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 Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  The relation of chastity is developed, then, according to two axes. First, chastity appears as an essential prerequisite of spiritual science. No one can hope to arrive at the latter if one doesn’t start by practicing the chastity that results in purity of heart. From the beginning of the Institutes, Cassian, in explaining the meaning of monastic dress, shows that the girdle (which signifies the desire to destroy all the seeds of lust) attests to the ascetic’s ardor “for spiritual progress and the science of divine things that purity of heart gives.”41 But it’s in the fourteenth Conference, that of Abbot Nesteros, that Cassian gives this theme its full scope. Spiritual knowledge demands purity of heart and chastity in the very general sense that it is incompatible with agitation of thought, the disorderly movement of the imagination, and any concern with the things of the world: “If you would prepare in your heart a holy tabernacle of spiritual knowledge, purge yourselves from the stain of all sins, and rid yourselves of the cares of this world. For it is an impossibility for the soul which is taken up even to a small extent with worldly troubles, to gain the gift of knowledge or to become an author of spiritual interpretation, diligent in the reading of holy things.”42 But much more precisely, chastity as control of the carnal passions in the strict sense is indispensable to spiritual science. The latter, like a perfume, cannot subsist in a soiled container: “A jar once permeated by evil smells will more easily contaminate the most fragrant myrrh than receive from it some sweetness of capacity to please. Purity is corrupted more speedily than corruption is made pure […] So then if you are anxious to win the incorruptible fragrance of Scripture, begin by turning your effort to winning the cleanness of chastity from the Lord.”43 Finally, it needs to be understood that the chastity of the body is the first form of a series of “chastities” the mind must take on in order to advance toward spiritual knowledge without ever losing sight of it. One must renounce fornication of the body if one means to understand the Scriptures, but it’s also necessary to stay well away from that “fornication” constituted by pagan ceremonies, the soothsayers, the omens, and from that other fornication which is the observance of the Judaic type of law, and from that other one still, that consists of heresy, and finally from the one that makes thought stray—however little—from God, on whom it should always stay focused. And as these different fornications are excluded and the mind becomes chaste in a more and more spiritual sense, the meaning of Scripture will emerge from its mysteries and will appear with increasingly spiritual values.44 The practice of chastity and the comprehension of the Word grow in spirituality simultaneously. Cassian goes so far as to say, in the Institutes, that chastity, in its perfect form, suffices for understanding the Scripture.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  I mean, do you? Because seriously, when you talk after sex, it’s different. I think it’s why Freud had everyone lie down.” “Did Freud sleep with his patients?” “I think so.” She rolled her eyes. “Okay. Fine. Julian died—God, I don’t even know how long ago. You know, depending how close you were to someone . . . There were some people who drew you in, leaned on you, and you spent more time with them in those last months than you ever had before. And there were people where if you were outside their closest circle, they shut you out. Not in an unkind way, it’s just they didn’t need you. You’d have been an interruption, you know? And I wasn’t in Julian’s tightest circle. And anyway, in the end, he shut everyone out.” Jake looked like he didn’t follow. “Okay,” he said. “There was this competitive grieving thing that could happen. People would crowd into the hospital and stand around for days, sort of posturing . That sounds terrible, but it’s true. Not that they had bad intentions, just . . . you always want to believe you’re important in someone’s life. And sometimes, in the end, it turns out you aren’t.” Jake ran his tongue down her ear and then along her clavicle. “One more time,” he said. She didn’t like the way he looked at her, staring deep like he was trying to get their pupil dilation synced up. The point had never been for him to get more attached, especially not with everything else going on. There were sounds out in the apartment. “Shit,” she said. “If it’s just Richard he’ll go to bed soon. You can sneak out then, okay?” “Alright,” he said, and closed his eyes. “I’m not an alcoholic. That was a joke.” “How is that funny?” “I don’t know. I was drunk.” Fiona must have fallen asleep, because she was on a bus in Chicago with Richard, looking for Corinne’s house. Her hand was on fire. When she rolled over in the middle of the night, Jake, thank God, was gone. 1986Bill had decreed that everyone had the afternoon off. Yale lugged his bag on the El, and then to Briar and up the two flights. He’d been away long enough to induce that wonderful coming-home-after-a-long-trip feeling, the way you’re hit with the smells of your own building, the dimensions of your own hallway, which have somehow readjusted themselves so the place feels dreamlike, off by a few vertiginous inches in every direction. He was hungry, late for lunch. He thought he might make a grilled cheese, and he wondered if there was tomato soup in the pantry. When he opened the door, Charlie’s mother stood there in a gray dress, her feet bare. He’d thought she was coming next week. Yale dropped his bag and said “Teresa!” and went to hug her. As he did, he heard the bedroom door shut.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  ON THE WAY home from school, I copied the battlefield photograph and sent it to her with four cut-out words, loose in an envelope: WHOREALLYAREYOUI SAT ON the rag rug in my room after dinner, cutting old magazine covers into shadow puppets with the X-acto and sewing them onto bamboo skewers I’d saved from Tiny Thai. They were mythical figures, half-animal, half-human—the Monkey King, the antlered man who was sacrificed each year to fertilize the crops, wise centaur Chiron and cowheaded Isis, Medusa and the Minotaur, the Goat Man and the White Crow Woman and the Fox Mistress with her latest moneymaking scheme. Even sad Daedalus and his feathered boy. I was sewing the Minotaur’s arm to his body when there was a soft knock on the door. Musk, the smell of something stolen. Sergei leaned against the doorjamb, his muscled arms folded, in a crisp white shirt and jeans, a gold watch like a ship’s clock on his wrist. His eyes flicking around the room, taking in the clutter—clothes piled in boxes, my bags of full sketch pads and finished drawings, the flowered curtains fading to pastel. His glance took in everything, but not like an artist’s, seeing form, seeing shadow. This gaze was professional, wordlessly estimating the possibilities, how hard it would be to get what he wanted through the window and out to the truck. Nothing that he saw was worth bothering about. Threadbare carpet, old beds, Yvonne’s paper horse, a paperweight with glitter instead of snow that said Universal Studios Tour. He shook his head. “A dog should not live here,” he said. “Astrid. What you going to do?” I tied the Minotaur’s arm to the skewer, held it in front of the lamp, made it go up and down, miming his words. “A dog should not live here,” I said, imitating his heavy accent. “Children, yes. But dogs no. No dogs.” The Minotaur pointed at him. “What you got against dogs?” “Play with dolls.” He smiled. “Sometimes you are woman, sometimes little girl.” I put the Minotaur in a can with the others, a bouquet of paper demigods and monsters. “Rena’s not here. She’s out getting loaded with Natalia.” “Who say I come to see Rena?” Sergei peeled himself away from his doorjamb and came in, casually, just wandering, innocent as a shoplifter. He picked things up and put them down exactly where they had been, and he never made a sound. I couldn’t stop watching him. It was as if one of my animal-men had come to life, as if I had summoned him. How many times had I thought of just this moment, Sergei come a-calling, like a cat yowling on the back fence for you. I emitted some civetlike female stink, a distinct perfume of sexual wanting, that he had followed to find me here in the dark. Sergei picked up Yvonne’s paperweight and shook it, watched the glitter fall.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  In the Conferences, Cassian returns to this distinction and comments more extensively. He gives it the same fundamental value: continence is a refusal, a rejection (districtio); chastity, a positive force that uplifts and that is sustained by “the delectation it takes in its own purity.”27 Thus, the pagans are capable only of continence. Socrates was not chaste, though he refrained from consummating the love he felt for boys: he did violence to his “bad desire” and to the “delight of his vice,” without banishing them from his heart.28 Yet this opposition is not exempt from a certain ambiguity. Cassian describes the reign of continence, in fact, as a moment that must last for as long as the slightest traces of the carnal passions remain: “So long as there remains an attraction to voluptuousness, one is not chaste but only continent […] So long as we feel the rebellions of the flesh, let us recognize […] that we are still under the miserable scepter of continence, tired out from continual battles, whose outcome necessarily remains in doubt.”29 Compared to these stresses of continence, chastity appears to be an end state in which one would no longer have to combat “the urges of carnal concupiscence”;30 then, and only then, the soul can become “the dwelling place of the Lord,” which is never in “the battles of continence,” but in “the peace of chastity.”31 Now, Cassian emphasizes throughout his work—and it’s precisely the theme of the twenty-second Conference on chastity—the fact that the struggle against the assaults of the flesh can never be considered finished. “We also have a body, which is a poor beast of burden.”32 Not only do the attacks resume when one believes them defeated, but, as will be seen, their menace has a positive value for virtue: sometimes they are the blessing of God, who does not want us to doze off in the tranquility of the soul. So that chastity as a spiritually different state than continence constitutes an ideal point toward which one must advance indefinitely, without being sure that it is completely attainable.33 But Cassian also depicts it in relation to continence (a negative attitude of refusal) as a positive force that overlays the latter, sustains it, animates it, and transforms simple abstinence into a movement of ascension toward God: “One cannot control or banish the desire for present things, if in the place of harmful penchants, that one aspires to do away with, one doesn’t put salutary ones […] We want to rid our heart of the lusts of the flesh: for all its incontinence, let us hand the place over to spiritual joys.”34

