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.

Page 339 of 344 · 20 per page

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  When Elio, the narrator of André Aciman’s novel Call Me by Your Name, finds himself fantasizing about a man, a visiting grad student named Oliver, Elio longs for a night with him—a single night, even just an hour—to figure out if the attraction is real. “What I didn’t realize,” Elio explains, “was that wanting to test desire is nothing more than a ruse to get what we want without admitting that we want it.”18 [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] An old friend emailed in early April and wanted to catch up. Could I do a Saturday night? My friend was a lesbian, though we’d never talked much about it before. Now we had something new in common: I could tell her about jury duty, about the past several months, about our open marriage. Maybe she could fix me up. We decided to meet at Dino’s, which had been open for a month—admittedly an odd choice given the situation, but this friend knew Brandon, and she wanted to see it. Brandon would be working there that night too. So I would meet up with my lesbian friend at my husband’s restaurant, with my husband across the room, and she and I would hash out my desire to sleep with women. I asked my mother to babysit, and she offered to have June sleep over. I put on jeans and a white sweat shirt, the neckline of which I’d trimmed Flashdance-style, so it tipped off one shoulder. I wore a bra with hot pink straps. At Dino’s our friend hugged Brandon, and he gave her a tour. The bar was crowded, everything glowing neon red. I was sweating, that panicked sweat with its own peculiar smell. I had to get outside. I squeezed Brandon’s shoulder, pulled him in for a hug, told him I’d be back in a couple of hours, and steered my friend out onto the sidewalk. We ordered Negronis at a bar down the block. She told me about her recent breakup. I told her about Nora. I sat next to her and wondered if we looked like we were on a date. I hadn’t imagined it that way, but could it be? Did she feel it too? Could it be this easy? I swiveled a little to face her, let my elbow bump into hers. Was there anyone I knew in this bar? Anyone who knew me, who knew Brandon, who knew me as June’s mother? What would happen to us, all of us, if I kissed my friend? I leaned toward her, and she laughed. Then her face was right there in front of me, and I went in, catching her top lip between my two. She was so soft, my head went blank, as though a curtain dropped. Even when Brandon was freshly shaved, he wasn’t soft like this. She opened her mouth and took my bottom lip, sucked it between her teeth. I should go, she said against my cheek. I’ve got an early meeting tomorrow.

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

  • Grab a pair of nipple clamps to stimulate her breasts, leaving your hands free for other things. • Rub your vulva over her breasts; or rub your nipple on her clit after orgasm. • Turn a blow job into breast play. “Tit fucking” needn’t be reserved for heterosexual porn. After she’s sucked your strapped-on cock, slip your saliva-lubed cock between her breasts and thrust inside her cleavage. You can slide your cock back and forth between her breasts as she sucks. Nipple PiercingsMy piercings make my nipples one of my main sources of sexual pleasure. I can come from just nipple play. Nipple piercings can make breast play even more deliciously erotic. Not only are the rings and barbells attractive and fun to play with, many women even find that their nipples become extra sensitive after they get piercings. Nipple piercings can take several months to heal. New piercings can be quite raw. They’re also vulnerable to infection. So, if you’re playing with someone who has a piercing, make sure you ask how recently she got it. Ask your partner how her piercing affects nipple sensation, too—some women lose nipple sensitivity as a result of scar tissue forming at the point of entry. I like when she wakes me up in the morning by suckling my nipple. My lover can make me orgasm just from stimulating my breasts. Toys for Breast PlayYou may not ordinarily think of your clothes as sex toys, but lingerie and fetish wear are popular erotic playthings—especially for the exhibitionist. Delicate structures of lace that emphasize the shape of the breast, corsets that enhance cleavage, brassieres with holes where nipples can peek through, leather harnesses, and chain-mail halters—all are designed to draw the eye to your breasts. Bondage enthusiasts can create elaborate corsets of rope as beautiful and alluring as any garment you can find. Breast bondage is especially fun with large-breasted women. Wrap thick, soft rope around each breast and then in a figure eight linking the breasts. All bondage safety precautions apply: Do not use thin wire or string that can cut, do not wrap rope tightly enough to cut off circulation, and do make sure you have safety scissors handy in case of emergency. For sensual breast play, you can experiment with feather boas, fur mitts, battery-operated vibrators, light slappers, and soft whips. You can play with suction toys, such as tit pumps and snakebite kits. You can create a range of sensations by altering skin temperature through the use of ice cubes, mentholated cough drops, Tiger Balm, and hot wax. You can produce ecstatic (or excruciating) sensations with fingernails, feathers, slip-on talons, and even the neuro wheel your chiropractor uses to test your reflexes.

