with her husband but he would say, Ow! And Lina would think, Ugh. He held her by the hips and lowered her up and down his shaft. He started doing it faster and faster until she knew he was about to come. She got dizzy imagining his pleasure. He began to slam her down faster still and then he came on her back. She’d been close to having an orgasm herself but the Cymbalta made it hard. She felt his semen inching down her backbone. She wanted to smear it all over her body. She grabbed his hand and said, Put your fingers inside me. Then she showed him with her hands how fast and how far in to go. He took the instruction very well and she came easily, though her own orgasm felt like an aftershock. An infinitely less important thing. He said he had to go pee. They both got out of the truck and dressed in the cold. He peed a stream into the brown trees and said, I gotta go, Kid, I’m gonna be in so much trouble.

• From The Porn Trap: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Problems Caused by Pornography (2008)

  The slide into becoming interested in risky sexual practices can begin without a strong conscious intention to get into the more extreme varieties of porn. As Len explains, it can be just a matter of following your natural curiosities about sex. He told us, “Out of curiosity and for a change of pace I’d read most anything—stories of bondage, incest, gang rape, torture, and all of those sorts of bizarre things that you don’t normally find in standard suck-and-screw porn. It’s a matter of becoming accustomed. I’ll find anything new and interesting at first. Then it becomes familiar and isn’t as exciting. If you have free chocolate cookies all day, they’re still chocolate cookies and they’re pretty good, but you start to feel that something else would be nice. So I look for some other type of sex that’s new and interesting, and on I go.” After a while, seeing one type of porn loses its effectiveness as a sexual stimulant and is replaced by a desire to explore more extreme types of porn. The porn user realizes that in order to get the same “high” off the porn, he or she has to raise the shock and shame factor of the porn. James, a college student, said, “I need things that are a little more perverse, a little more dangerous to get the good feeling I’m after. Even just thinking: This is bad or This is really bad, can pump me up. And nowadays it’s not hard to find hard-core with people slapping, choking, cutting, urinating, and even vomiting on someone. I know it’s not a good idea to watch that stuff, but I keep getting pulled in for the high.” Looking at a lot of extreme porn can fool us into thinking that degrading, dangerous, and violent kinds of sexual behaviors are more common and tolerated than they really are. Some porn users feel they will be missing out on something exciting if they don’t try acting out the behaviors that they see in porn. And because the potential problems and painful outcomes of certain sexual behaviors are not shown in porn, porn users may get a false impression of risk and conclude that some of the extreme behaviors would not be that bad to actually do in real life. Using porn as a regular sexual outlet can desensitize a person to violence. It teaches us to regard people as objects, not as human beings with feelings, needs, and essential rights. Studies show that people with histories of violence and impulse-control problems who regularly masturbate to porn demonstrate an increased potential for being sexually violent in real life.

• From The Porn Trap: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Problems Caused by Pornography (2008)

  As we discussed in chapter 1, using pornography can change your body and brain chemistry. It stimulates the pleasure centers of your brain and can trigger the release of a cascade of pleasurable hormones and chemicals—such as dopamine, endorphins, adrenaline, and oxytocin—that alter the way you feel. Some scientists have likened the changes in brain chemistry that occur when using pornography to those that occur when using cocaine. We also now know there are significant differences in the brain scans of people addicted to sex and porn compared to those who are not. There is compelling evidence that porn enters our bodies (through our eyes) and alters important biological systems just like drugs do. Due to these neurobiological and body chemistry changes, addictive use of porn can change a person’s primary reasons for using it. You don’t just use porn to feel good, you use it because on some level your body has become accustomed to using it and now needs it. Addictions to any substance or behavior can be difficult to recognize because they often develop slowly over time and on a biological level. Just as we’re not aware of our cells building and dying, we’re not aware of the biological transformations that happen each time we are involved with porn. And for those of us who are more biologically prone to developing addictions, the problem is even more severe. Unfortunately, we don’t often discover whether we have a predisposition to addiction until we are solidly under the spell of one. A good way to answer the question “Could I be addicted to porn?” is by evaluating your relationship with it. There are three key features that are present in people who engage in porn use addictively. Porn addicts: Crave porn intensely and persistently,Can’t control it and ultimately fail when they try to stop using, andContinue to use it despite being aware of significant harmful consequences.Craving—Can’t Control it—Continuing despite Consequences. Thinking about the letter “C” can help you to remember these key features of porn addiction. Being addicted to porn causes us to lose the ability to decide for ourselves whether, when, what, how, and how much of it we will consume. The substance dominates and calls the shots. Without realizing it, we can come to need it in order to feel good. As a teenager Rob developed the habit of masturbating daily to porn. He didn’t think of it as anything strange or compulsive, it was just something he liked to do and was used to doing every day.