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  An interruption first of natural desire. Basil explains the attraction of the sexes by a general principle that holds in the same way among human beings and among the animals. In order to populate the earth, God made use of “prototypical germs” to which he gave the possibility of reproducing themselves by separating a “segment” from the body of the males; this segment constitutes the female with which the masculine individual tries to reunite. To this tendency toward reunification, Basil gives two forms in turn: mutual attraction, which seems to place male and female in a symmetrical position (ontologically, these are two parts of the same individual); and the male’s drive toward the female, which, through a “physiological” dissymmetry, places the principle of attraction on one side, and the force of movement on the other. The female is like the magnet; the male like the metal. The woman is passive, since it’s toward her that the male directs itself; but she is also a principle of movement, since she is the site of the pleasure that attracts—which ensures moreover that the greater strength on the masculine side is softened and mitigated by the desire to protect. In any case, in this natural dynamic (to describe it, Basil makes only a very distant allusion to the Scripture, the scheme of reference is borrowed from natural history), one sees that the feminine part is in a privileged “strategic” position. Locus of attraction, but herself immobile, the woman can interrupt this movement that is inscribed in nature from the beginning. Such is the role of the virgin: to be the point of rupture in this general process of attraction.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  It is to you, Tania, that I am singing. I wish that I could sing better, more melodiously, but then perhaps you would never have consented to listen to me. You have heard the others sing and they have left you cold. They sang too beautifully, or not beautifully enough. It is the twenty-somethingth of October. I no longer keep track of the date. Would you say—my dream of the 14th November last? There are intervals, but they are between dreams, and there is no consciousness of them left. The world around me is dissolving, leaving here and there spots of time. The world is a cancer eating itself away. … I am thinking that when the great silence descends upon all and everywhere music will at last triumph. When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written. You, Tania, are my chaos. It is why I sing. It is not even I, it is the world dying, shedding the skin of time. I am still alive, kicking in your womb, a reality to write upon. Dozing off. The physiology of love. The whale with his six-foot penis, in repose. The bat—penis libre . Animals with a bone in the penis. Hence, a bone on . … “Happily,” says Gourmont, “the bony structure is lost in man.” Happily? Yes, happily. Think of the human race walking around with a bone on. The kangaroo has a double penis—one for weekdays and one for holidays. Dozing. A letter from a female asking if I have found a title for my book. Title? To be sure: “Lovely Lesbians.” Your anecdotal life! A phrase of M. Borowski’s. It is on Wednesdays that I have lunch with Borowski. His wife, who is a dried-up cow, officiates. She is studying English now—her favorite word is “filthy.” You can see immediately what a pain in the ass the Borowskis are. But wait. … Borowski wears corduroy suits and plays the accordion. An invincible combination, especially when you consider that he is not a bad artist. He puts on that he is a Pole, but he is not, of course. He is a Jew, Borowski, and his father was a philatelist. In fact, almost all Montparnasse is Jewish, or half-Jewish, which is worse. There’s Carl and Paula, and Cronstadt and Boris, and Tania and Sylvester, and Moldorf and Lucille. All except Fillmore. Henry Jordan Oswald turned out to be a Jew also. Louis Nichols is a Jew. Even Van Norden and Chérie are Jewish. Frances Blake is a Jew, or a Jewess. Titus is a Jew. The Jews then are snowing me under. I am writing this for my friend Carl whose father is a Jew. All this is important to understand. Of them all the loveliest Jew is Tania, and for her sake I too would become a Jew. Why not? I already speak like a Jew.