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

  Until the idea of this book came to me I had never really thought about my sexuality very much. I did, however, realise that I had had multiple partners early on which is unusual, especially for girls, or it certainly was in the milieu in which I was brought up. I lost my virginity when I was eighteen – which is not especially early – but I had group sex for the first time in the weeks immediately after my deflowering. On that occasion I was obviously not the one who took the initiative in the situation, but I was the one who precipitated it – something I still cannot explain to myself. I have always thought that circumstances just happened to mean that I met men who liked to make love in groups or liked to watch their partners making love with other men, and the only reaction I had (being naturally open to new experiences and seeing no moral obstacle) was to adapt willingly to their ways. But I have never drawn any theory from this, and I have therefore never been militant about it. There were five of us, three boys and two girls, and we were finishing our lunch in a garden on a hill above Lyon. I had come to see a young man I’d met recently while staying in London, and I had taken advantage of the fact that a friend’s boyfriend, André (who was from Lyon himself), was driving down from Paris. On the way, when I asked if we could stop so that I could have a quick pee, André came and watched me and stroked me as I squatted. It was not an unpleasant situation but it did make me feel slightly ashamed, and it was perhaps at that precise moment that I learned to side-step my embarrassment by burying my head between his legs and taking his cock in my mouth. When we reached Lyon, I stayed with André and we went to stay with some friends of his, a boy called Ringo who lived with an older woman whose house it was. The latter was away, and the boys had made the most of this and organised a little party. Another boy came and brought a girl, a tall, lanky tomboy with very short, coarse hair.

• From The Principle of Desire (2013)

  She kissed him. Grabbed his shirt, pulled him in and kissed him like it was the end of the world, just because she wanted to know how he tasted—and because she’d already done so many insane things that night that kissing a stranger on a dangerous street seemed like a sane choice in comparison. He was startled. There was a clash of teeth, an accidentally nipped lip, before they lined up properly. It had been years since Beth kissed anyone but Aaron, who stood a full head taller than she did even when she wore heels. With Ed she was face to face, a whole new perspective. She’d expected awkwardness, uncertainty with tongue and hand placement, breathing conflicts to work out. But after that first bit of jockeying, she found that kissing Ed was not like kissing a stranger at all. It was the one thing she hadn’t expected, or been prepared for. It was perfect. * * * Ed tasted mint, and his own come, and possibly some other flavor that might or might not have been crazy sauce. It didn’t matter. Nothing else mattered but this, right here, his lips and tongue and Beth’s amazing mouth and her slender hands reaching to grab his ass just like he’d grabbed hers earlier. They would stay here forever, kissing and groping and periodically getting each other off, until they starved to death or got shot in a turf war. And Ed was okay with that. Totally worth it. She’d started it, and she ended it, to his regret. With a final squeeze of his rear that nearly got him going all over again, she pulled back and sidled between the car and the open door to establish a buffer zone. The door indicator was dinging, and the dome light drew a few mosquitoes into the car. “Pie,” she told him, nodding firmly. “Time for pie. Do you want a ride to your car? Did you ever get your phone?” “I did. You should have some sort of upvote button on you. I need to upvote you.” He waved his hand over a few areas, suggesting where he thought said button might be found. “Yeah. No upfisting, though. That’s a hard limit.” “Huh?” “Never mind. I have a feeling I’ll be explaining it later. Pie, Ed.” “Pie, Beth. I’ll walk to my car.” Like the well-brought-up Texas boy he was, he waited to make sure her car started up properly and she was safely on the road. Then, after a few seconds of pointlessly staring after her taillights, Ed made his way back down the street to his own car. Passing the stoop of the club, he tipped an imaginary hat to Big Dog and Sir Tobias. “Have a good one,” Dog called. “Thanks, man. Working on it.” The drive to the pie house near the condo complex was just long enough for Ed to work up some anxiety about what had happened.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  As if someone had cellophaned a constrictive packaging over the youthful Benjamin Hood, soft even then. He was mottled and patchy. He needed a new coat of semigloss. His hair was going. He had worn it short all his life—he had never seen it, really—and now it was gone. His glasses were perched on his tiny, crooked nose like a large, barren tree on a granite outcropping. His minuscule eyes were the color of antifreeze. Okay, he was forbidding to behold. He resembled a longtime funeral director or a salesman of bogus waterfront property. He knew this. He tried to make up for it with kindness and fidelity. He tried. His erection was subsiding. Right now. His bejeweled weapon of persuasion was subsiding where it used to beckon, at his boxer shorts. Once his dreams had been songs. He’d been a balladeer of promise and opportunity. The corridors of the financial industry were his . Once he had been the filly before the first race, the cadet before the invasion. He had advanced in the direction of his dreams. But by 1973 desire surprised him at inappropriate moments: during television broadcasts of Southeast Asian massacres, during the Frazier/Ali rematch, when Archibald Cox was fired, when Thomas Eagleton admitted to shock-therapy treatments. Hood was not here, in this guest room, because he perfumed himself, because he was sunny and joyful. He was here, he opined, because his touch could be cruel. He was masculine and magical and mystical. He was a swordsman. Janey Williams brought it out in him. Having a mistress was like discovering, as an agnostic, the consolations of religion. It was like caving in and having a stiff drink right at the moment the clock strikes four. He felt no need to probe new ways of lovemaking now that he had come out of retirement from love. There was no need to express his feminine side . He preferred the conventional posture. Janey wanted him as he was. (And he heard her footsteps, now, going down the staircase. Perhaps in search of a candy to feed him during the act.) So he had a little trust. A little trust wasn’t much, but it was something. Trust never overpowered him. Hood was full of dread. And anxiety. Any change in his environment—the failure of Bob’s Stationery in town, for example, or the relocation of Bruce Abrams to some distant Shackley and Schwimmer branch office—filled him with dread. The small failures of life brought him, inexplicably, to the verge of tears, though he always managed to step back from that precipice. He could see desire had grown subtle and strange in the years since he had learned about it. Desire wasn’t about large breasts in Cross Your Heart brassieres anymore. It was about hunting for comfort. This was perhaps a useful moment to fix a drink.