• From The Porn Trap: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Problems Caused by Pornography (2008)

  What surprised Rob was how much he continued to crave porn even after he got married and had an active and exciting sex life with his wife. In his words: “Even though we were having sex nearly every day, I still needed my porn fix. Instead of buying magazines, I switched over to going to adult bookstores. They had these little booths with porn films, so I’d pop my quarters in there. No matter how much sex my wife and I had, I still needed the vicarious thrill and stimulation of watching porn to satisfy me.” Marie began using porn regularly after her husband died. It started out as a way to distract herself from her grief, but soon became something she couldn’t do without every night after putting her kids to sleep. “Watching Internet porn began as a natural thing but quickly turned into a compulsion. It became a craving, like a drug. It felt unnatural if I didn’t look at porn in the evening.” As part of their craving, porn users often develop their own rituals for obtaining, storing, and spending time looking at porn. Checking favorite Web sites for new pictures every day, stopping off after work to visit an adult bookstore, or getting up in the middle of the night to watch porn, can become routine behaviors that people develop and feel they need. Satisfying cravings for porn can become so important that it takes priority over meeting work, relationship, and family responsibilities, or taking good care of one’s health. One man said, “Not only did I create opportunities to use porn, I used it whenever I had the opportunity.” People who are addicted to porn often experience that they’ve lost control over their behavior with porn when they try to manage the amount of time they spend with it. For example, another man told us he became worried when he tried to go a week without using porn, but he could only make it for three or four days. Len is just recently becoming aware of how little control he has over his porn use. He told us, “Every now and then when I’m on the computer looking at porn I’ll think, I’ve gotten carried away. I’m spending too much time on this. I clear off the bookmarks and clear the addresses of the various sites from my computer. I clean it all up, all the pictures I had saved off the computer. But then shortly thereafter, maybe just a few days later I’ll think, I shouldn’t have done that. Then I go and put everything back on. I start over and download everything again from the Internet.”

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (1984)

  One of them would consist in thinking that intercourse between husband and wife had no other function for the Greeks in the classical period than the calculation which allied two families, two strategies, and two fortunes, and which had the sole objective of producing descendants. The Against Neaera aphorism, which seems to sharply differentiate the roles that ought to be played in a man’s life by the courtesan, the concubine, and the wife, has sometimes been read as a tripartition that implies exclusive functions: sexual pleasure on one side, everyday life on the other, and for the wife nothing more than the maintenance of the line of descent. But one has to consider the context in which this harsh-sounding maxim was formulated. It was part of a litigant’s attempt to invalidate the apparently legitimate marriage of one of his enemies, as well as the claim to citizenship of the children born of that marriage. And the arguments given had to do with the wife’s birth, her past as a prostitute, and her current status, which could only be that of a concubine. The object therefore was not to show that pleasure was to be sought elsewhere than with the legal wife, but that legitimate descendants could not be obtained except with the wife herself. This is why, as Lacey comments, it would be a mistake to interpret this text as offering a definition of three distinct roles; it is more in the nature of a cumulative enumeration, to be read as follows: pleasure is the only thing a courtesan can give; as for the concubine, she is capable of providing the satisfactions of everyday life besides; but only the wife can exercise a certain function that is owing to her special status: she can bear legitimate children and ensure the continuity of the family institution.11 It needs to be understood that in Athens marriage was not the only kind of union that was accepted; it actually formed a particular and privileged union, which alone could lead to matrimonial cohabitation and legitimate offspring. Further, there exists a good deal of evidence testifying to the value that was attached to the wife’s beauty, to the importance of the sexual relations that one might have with her, and to the existence of mutual love (as in the play of Eros and Anteros that unites Niceratus and his wife in Xenophon’s Symposium).12 The radical separation between marriage and the play of pleasures and passions is doubtless not an adequate formula for characterizing marital life in antiquity.