• From Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)

  By the time I met this girl, I’d been edging my way toward sex work for a while. It’s hard for me to remember the details of how and why, now, not because it was so long ago, but because once you have done something that comes to define a large part of your identity, it’s difficult to recall exactly what you thought about that thing before doing it. I know that on a practical level, I understood it as the best way to make a lot of money in a short amount of time, and I knew I needed to find a solution to my near-categorical hatred of work. I allowed myself to think of it initially as an art project, probably to rationalize a choice I was told was risky and to protect myself from the stigma that would come from making that choice. Making art can justify a recklessness that making money doesn’t. And it combined two things I spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about—sex and capitalism. Naively, I thought I might dip my toe into the blurred lines of the market by selling a dual performance with my new friend. Something wherein we wouldn’t actually have to fuck clients, but could sell an allure, a way that they could watch us. To her credit, she didn’t see how this would benefit her financially any more than the situation she had already created: dating men who were likable enough, who had more money than they knew what to do with and less access to women than they knew how to deal with, and who would gladly pay for a lifestyle that could support her making art. She was right—it wouldn’t have—and we never worked together. As consolation, I suppose, for rejecting my offer, she gave me a book called The Art of Seduction. I only ever used it to prop open my broken window. It was stacked on top of a classic client-to-his-creative-hooker gift: Patti Smith’s Just Kids. The books rotted on my windowsill for years. Nonetheless intrigued, I followed her example and joined SeekingArrangement—the inevitable first step of the naive, collegiate, full-service sex worker—filling in the career box with “artist.” Still unsure about selling sex, I decided I was just in it for the experience. I met a married man for afternoon drinks who called himself an author and explicitly stated in his profile that he wasn’t looking for a pro. I wore a new white dress I still have, though it fits me differently now. After two Aperol spritzes, we walked a block together and he took my hand and asked if he could kiss me. I looked at my hand in his, and I felt neither attraction to him nor curiosity about him, the two things that would normally lead me to kiss someone.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  The “excessive womanliness” of Dolly Parton captured in a stand-up poster of her in a Nashville music store. This photograph appeared in Esquire in 1977. Esquire In this way only, she shared a persona with the Tennessean Dolly Parton. The country singer known for her “voluptuously overflowing body,” garish outfits, big blonde wig—what one scholar has called “excessive womanliness.” Dolly’s grandfather was a Pentecostal preacher. Like Tammy Faye, the singer liked to buy her clothes at the cheaper stores. Her image, as Parton confessed in her autobiography, expressed the desire of poor white trash girls to see themselves as magazine models. She explained, “They didn’t look at all like they had to work in the fields. They didn’t look like they had to take a spit bath in a dishpan. They didn’t look as if men and boys could just put their hands on them any time they felt like it, and with any degree of roughness they chose.” Poverty, for a female, went beyond the wretchedness of having no money. 42 Here lies a clue to the real appeal Tammy Faye had among her fans, who vicariously enjoyed the exhibitionism and excess. Parton’s style could be seen as a burlesque—a hooker on the outside and a sweet country girl on the inside; similarly, Tammy Faye’s drag queen look was embraced by the gay community. She was one of very few conservative evangelicals to show sympathy for gay men who were dying of AIDS. She also became for true believers a real-life Christian Cinderella story; one PTL partner made a handcrafted doll of her (marketed for adults, not children) that sold for $675. The Tammy Barbie was a fairy-tale princess with a large heart, adorned, as well, with exaggerated eyelashes. 43