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

  As you get aroused, your nipples become erect and your areolas swell and may darken. Your breasts may seem to get larger. Like your clitoris, an aroused nipple may take a lot of stimulation. You may enjoy more intense nipple play as you approach orgasm. In fact, some women must be extremely aroused to enjoy any nipple play at all. My nipples are extremely sensitive. I can’t even wear clothing with seams there or bump against the edge of a table without feeling uncomfortable. So I have to be sexually stimulated before someone can touch them—but then I want it all, especially sucking—but not hard. How women like their breasts and nipples touched is as individual as how they like their clits touched. It’s not just a matter of whether you prefer light or hard touches, though that’s important. You may be very particular about how you like your breasts touched. You may like the whole breast cupped and the underside caressed and held, or perhaps don’t like the undersides touched at all. Experienced breast-play aficionados can get quite specific in their instructions for nipple stimulation. I prefer delicate touches or licking around the nipple. Almost—but not quite—a tickling feeling. That’s great! Love it!! Mmmmmm… SensitivitySometimes I’m very sensitive and just a gentle stroke will make me shiver or jump. Breast sensitivity changes from day to day, over the course of your menstrual cycle, and over a lifetime. During your period, your breasts swell to their fullest and roundest—and may look quite succulent. Your breasts may be more sensitive in the days leading up to your period or during your period. Both PMS and pregnancy can make you feel as if you have “atomic tits.” New piercings, of course, will make your nipples especially tender. Fibroids can also make breast play painful. Any surgical procedure, such as a breast reduction or breast implants, can result in scar tissue that affects sensitivity. Of course, breast cancer will affect women very individually. Some women lose sensation after treatment, while others experience pain. Two years after my lumpectomy, other people can hardly see the scar even when I point it out. I lost sensitivity in the nipple for a while but it’s back almost full-strength now. I have ongoing irregular nerve pain inside the breast tissue around where the tumor was. Pressure directly on that area of the breast hurts like hell, so positions like lying on top take care. Sometimes if I mention this to a lover she or he seems scared and then avoids touching that breast. I understand but would prefer a more careful touch and inclusion of that breast in our sex play. I loved my breasts before, and I treasure them even more now. Teach Your PartnerI never used to enjoy breast stimulation until I met my current partner. Perhaps no one had a soft or gentle enough touch for me…or maybe I just never allowed myself to feel what I’ve felt with her.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  How could this kind of contentment coexist with the mess in my head? How could this love coexist with the desire for a whole other love? Shouldn't they cancel each other out? I had watched my husband and child sleep, choked with feeling. I wanted to press a woman against a wall with the length of my body, a woman who looks like a boy, and fuck her. Does one life preclude another? I wanted both, two lives in this body, running alongside each other in parallel, like ski tracks.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Her poncho didn’t keep out the cold, but she withstood it, shivering, because she was precociously brilliant—everyone said so—and impractical. Anything was better than the homely, pink ski jacket her mom had bought her. Originally, it wasn’t Mike Williams but his brother, Sandy, with whom these trysts had taken place. He was a jumpy, quiet boy and Wendy liked how he was shocked by her, how he was always a little bit uncomfortable when she was around, how he didn’t want to kiss with his mouth open; she liked how he was always skulking off to work on a model airplane, one of those monuments to futility and boredom. He was a challenge. One afternoon she successfully persuaded him to let her enter the bathroom with him. It was just the sort of pastime they got into over the years. Wendy had wrestled with him at touch football; she had eaten the sandwich ends he left behind—cream cheese and jelly, Fluffernutter, deviled ham; she had shared her Mountain Dew with him and tortured insects with him. Though Sandy didn’t talk much, Wendy thought what he thought and knew what he knew. Until that time in the bathroom. The Williamses’ downstairs bathroom was wallpapered in a velvet floral print. As Sandy unzipped his tiny shorts (this was the summer just past), and squatted down over the toilet, the absolute nakedness of his skeletal body struck her. There wasn’t a fold or pouch on him. He was like a little National Geographic photograph—the wise villager struggling against famine. And then there was his dick. It was no more than a little outcropping. It looked like the end of a number-two pencil, the part you throw out because it would be too short to extract from the sharpener. Not a hair surrounded this appendage. Sandy was as blank as a newborn, as simple as one of those modern pictures—all black or all white or all red—that any kid could do. He reposed on the toilet like a little girl, and began to empty himself. But then the enormity of being observed in this private ritual, this ritual of cleanliness messed him up. It was like she had stumbled into his sleep and learned all about his nightmares. Immobilized on the commode, he started to shout: —What do you want? What do you want? Get out! Get out of here! His usually peaceful face became twisted and raw as he rose up toward her. Brass-colored urine trickled lazily down his thigh—under his bunched, unfastened safari shorts—onto the throw rug. No girlish smile was going to get her out of this. Mrs. Williams must have heard the commotion. She pulled Wendy out by the ear. But because Mrs. Williams was cool and because she approved of the basic changes brought about by young people in the last five or six years, she let Wendy off with just a few cautionary words. A person’s body was his temple, Mrs.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  It is clear then that the love envisioned is not protected by the institution of marriage. There is no indication that it is adulterous (that either party is married to anyone else). Most probably, the lovers are young and unmarried. The woman appeals to “the daughters of Jerusalem” as coconspirators, and this again suggests clandestine arrangements. All of this contrasts sharply with the kind of sexual ethic that we meet elsewhere in the Bible, which is usually concerned to impose penalties (often draconian) for sexual irregularities. The primary concern in the biblical laws is with the institution of marriage. According to Deuteronomy 22, if a man is caught lying with the wife of another, both must die. Also if a man lies with a woman who is betrothed, both are subject to the death penalty, except that if the incident happens in an isolated area the woman is not held accountable. In the case of a woman who is neither married nor betrothed, however, the penalty is much less severe: “The man who lay with her shall give fifty shekels of silver to the young woman’s father, and she shall become his wife. Because he violated her he shall not be permitted to divorce her as long as he lives” (Deut 22:29). The formulation in Deuteronomy implies that the young woman was forced. It does not appear, however, that premarital sex was regarded as a grievous matter so long as a marriage ensued. The perspective from which the Song of Songs is written, however, differs greatly from that of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy is concerned with social control, from the viewpoint of the authorities in the society. The Song of Songs articulates the viewpoint of the lovers, who find love intoxicating, delightful, and irresistible. From this perspective there can be no question of condemnation, regardless of social disapproval. The Song is unique in the Bible in giving expression to the romantic and erotic feelings of a woman. The Song is one of only two books in the Hebrew Bible that does not mention God (the other is the book of Esther). Nonetheless, Rabbi Akiba declared it to be “the Holy of Holies.” The reason, perhaps, was the purity of the love expressed, which validates itself by its strength and beauty. Love is affirmed as an ultimate value in life. Nowhere is this expressed more powerfully than in 8:6-7: “Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. . . . Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. If one offered for love all the wealth of one’s house, it would be utterly scorned.”