• 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 The Ice Storm (1994)

  Casey had decorated their master bath in a style according to their age and means. Lavender shell soaps—they were everywhere, no home without them—occupied a china soap dish. Floral wallpaper, also flecked with lavender, adorned the walls. The soap and the wallpaper and the tissue paper and the hand towels matched. The medicine cabinet yielded precisely the kind of paydirt he had been hoping for. Besides some Preparation H and some perfumed douches, there were several prescriptions: phenobarbital, Valium, Seconal, and an old one, paregoric. The Seconals interested him particularly. Before he could effect the next stage of his plan, however, he unzippered his khakis and took himself in hand. An inevitable part of marijuana intoxication. When Paul felt irritable and forlorn, he noticed he was also especially prone to jerk that thing. He had elaborated a number of complicated masturbation scenarios. He always liked to begin, for example, when the second hand of his watch was precisely at twelve. (There was a small wind-up clock on the sink.) He liked to finish before the second hand made it around twice. He also liked to whack off to pictures of girls he found by randomly flipping through his St. Pete’s yearbook. Once he had arrived at Libbets’s picture through this procedure, and though these yearbook episodes were usually memorable, he found on this occasion that he wilted in his hand. He just couldn’t bring himself to do it with a woman so adorable. He just couldn’t bring himself to that point. He had tried a variety of lubricants. Skin lotions, lip balms, even Stan Sinclair’s jar of QT tanning lotion. This failure turned out to be good luck. It proved that Libbets was appropriate for his worship. So appropriate that he got hard, this time, this day. Shafts of light coursed through his penis. He could feel light in his scrotum, in every millimeter of that downy chicken skin. His ecstasy was religious. This orgasm would be compensation for Paul Hood’s troubles here on earth. Yes, the best orgasms were characterized not by joy—he couldn’t remember a joyful one anyway—but by earthly loss and the desire to fortify himself against it. With this in mind, he was about to tearfully leak a couple of teaspoons of disaffection in the sink. But a knock at the door interrupted him. —Champ, Davenport called from the other side of the door. What the hell is going on in there? We are bored and desire your company. Come on out. Desist from choking that toad, champ. Desist. Paul froze. Did Davenport really— —Just gotta spill in the sink here first, Francis. He giggled wretchedly at his floppy divining rod.—Then I’ll bring out the heavy chemistry. —Okay, but don’t be long about it. If you’re gonna take your pleasures in there we want to know about it. We want to participate. Paul caught his breath. Ran water through his hair. Took a deep breath. Back in the library. Star Trek with American Beauty soundtrack.

• From The Power of Myth (1988)

  by Titian (now in the Prado), conceived when he was ninety-four years old. The tree is, of course, the mythological world axis, at the point where time and eternity, movement and rest, are at one, and around which all things revolve. It is here represented only in its temporal aspect, as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, profit and loss, desire and fear. At the right is Eve, who sees the tempter in the form of a child, offering the apple, and she is moved by desire. Adam, however, from the opposite point of view, sees the serpent-legs of the ambiguous tempter and is touched with fear. Desire and fear: these are the two emotions by which all life in the world is governed. Desire is the bait, death is the hook. Adam and Eve were moved; the Buddha was not. Eve and Adam brought forth life and were cursed of God; the Buddha taught release from life’s fear. MOYERS: And yet with the child—with life—come danger, fear, suffering? CAMPBELL: Here I am now, in my eighties, and I’m writing a work that is to be of several volumes. I want very much to live until I finish this work. I want that child. So that puts me in fear of death. If I had no desire to complete that book, I wouldn’t mind dying. Now, both the Buddha and Christ found salvation beyond death, and returned from the wilderness to choose and instruct disciples, who then brought their message to the world. The messages of the great teachers—Moses, the Buddha, Christ, Mohammed—differ greatly. But their visionary journeys are much the same. At the time of his election, Mohammed was an illiterate camel-caravan master. But every day he would leave his home in Mecca and go out to a mountain cave to meditate. One day a voice called to him, “Write!” and he listened, and we have the Koran. It’s an old, old story. MOYERS: In each case receivers of the boon have done some rather grotesque things with their interpretation of the hero’s message. CAMPBELL: There are some teachers who decide they won’t teach at all because of what society will do with what they’ve found. MOYERS: What if the hero returns from his ordeal, and the world doesn’t want what he brings back? CAMPBELL: That, of course, is a normal experience. It isn’t always so much that the world doesn’t want the gift, but that it doesn’t know how to receive it and how to institutionalize it— MOYERS: —how to keep it, how to renew it. CAMPBELL: Yes, how to help keep it going. MOYERS: I’ve always liked that image of life being breathed back into the dry bones, back into the ruins and the relics. CAMPBELL: There is a kind of secondary hero to revitalize the tradition. This hero reinterprets the tradition and makes it valid as a living experience today instead of a lot of outdated clichés.

• From The Whole Lesbian Sex Book: A Passionate Guide for All of Us (2004)

  What sexual qualities do you look for in a partner? By sexual qualities, I don’t mean a 5-inch tongue, fingers as busy as a vibrator, or an exquisite strap-on technique. I’m talking about the qualities of self we bring to our sexual couplings. You may say that you want a partner who knows without being told what you need sexually. You’ve no doubt heard by now that this is a romantic myth. Sure, it happens, but I wouldn’t count on it. Eros, if it is to survive the ravages of time, familiarity, and routine, requires a special kind of nurturing and a unique set of skills. JACK MORIN Putting aside the desire for a mind-reader or a magician, and your own personal likes and dislikes, what makes someone a great sex partner? Here are some qualities that can make a difference, regardless of your sexual proclivities or situation. (This is not a complete list, nor does it address all the other aspects of relationship.) Some of these are qualities you can develop in yourself as well as look for in others: • Erotic attraction. Heat. Someone for whom you feel powerful sexual desire. • Sexual compatibility. Your favored sexual activities needn’t match up like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, but it helps to be playing the same game. • Willingness to try new things—that’s what makes it possible for you to grow sexually, both individually and together. • Openness to discussion about what you like, don’t like, what you need, how you feel, your sexual histories, STDs, safer sex—even if the conversation is awkward or uncomfortable. These are the courageous conversations that make possible new erotic adventures, experiences that can’t possibly happen if you never speak up. Good communication deepens sexual relationship. • Respect both for herself and for you. That’s limits and desires—especially respect for those she does not share. This also includes respecting your physical and emotional health concerns. • Sexual honesty. This is required for your emotional safety. It’s also the bottom line for couples who forgo safer sex practices, instead choosing to be monogamous or fluid-bonded. • Ability to listen to not just the words, but the intention. Listening is more than just waiting your turn to speak. • Embodiment. You do not have to be a goddess of sensuality or a practitioner of Tantra to be in touch with bodily sensations. Regardless of your level of sexual experience, your disabilities and physical limitations, and even a history of dissociation, you can learn how to live in your body as a sensate being. Sex with her is so great because she embodies a wide range of genders and sexual roles—boy, fag, straight girl, butch dyke, high femme, daddy… How would you describe your ideal partner? Here are some examples to get you started: Someone who really touches my skin and listens to my body. The skin is the biggest sexual organ of them all.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Mike had transformed himself entirely into the unforgiving executive of her dreams. The guy who would look after drug and alcohol procurement. She could smell it on his breath, and his tongue had a taste it never had, a medicinal taste. Her needs were going to be met. She grabbed the back of his ass. It was loose and boyish. Just bones and jeans. Nothing more. He wrestled with her as though she were a sailor’s knot he had never learned. —C’mon, he said. —You mean the tapes, Wendy said. You mean the tapes you wanted me to look after. You want me to fast-forward— Mike grunted. —C’mon— —I’m afraid there’s been a problem. There’s a problem in processing— —Wendy, Mike said, you gotta take off your pants. —No way, not until I’m fifteen. —It’s not ... you can’t do it like this. You have to take off your pants. —No way. He caught her by the wrists again. He let go and got up on his knees. He began to fumble with his belt buckle. And then with the zipper. —Okay, she said. Okay. I’ll touch it, but that’s as far as it goes. Mike shoved his jeans down around his knees and lay down on her again. Goosebumps. His briefs were tangled in his pants. They reminded her of nothing so much as a diaper. Her turtleneck was still bunched up around her breasts, and he set his penis on the unnavigated terrain there, on her belly. It felt like a salamander to her. It felt like a salamander scampering across her. Then the door at the top of the stairs opened. The light when the door opened! That splendid bad news! Wendy never knew that a door, so imperceptibly ajar, could promise so much. It was like the climax of a fabulous chorale. The thrashing of Mike’s salamander recaged, the unknotting and refastening of shirts and pants. Instantaneous. No soldiers anywhere were ever quicker to arms. The two of them were like some undercranked silent movie, like Keystone Cops at a laundry line. She knew, somehow, that it was her dad who descended those stairs. Before she even heard his tiresome, methodical steps she knew it was him—the incongruity of him didn’t strike her until a long time after. By the time she could see his face she and Mike had been through all the unspoken strategies and cover-ups—they could presume he didn’t know what was going on, they could lie about it, they could tell the truth and hope for the best. Mike found a fourth option: he seized another TV Guide—Gene Rayburn on the cover—and studied it furiously. —When Worlds Collide, he muttered. —Huh? —4:30 movie. Her dad had reached the bottom of the stairs with the sort of exaggerated drama that marked all his paternal moments.