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

  I returned a few weeks later with my boyfriend and a photographer I hired to assist in the self-portraiture. She shot on medium format film and had experience photographing beautiful smut. The rooms were perfectly sun-dappled. I posed in various positions on the bed, on a chair, in a windowsill. I sat on the dirty mantle in front of the blue neon skyline in the New York room. The light faded, and we moved to capture the shot I really wanted: the money shot, the facial. The moment of ejaculation has been colloquially renamed the money shot because, historically, porn producers have had to pay more for it. Citing Marcuse and Debord, Linda Williams writes in her book Hard Core, “As the industry’s slang term for the moment the hard-core film ‘delivers the goods’ of sexual pleasure, the money shot seems the perfect embodiment of the illusory and insubstantial ‘one-dimensional’ ‘society of the spectacle’ of advanced capitalism—that is, a society that consumes images even more avidly than it consumes objects.” But I disagree with Williams’s characterization: the money shot is neither illusory nor insubstantial. It is a photo-realistic representation of a moment of ecstasy, which is rather godly. The photographer lit us and stood nearby while I gave my boyfriend head, my own head perched uncomfortably in such a way that it was slightly lolling off the bed, wanting to be in position for the photograph I’d instructed them to capture. He warned me he was going to come, and then he did it, streaming over my face in two perfect lines, spreading outward from my mouth like brooks feeding into a lake. I modeled this photograph after Exaltation, one of Koons’s photographs from Made in Heaven. The photo depicts Cicciolina on her back; it’s a close-up of her face, with the top of her chest and neck visible. A hard, red dick rests on her tongue, with ejaculate dripping down her cheek and chin. She wears cotton-candy-colored eye makeup—blue mascara—and her eyebrows are thick and filled in, auburn-brown in shocking contrast to her bleached hair. On her head is a pearl tiara, and in her ears, costume earrings that look like clip-ons. Her clothing is seafoam. She looks like a princess, and also a little bit like she’s dead. I think the piece is gorgeous; a perfect depiction of woman-as-object. I wanted to recapture it with the whore in the artist position. I wanted to see how that subject positioning might change, or not change, someone’s perception of a work that was otherwise formally and compositionally the same. I was both subject and (directorial) photographer. It was my shot to solicit, and to, in several different senses, take.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  It is rich in similes and repeatedly evokes scenes from nature. The beloved is compared to a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valley, a lily among brambles (2:1-2), or to a dove in the clefts of the rock (2:14). The beloved speaks at a time when winter is past, flowers appear on the earth, and the sound of the turtledove is heard in the land (2:10-12). Most striking is the appreciation of physical beauty in the wasf poems. (For comparable emphasis on physical beauty in the Jewish tradition, we must go to the postbiblical Genesis Apocryphon from Qumran, which praises the beauty of Sarah in similar detail.) Admittedly, some of the similes are startling to the ears of an urban, Western reader: “I compare you, my love, to a mare among Pharaoh’s chariots” (1:9). “Your hair is like a flock of goats moving down the slopes of Gilead. Your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes that have come up from the washing. . . . Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle” (4:1-5). The poetry reflects a bucolic, rural setting, with a ready appreciation of the beauty of animal life. (This is not negated by the references to a city. City life in ancient Israel and Judah was never far removed from the rural context.) Another feature of the poetry is the frequent evocation of fruits and spices: “Your channel is an orchard of pomegranates with all the choicest fruits, henna with nard, nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense, myrrh and aloes, with all chief spices” (4:13-15). The most striking aspect of the Song, however, is its uninhibited celebration of sexual love. Just how uninhibited it is, is a matter of interpretation. Several passages lend themselves readily to sexual interpretations (e.g., 5:4: “my beloved thrust his hand into the opening, and my inmost being yearned for him”). But even if one does not explore the full range of metaphorical allusions, it is clear that physical love is joyfully affirmed. There is little to indicate that the lovers are married. The poem in 3:6-11 may celebrate a wedding procession, but in most of the poems the lovers evidently do not live together. This is why the woman has to go in search of the man. In 1:7, she asks where he pastures his flock. In 3:2, she rises from her bed and goes around the city to seek him. When she finds him, she brings him to her mother’s house. On another occasion she is beaten by the sentinels as she searches for her lover (5:7). In 7:10-13 she urges him to go with her to the vineyards, so that “there I will give you my love.” The impropriety of this love is reflected in 8:1: “O that you were like a brother to me, who nursed at my mother’s breast! If I met you outside, I would kiss you, and no one would despise me.”

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  1. In Germany I have since learned the State requires that ten times as much pure air must be supplied as we had and in consequence the serious illnesses which with us amounted to eighty per cent in three months have been reduced to eight. Paternal Government, it appears, has certain good points. One day just as the “decompression” of an hour and a half was ending, an Italian named Manfredi fell down and writhed about, knocking his face on the floor till the blood spurted from his nose and mouth. When we got him into the shed, his legs were twisted like plaited hair. The surgeon had him taken to the hospital. I made up my mind that a month would be enough for me. At the end of the first week I got a note from Jessie saying that her father was going on board that afternoon and she could see me the next evening. I went and was introduced to Jessie’s sister who, to my surprise, was tall and large but without a trace of Jessie’s good looks. “He’s younger than you, Jess”, she burst out laughing. A week earlier I’d have been hurt to the soul, but I had proved myself, so I said simply, “I’m earning five dollars a day, Mrs. Plummer, and money talks.” Her mouth fell open in amazement. “Five dollars”, she repeated, “I’m sorry, I—I—” “There, Maggie”, Jessie broke in, “I told you, you had never seen anyone like him; you’ll be great friends yet. Now come and we’ll have a walk”, she added and out we went. To be with her even in the street was delightful and I had a lot to say, but making love in a New York street on a summer evening is difficult and I was hungry to kiss and caress her freely. Jessie, however, had thought of a way: if her sister and husband had theatre tickets, they’d go out and we’d be alone in the apartment; it would cost two dollars, however, and she thought that a lot. I was delighted: I gave her the bills and arranged to be with her next night before eight o’clock. Did Jessie know what was going to happen? Even now I’m uncertain, though I think she guessed. Next night I waited till the coast was clear and then hurried to the door. As soon as we were alone in the little parlor and I had kissed her, I said, “Jessie, I want you to undress. I’m sure your figure is lovely, but I want to know it.”