• From The Whole Lesbian Sex Book: A Passionate Guide for All of Us (2004)

  • Sometimes we are playful, sometimes romantic, sometimes wild and hot. • At least once a month, we share some form of erotic entertainment—an evening with a porn DVD, a night at a drag king show, a trip to the toy store, a photo shoot with our new digital camera. • At least once every three months, we explore something that one of us has never done before (or even that neither of us has done before). • At least once every six months, we go away together for a long weekend—no cell phone, no laptop. • We tell each other what we need to get off. • We tell each other if we feel unsatisfied, jealous, too vulnerable, or freaked out. • We give each other lots of compliments.2 This list is certainly specific. Is it possible to achieve? For instance, are both of you home often enough to meet up in bed three times per week? Most important, are the items on the list measurable? Is it possible to say, “Yes, we are meeting our expectations”? Or “Well, we’re doing OK in some areas, but not in others”? Or even “I haven’t even thought about sex in weeks”? Back to the drawing board…. What would you put on your list? One woman said that she couldn’t imagine being with a partner who didn’t like oral sex—without receiving cunnilingus on a regular basis, she simply would not feel satisfied. Another said she needed to get fucked, on her back, heels in the air, three times per week, at a minimum. And a third said that she didn’t care so much about frequency or what particular sexual activities she and her partner engaged in. What matters to her is that her lover is her equal in adventurousness and curiosity, willing and able to meet her wherever her explorations might go. Do you want a partner who is romantic? Daring? Who’ll try anything once? (Who has tried everything once?) A partner who knows more about sex than you do? Do you want to mentor a novice? Do you feel desired and protected by a partner who never leaves your side—or does such possessiveness repel you? What about variety? One woman said she couldn’t stand the predictability of reciprocal sex in her previous lesbian relationships: You do me, then I’ll do you, we both do each other, back and forth, weekend after weekend. Is S/M essential to your sex life? “It doesn’t have to be all the time, but I couldn’t be in a relationship if I knew there was no possibility of S/M play. I’ve done that before and I won’t do it again.” Do you need a partner who is a switch? “I need to bottom occasionally. Otherwise I start to feel resentful.” Or, “I’m a top, and I don’t want my partner to expect that I’d like to be on the receiving end.”

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Watergate was heating up. Saturday Night Massacre. Wendy had started watching Watergate more closely than even Dark Shadows or The 4:30 Movie. She liked to see Nixon sweating under the cameras; she liked the relentless glare of network news. But Mike came back eventually, like he was coming up Valley Road, now, on his Fuji bicycle. Finally, she had led him from his chewing-gum counting house and down to the little graveyard on Silvermine Road, where lost souls from the nineteenth century slept fitfully—Sereno Ogden, Capt. Ebenezer Benedict, and S. Y. St. John—where none came to mourn, where kids practiced their French inhaling. When the dizziness from their own pack of Larks was too much, Wendy lay across his chest. And he held her there. She could see his erection in the tan corduroys, straining like the kid in math who always had the answer. And they undressed there in the graveyard, their clothes piled neatly on some family mausoleum, and then they stopped just short, each with the other’s smell on his or her hands, each like an overwound watch. They just stopped. Who knew why? So the graveyard, for Wendy and Mike, inaugurated the tradition of dry humping. —Where have you been? she called across the gloomy landscaped expanses of Silver Meadow. —Something with my mom, Mike said, hauling his bike alongside him. She was getting out of the house in a hurry and I was in the driveway trying to get the chain back on the bike, and then, because of the rain, I went back in the garage— Mike pointed at a spot on her chest, right in the center of her poncho, and she looked down. He chucked her under the chin with his index finger. HA! HA! HA! HA! He always did that. —Freezing my ass off out here, she said. —Don’t bum out, Charles. The light was failing. The precipitation had turned to snow. Or something close to it, fierce nuggets of precipitation. Precipitation like an insult. But the anticipation of licentiousness thrilled Wendy, worked that tantric magic on her. Winter didn’t trouble her. She could have waded miles in the slush and ice, like a superhero. The basement of the Williams house was unused and lonely. She had seen, in the frugal architecture of local churches—Congregational and Episcopalian and Presbyterian; her mom could never make up her mind about denomination— those small altars where just prior to communion the minister arrayed himself in his professional garment, and where the sacred vessels moldered. Sacristy? This was how she thought of the Williamses’ basement, as she straddled the seat of Mikey’s bike (he pedaled standing up), and held fast onto his waist. It was an uphill ride and they left her own house behind—on the far edge of Silver Meadow—that ramshackle place of dark brown, full of drafts and ancient hinges, the former home of Mark Staples, Republican assemblyman and Episcopal minister of New Canaan from 1871 to 1879.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  She was twenty-nine. When I told her I was thirty-eight, it felt like a dare. Her last girlfriend, she smiled, was thirty-nine. We fiddled with the straws in our drinks, stayed for two hours, walked around the corner for Malaysian food. She’d come out a few years ago, she said; like me, she’d felt straight before that. Then a year ago she came out again, this time as non-binary, gender-nonconforming. I liked how easily she said it. When she turned to speak to the server, I gawped at her: the line of her jaw, angular and delicate, and the confident slash of her brow. At each corner of her mouth a soft crease ran perpendicular to her lips, and it gave a tiny fullness to the flesh there. I wanted to suck on it. We closed down the restaurant and walked out to my car. The rain had let up, and she handed me the paper bag of leftovers. The street was busy, cars sluicing us with rainwater as they sped by. Can I walk you to your car? I asked, depositing the leftovers on the seat. She pointed us up a side street and we went, shoulders knocking through our coats. I couldn’t look at her. When we got to her car it was raining again. There was a slope to the sidewalk, and I was below her, which was perfect, because now we were the same height. I asked if I could kiss her. We both started to giggle, shy now, and she put her lips on mine. I opened my mouth to her, searched out her narrow hips under my hands. I could feel her start to smile as I kissed her, and I pulled her closer, flicked my tongue along the inside of her cheek. I liked the taste of her mouth, like fried rice and clean water. The rain was coming down steadily, ice-cold on the back of my neck, and the nylon of our raincoats scritched-scritched. Can I see you again? she asked, and I said, Please. I pressed my pelvis against her. She whispered into my teeth, threw her head back, and laughed, did a giddy soft-shoe. I wanted her to be more aloof, hot and distant—a gun for hire, for sex. I wished she liked me less. When we were soaked, she offered to drive me back to my car. We clambered into hers, and the windshield wipers squeaked to life. Heat blasted from the dash, and I rubbed my hands in front of the vent. When she pulled up behind my car, I found I didn’t want to get out. I looked at her, and she turned in her seat, and like horses we nuzzled, touched our faces cheek to cheek.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  Different towns, different menThroughout the first few years of my adult life, my sexual experiences were intimately linked with the need to escape. That need even instigated them. It was when I ran away from home for the first time that I lost my virginity. I had argued with my parents yet again. Claude, who I did not yet know, had rung at the door of our apartment to let me know that a friend I was meant to be meeting had been delayed. He asked me to to go out with him. In the event, his Renault 4 took us all the way to Dieppe. We set up the tent on the edge of the beach. Some time later I fell in love with a student from Berlin. We did not make love together (he was a cautious young man, and I had not made any demands), but the long sturdy frame of his body lying next to mine and his big white hands sent me into ecstasies. I wanted to go and live in West Berlin. The wide Kudam leading all the way up to the gleaming blue cathedral, and the parks of that great city – even though it was divided at the time – fuelled my dreams. And then the student wrote and told me that it would not be sensible for us to be committed when we were so young. Another excuse to run away, again with Claude (whom I still saw) and his Renault 4. Destination Berlin, to talk with the boy who wanted to break up with me. Attempt to cross the border between East and West Germany which failed because I did not have the necessary papers. So the student came as far as the frontier to talk it through, and my first romance came to an end in a cafeteria in a huge car park in the middle of a forest, amidst queues of people and queues of cars waiting to pass the wooden sentry boxes.

• From Wild (2012)