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  The last was a quote I’d pulled from the book In the Company of Women. It was from an entrepreneur named Mary Going, intended as advice about work and business. When I stuck it to the mirror, I was mostly thinking of going down on a woman. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Out one day, I ran into a friend of a friend. She was easy to talk to, and I mentioned my separation. Do you have any friends who are divorced? she asked. I’ll be your divorced friend. We made plans to go out for drinks a couple of weeks later. Over a plate of nachos, we traded stories. I recounted the tale of Nora, said I now wanted to date casually, full stop—caaaasually, I enunciated. She asked if I had “a type.” I like androgyny, I said, my first time saying it aloud. I’m attracted to both men and women, but really I like people who aren’t exactly either. What word do you use for yourself, for your orientation? she asked. Do you use queer? I guess, I said. Maybe bisexual works. But I don’t just want it both ways; I want it every way. I fished an ice cube from my margarita and crunched on it. I’ve never been into, like, American-man men. No men-men. I loved that Brandon was a composer. He threw dinner parties in college, you know? Ha, she said. I didn’t know that. I think I like softer men, I said, and harder women. I liked how this sounded in my mouth. I might know someone you’d be into, said my friend. She gave a smile, quick and devious, and grabbed her phone. Scrolling through somewhere, she produced a photo. It was grainy, with the ersatz orange haze of an iPhone filter, but in it was a fine-boned girl with very short dark hair, sitting in what looked like a swiveling desk chair. She was beautiful, but not like a girl. She looked like the lead singer of a boy band. Oh, I snorted. Yeah, I’d totally fuck her. Her name is Ash, my friend said. I used to work with her at my old job. Want me to see if I can set you up? [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] We went out on a Thursday night. It was raining hard for Seattle, a hood-up kind of rain, and I got to the bar first, glad for a second to rearrange my bangs. I was too antsy to sit down in a booth, so I stood at the bar and made small talk with the bartender. He was the same one who’d bought me and Nora a round on our first date, but at a different bar. I tried not to read into it. At the edge of my vision I saw Ash walk in and felt my heartbeat thud, ca-su-al, down the length of my arms.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  I wanted to touch her, move my body over hers. I wanted to play, to be allowed to play, to be pulled along, to be pushed. I wanted to take and be taken. I wanted permission to try. Instead we sat on opposite ends of the bed, not touching. Nora leans back against the headboard. She stares at the dresser. We take turns sending out words to probe the space between us, measuring its depths. I don’t know if we’re a good match, Molly, says Nora. She says my name like a threat. I don’t know what to do about this, I say. I want to say her name back to her, but it feels perilous to say it aloud, as though I’ve forgotten how to pronounce it. There are a lot of ways to have sex, she says. I’ve had sex plenty of times without even taking my clothes off. My head empties like a drain. But I don’t want that, I choke. I threw off all the rules to be here. I don’t want a whole new set of them. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] “Axiom 1: People are different from each other,” writes queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. I imagine Sedgwick rolling her eyes at the typewriter, poking tiredly at the keys, lamenting that this should require explanation. “Even identical genital acts mean very different things to different people.”29 Being with Nora feels like a homecoming, I wrote that summer. But to a place I’ve never lived, and I can’t figure out which room is mine. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Why are there so many rules? I once asked Nora. I mean, in lots of places it’s against the law for two women to have sex with each other at all. If we’ve already decided to break those rules, why create even more? I had made my way to her bed because something in me had shifted. I did not choose that shift, but it had happened, and what it looked like was desire. I wanted to love and be loved by a woman. Here is the part I did choose: I followed what I wanted. Against social constraints, against my marriage, against my own instinct, against anxiety, against rules, I chose desire. Isn’t that queer sex? I wanted to ask. What is queer sex, if not a throwing-off of everything that isn’t desire? [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] In casual conversation, one of Nora’s friends referred to me as femme. Not in the French sense, meaning woman or, depending on the context, wife. Nora’s friend called me femme as in the opposite of butch, as in a queer person who presents as conventionally feminine.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  I used to illustrate the absurdity of our present system of educating the young by a quaint simile. “When training me to shoot”, I said, “my earthly father gave me a little single-barreled gun, and when he saw that I had learned the mechanism and could be trusted, he gave me a double-barreled shot-gun. After some years I came into possession of a magazine gun which could shoot half a dozen times if necessary without reloading, my efficiency increasing with my knowledge.” My Creator, or Heavenly Father, on the other hand, when I was wholly without experience and had only just entered my teens, gave me, so to speak, a magazine gun of sex, and hardly had I learned its use and enjoyment when he took it away from me forever, and gave me in its place a double-barreled gun: after a few years, he took that away and gave me a single-barreled gun with which I was forced to content myself for the best part of my life. Towards the end the old single-barrel began to show signs of wear and age: sometimes it would go off too soon, sometimes it missed fire and shamed me, do what I would. I want to teach youths how to use their magazine gun of sex so that it may last for years, and when they come to the double-barrel, how to take such care that the good weapon will do them liege service right into their fifties, and the single-barrel will then give them pleasure up to three score years and ten. Moreover, not only do I desire in this way to increase the sum of happiness in the world while decreasing the pains and disabilities of men, but I wish also to set an example and encourage other writers to continue the work that I am sure is beneficent, as well as enjoyable.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  her—and Forever—so interesting is that she’s actually enticed by the idea of sex. As their relationship unfolds, it becomes less about if for her, than when. “In the old days girls were divided into two groups—those who did and those who didn’t,” Katherine muses. “Nice girls didn’t, naturally. They were the ones boys wanted to marry.” She continues to say that just because the rules have changed, it doesn’t mean that her entire generation takes sex lightly. “It’s true that we are more open than our parents but that just means we accept sex and talk about it. It doesn’t mean we are all jumping into bed together.” Katherine isn’t jumping into bed with anyone—but in her town, teenage hanky- panky is hardly rare. Her best friend, Erica, lives on a hill, where “she’s always finding used rubbers in the street.” Erica herself is sassy, extroverted, and less sentimental about sex than Katherine is. “I’ve been thinking,” Erica tells her one day, “that it might not be a bad idea to get laid before college.” When Katherine balks because Erica doesn’t have a boyfriend, Erica is unfazed. “We look at sex differently,” she says. “I see it as a physical thing and you see it as a way of expressing love.” In the months that follow, Erica gets involved with Michael’s friend Artie: a promising high school actor who thinks he might be gay. Erica is more than happy to help him figure himself out, though he’s mostly interested in her as a formidable board game opponent. She gets frustrated with him but there’s also a sense that in the world of the book, she and Artie are doing right by each other. By giving Artie the space to understand his sexuality—a plotline that turns tragic when he tries to take his own life—Erica slows down enough to realize that she cares more about sex than she thought she did. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and have decided I don’t want to fuck just for the hell of it,” she writes in a letter to Katherine near the end of the novel. “I want it to be special.” It’s clear that Erica has come around to the right way of thinking about teenage sex. Forever makes a case for the wrong way, too. The novel opens with a shocker of a phrase: “Sybil Davison has a genius IQ and has been laid by at least six different guys.” Sybil is Erica’s cousin, who hosts the New Year’s Eve fondue party where Michael and Katherine first meet. We learn that Sybil is fat and Erica thinks she sleeps around to make up for her low self-esteem. For the most part, Sybil exists as an off-screen character. She shows up in Artie’s school play looking “fatter than ever” and then disappears from the action, until Erica tells Katherine that Sybil is pregnant. Nobody knows who the father is and she’s too