  He shook his head. “I don’t have a condom,” I said, which seemed the most ridiculous thing ever, since in fact I had carried a condom over scorching deserts and icy slopes and across forests, mountains, and rivers, and through the most agonizing, tedious, and exhilarating days only to arrive here, in a heated luxury tent with a double bed and battery-operated candle lights, staring into the eyes of a hot, sweet, self-absorbed, brown-eyed, Michelle Shocked–loving man without that condom just because I had two palm-sized patches of mortifyingly rough skin on my hips and I’d vowed so fiercely not to take my pants off that I’d purposely left it behind in my first aid kit in my backpack in the town that was located in God-knows-what direction instead of doing the reasonable, rational, realistic thing and putting it in my little faux purse that smelled like white gasoline. “It’s okay,” he whispered, taking both of my hands into his. “We can just hang out. There are a lot of things we can do, actually.” And so we recommenced kissing. And kissing and kissing and kissing, his hands running everywhere over my clothes, my hands running everywhere over his. “Do you want to take your shirt off?” he whispered after a while, pulling away from me, and I laughed because I did want to take my shirt off, so then I took it off and he stood there looking at me in the black lace bra I’d packed months before because I thought when I got to Ashland I might want to wear it and I laughed again, remembering that. “What’s so funny?” he asked. “Just … do you like my bra?” I waved my hands in a flourish, as if to model it. “It traveled a long way.” “I’m glad it found its way here,” he said, and reached over and touched his finger very delicately to the edge of one of its straps, near my collarbone, but instead of pushing it down and off my shoulder as I thought he would, he ran his finger slowly along the upper edge of my bra in front and then traced it all the way down around the bottom. I watched his face while he did this. It seemed more intimate than kissing him had. By the time he’d finished outlining the whole thing, he’d barely touched me and yet I was so wet I could hardly stand up.

• From Three Women (2019)

  He looks finer than he usually does in class and is wearing more cologne than usual. He flashes her a fantastic smile, then asks a passing employee where to find Freakonomics. She follows behind them. She knows she has to be a child and a woman all at once and it takes all her energy to satisfy the requirements of each role. She’s already nervous about the end of the excursion. The book will be procured, and they’ll be out the door and he will be left with a boring taste in his mouth and never think to engage again. He finds the book and reads the back of it, which is enviable behavior. That he can keep other information in his brain beyond the Ahhhh of lovecrush means he is already and forever the alpha of their arrangement. No matter how much her small hands inveigle him, he has brain space for reading books and raising children and interacting with employees in big box stores. That, she decides, is power. When he gets in line to pay for the book Maggie stands nearby, like a daughter. There are all these point-of-purchase baits. Chocolates and magazines and book lights and mini books. She wants to talk about every single thing with him. She wants to look only at things that he looks at. The things that he doesn’t see don’t exist. When the card is swiped she feels like her heart has been fed into a meat slicer. She hasn’t been fun enough! She hasn’t been smart enough! She has been quiet and fawnlike, following him through the aisles in not even her best outfit. He will never want to do this again! He carries his book in a bag and she follows behind him. In the heated vacuum of the foyer he asks if she wants to go for a drive. Lovecrush hisses in her veins. She would forgo winning the lottery or becoming a celebrity to keep mainlining it. They walk to his car. It’s a dark blue crossover. Actually it’s his wife’s car. He doesn’t open the door for her. She isn’t used to having doors opened for her anyhow. Mateo did it, but maybe this is why Knodel makes her heart thump more—because he doesn’t open the door, because there is a fraction of asshole to him, because he is withholding and less capacious. He starts to drive. She notes that he’s a good driver. She feels there’s nothing about him that isn’t excellent. She inhales the scent in the car and is thankful she is not wearing perfume. She quit wearing it, the pink Lucky bottle, just this year. The scent began to seem childish. She doesn’t want to leave anything behind that might tip off his wife and make him afraid.

• From Wild (2012)

  And so it went, for the next couple of hours, as I hung out in front of the co-op. I was starved. I didn’t feel like myself anymore. I felt only like a bucket of desire, a hungry, wilted thing. One person gave me a vegan muffin, another a quinoa salad that had grapes in it. Several approached to admire my horse tattoo or inquire about my backpack. Around four, Stacy came along and I told her my predicament; she offered to loan me money until my box arrived. “Let me try at the post office again,” I said, loath to take her up on her offer, grateful as I was for it. I returned to the post office and stood in line, disappointed to see that the same woman who’d told me my box wasn’t there was still working the counter. When I approached her, I asked for my box as if I hadn’t been there only a few hours before. She went into a back room and returned holding it, pushing it across the counter to me without apology. “So it was here all along,” I said, but she didn’t care, replying that she simply must not have seen it before. I was too ecstatic to be angry as I walked with Stacy to the hostel, holding my box. I checked in and followed Stacy up the stairs and through the main women’s dorm room to a small, private alcove that sat under the eaves of the building. Inside, there were three single beds. Stacy had one, her friend Dee had another, and they’d saved the third for me. Stacy introduced me to Dee and we talked while I opened my box. There were my clean old jeans, my new bra and underwear, and more money than I’d had since I started my trip. I went to the shower room and stood under the hot water scrubbing myself. I hadn’t showered for two weeks, during which the temperatures had ranged from the thirties to the low hundreds. I could feel the water washing the layers of sweat away, as if they were an actual layer of skin. When I was done, I gazed at myself naked in the mirror, my body leaner than the last time I’d looked, my hair lighter than it had been since I was a little girl. I put on the new black bra, underwear, and T-shirt and my faded Levi’s, which were loose on me now, though I hadn’t quite been able to fit into them three months before, and returned to the alcove and put on my boots. They were no longer new—dirty and hot, heavy and painful—but they were the only shoes I had.