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  I was convinced that I could never attain actual femaleness; in my mind, the best that I could hope for was merely pretending to be female or being “turned into” a girl. After a year or two of imagining myself becoming a girl (typically a rather tomboyish one who went off on adventures and such), I started experimenting with conventional femininity. This was due both to me wanting to explore my own feminine inclinations and to the fact that (like most people) I was taught to believe that femininity was an intrinsic part of being female. My growing fascination with femininity was also very much intertwined with my growing attraction to women. As a teenager who was dealing with sexual attraction for the first time, I found it hard not to conflate my desire to be female with my sexual attraction for women. And in this respect, feminine accoutrements—whether clothing, cosmetics, or other accessories—became highly symbolic of both. In chapter 14, “Trans-Sexualization,” I explained that trans people who have not transitioned, and who therefore are unable to take their own physical sex for granted, often experience sexual arousal in association with their own cross-gendered thoughts and expressions. While this is true for virtually all trans people, there are a couple of factors specific to crossdressers that intensify this phenomenon. First, testosterone, which significantly boosts one’s sex drive across the board, undoubtedly plays some role in amplifying cross-gendered sexual arousal for those who are hormonally male. Second, we live in a culture in which women are frequently viewed as sexual objects, and much of women’s clothing emphasizes and exaggerates women’s sexuality. For crossdressers, there is no way of getting around the cultural eroticism that surrounds “women’s” clothing. Many crossdressers, particularly early in their crossdressing, become particularly interested in the most highly sexual articles of feminine clothing precisely because of the symbolism associated with them. Unfortunately, I have heard women criticize, even ridicule, this tendency among crossdressers, sometimes even suggesting that a crossdresser who covers their own body in hyperfeminine or hypersexual articles of clothing somehow sexualizes womanhood as a whole. Such criticism seems to purposefully ignore the fact that many teenage girls similarly tend to dress in sexually provocative or revealing ways when they hit puberty and begin to explore the cultural meanings associated with adult female sexuality. Both teenage girls and crossdressers are exposed to many of the same cultural messages about femininity and female sexuality (albeit from rather different vantage points) and thus both are drawn to experiment with hyperfeminine and hypersexual clothing as a way of literally “trying on” the symbolic meanings associated with adult female sexuality. And most crossdressers, like most cissexual women, eventually move beyond their “teenage girl phase” (as some crossdressers refer to it) and come to recognize sexually provocative clothing as but one of the many options available to them, but not necessarily one that they wish to indulge in every day.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  Suburban life had felt like a trap to Judy. Suddenly, Tom Kitchens appeared, offering what looked like a handsome escape hatch. When Tom was assigned to a short-term position in London, he invited Judy and the kids to come with him. This—this was the kind of person Judy aspired to be. A woman whose radius extended well beyond her small town’s outer limits. A globe- trotter. A sophisticate who could give her children the experience of six months in Europe. She said yes—she, Randy, and Larry would go with him. In the winter of early 1976, they left the townhouse in Princeton for their new, temporary home in North West London. She and Tom got married that spring, less than a year after her divorce from John. It was fast, but for the first time, Judy was letting herself go wherever the universe took her. Was it crazy that she had started seeing someone so quickly? In retrospect, maybe a little bit. She certainly didn’t have to commit herself so wholeheartedly, so officially, to the very first man she dated, she later realized. “I could have had affairs, but instead I got married because that’s what I thought you did,” she explained after the fact. “So I married the first man who said, ‘Hello, how are you?’ ” They’d moved in together without really knowing each other, and Judy had an inkling that things weren’t working out even before she and Tom tied the knot. For instance—he’d been impressed by her career at first, but quickly grew resentful of all the time, between writing and book promotion, it took for her to maintain it. Instead of falling head over heels for the new guy in their mother’s life, Randy and Larry were ambivalent toward Tom. “I would say, ‘Isn’t he wonderful?’ ” Blume wrote in Letters to Judy. “And my kids would just look at me as if I were crazy. They didn’t dislike him. But they didn’t think he was so great either.” Larry was having a particularly hard time, acting out because he was angry about the divorce but refusing to admit it. Yet Judy felt she had no choice but to marry Tom. She had already uprooted her children by moving them to London, and making the relationship official seemed like the only way to ground that livewire decision. The idea of going back to Princeton—without Tom—was mortifying. The day they went to sign their marriage license in Hampstead, Judy had an allergy attack.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Lily first and then Rose were astonished and perhaps a little hurt at the sudden cooling off of my passion for them. From time to time I took Rose out or sent her books and I had Lily anywhere, any when; but neither of them could compare with Sophy as a bedfellow and her talk even fascinated me more, the better I knew her. She had learned life from the streets, from the animal side first; but it was astonishing how quickly she grew in understanding: love is the only magical teacher! In a fortnight her speech was better than Lily’s; in a month she talked as well as any of the American girls I had had; her desire of knowledge and her sponge-like ease of acquirement were always surprising me. She had a lovelier figure than even Rose and ten times the seduction even of Lily: she never hesitated to take my sex in her hand and caress it; she was a child of nature, bold with an animal’s boldness and had besides a thousand endearing familiarities. I had only to hint a wish for her to gratify it. Sophy was the pearl of all the girls I met in this first stage of my development and I only wish I could convey to the reader a suggestion even of her quaint, enthralling caresses. My admiration of Sophy cleansed me of any possible disdain I might otherwise have had of the negro people, and I am glad of it; for else I might have closed my heart against the Hindu and so missed the best part of my life’s experiences. I have had a great artist make the sketch of her back which I reproduce at the end of this chapter: it conveys something of the strange vigor and nerve-force of her lovely firm body. But it was written that as soon as I reached ease and content, the Fates would reshuffle the cards and deal me another hand. First of all, there came a letter from Smith, telling me how he had got a bad wetting one night and had caught a severe cold. The cough then had returned and he was losing weight and heart. He had come to the conclusion, too, that I had reached, that the moist air of Philadelphia was doing him harm and the doctors now were beginning to urge him to go to Denver, Colorado: all the foremost specialists agreeing that mountain air was the best for his lung-weakness. If I couldn’t come to him, I must wire him and he’d stop in Lawrence to see me on his way West, he had much to say— A couple of days later he was in the Eldridge House and I went to see him. His appearance shocked me: he had grown spectre thin and the great eyes seemed to burn like lamps in his white face. I knew at once that he was doomed and could scarcely control my tears.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “Shuah!” she said smiling, “you’re very strong, and you—” she asked, “was you pleased?” “Great God!” I cried, “I felt as if all the hairs of my head were travelling down my backbone like an army! You are extraordinary, you dear!” “Keep me with you, Frank”, she whispered, “if you want me, I’ll do anything, everything for you: I never hoped to have such a lover as you. Oh, this child’s real glad her breasties and sex please you. You taught me that word, instead of the nasty word all white folk use; ‘sex’ is good word, very good!” and she crowed with delight. “What do colored people call it?” I asked: “Coozie”, she replied smiling, Coozie! good word too, very good! Long years later I heard an American story which recalled Sophy’s performance vividly. An engineer with a pretty daughter had an assistant who showed extraordinary qualities as a machinist and was quiet and well behaved to boot. The father introduced his helper to his daughter and the match was soon arranged. After the marriage, however, the son-in-law drew away and ’twas in vain that the father-in-law tried to guess the reason of the estrangement. At length he asked his son-in-law boldly for the reason: “I meant right, Bill”, he began earnestly, “but if I’ve made a mistake I’ll be sorry: waren’t the goods accordin’ to specification? Warn’t she a virgin?” “It don’t matter nothin’!” replied Bill, frowning. “Treat me fair, Bill”, cried the father, “war she a virgin?” “How can I tell?” exclaimed Bill, “all I can say is, I never know’d a virgin before that had that cinder-shifting movement.” Sophy was the first to show me the “cinder-shifting” movement and she surely was a virgin! As a mistress Sophy was perfection perfected and the long lines and slight curves of her lovely body came to have a special attraction for me as the very highest of the pleasure-giving type.