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 Looking for Alaska (2005)

  I preferred the Colonel: At least when he was cranky, he had a reason . In a testament to the power of fatigue, I managed to fall asleep quickly, convinced that the shrieking of dying monsters and Alaska’s delighted squeals upon killing them were nothing more than a pleasant sound track by which to dream. I woke up half an hour later, when she sat down on my bed, her butt against my hip. Her underwear, her jeans, the comforter, my corduroys, and my boxers between us , I thought. Five layers, and yet I felt it, the nervous warmth of touching—a pale reflection of the fireworks of one mouth on another, but a reflection nonetheless. And in the almostness of the moment, I cared at least enough. I wasn’t sure whether I liked her, and I doubted whether I could trust her, but I cared at least enough to try to find out. Her on my bed, wide green eyes staring down at me. The enduring mystery of her sly, almost smirking, smile. Five layers between us. She continued as if I hadn’t been asleep. “Jake has to study. So he doesn’t want me in Nashville. Says he can’t pay attention to musicology while staring at me. I said I would wear a burka, but he wasn’t convinced, so I’m staying here.” “I’m sorry,” I said. “Oh, don’t be. I’ll have loads to do. There’s a prank to plan. But I was thinking you should stay here, too. In fact, I have composed a list.” “A list?” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a heavily folded piece of notebook paper and began to read. “Why Pudge Should Stay at the Creek for Thanksgiving: A List, by Alaska Young. “One. Because he is a very conscientious student, Pudge has been deprived of many wonderful Culver Creek experiences, including but not limited to A. drinking wine with me in the woods, and B. getting up early on a Saturday to eat breakfast at McInedible and then driving through the greater Birmingham area smoking cigarettes and talking about how pathetically boring the greater Birmingham area is, and also C. going out late at night and lying in the dewy soccer field and reading a Kurt Vonnegut book by moonlight. “Two. Although she certainly does not excel at endeavors such as teaching the French language, Madame O’Malley makes a mean stuffing, and she invites all the students who stay on campus to Thanksgiving dinner. Which is usually just me and the South Korean exchange student, but whatever. Pudge would be welcome. “Three. I don’t really have a Three, but One and Two were awfully good.” One and Two appealed to me, certainly, but mostly I liked the idea of just her and just me on campus. “I’ll talk to my parents. Once they wake up,” I said. She coaxed me onto the couch, and we played Decapitation together until she abruptly dropped the controller. “I’m not flirting.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  For a long time, Amy would remember the day at the Glamour Boutique as erotically charged. But she would remember very little about the sex that she and Patrick had, only that it was not erotic. Eventually, that was how she would come to understand what sex with men was for her. The erotic part lay in the dressing up, the foreplay, the mental switch into a feminine role. And yes, dressing up with men almost always culminated in sex, but a distant faraway sex —one that Amy felt like she hadn’t participated in. The sex itself was necessary to break the spell. The orgasm released the tension that had been building and brought you back to yourself. After sex, the spell could dissipate, and she saw herself as she truly was: a boy, lying dazed on his back in a stranger’s bed with a dress hiked up to the waist, a string of his own pre-cum on his thigh, and a stranger lifting himself off the bed to sheepishly pull off a reservoir-filled condom. While Patrick washed himself in the bathroom, Amy got her bearings. Took stock of the action figures lined up along the wall. The shemale porn DVD playing on the TV, which Patrick had stared at insistently and vacantly while he fucked Amy, the way Amy had scrunched shut her eyes and gone far away, taking with her only the sensation of being penetrated, of being filled by cock, of being passive for a lover. It was not Patrick’s cock she had taken with her. Or, maybe, in one dimension it was. But in the place Amy had gone, it was Jen from the shop inside of her. The encounter, both real and not, expanded inside Amy’s mind, a sequence that moved from that looped memory of Jen fitting Amy for a bra, then to Jen’s imagined body, and then, Jen was fucking her, fucking her as a woman; and Amy could feel it, couldn’t she? The thrusting inside of her, the hands on her hips and shoulders—feel that? That was Jen fucking her. Yes, it was and would be as long as she clung tight to this faraway place, and in this place she could enjoy herself for once, she could feel everything as it should be.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Beautiful last words, but I didn’t quite understand. “So what’s the labyrinth?” I asked her. And now is as good a time as any to say that she was beautiful. In the dark beside me, she smelled of sweat and sunshine and vanilla, and on that thin-mooned night I could see little more than her silhouette except for when she smoked, when the burning cherry of the cigarette washed her face in pale red light. But even in the dark, I could see her eyes—fierce emeralds. She had the kind of eyes that predisposed you to supporting her every endeavor. And not just beautiful, but hot, too, with her breasts straining against her tight tank top, her curved legs swinging back and forth beneath the swing, flip-flops dangling from her electric-blue-painted toes. It was right then, between when I asked about the labyrinth and when she answered me, that I realized the importance of curves, of the thousand places where girls’ bodies ease from one place to another, from arc of the foot to ankle to calf, from calf to hip to waist to breast to neck to ski-slope nose to forehead to shoulder to the concave arch of the back to the butt to the etc. I’d noticed curves before, of course, but I had never quite apprehended their significance. Her mouth close enough to me that I could feel her breath warmer than the air, she said, “That’s the mystery, isn’t it? Is the labyrinth living or dying? Which is he trying to escape—the world or the end of it?” I waited for her to keep talking, but after a while it became obvious she wanted an answer. “Uh, I don’t know,” I said finally. “Have you really read all those books in your room?” She laughed. “Oh God no. I’ve maybe read a third of ’em. But I’m going to read them all. I call it my Life’s Library. Every summer since I was little, I’ve gone to garage sales and bought all the books that looked interesting. So I always have something to read. But there is so much to do: cigarettes to smoke, sex to have, swings to swing on. I’ll have more time for reading when I’m old and boring.” She told me that I reminded her of the Colonel when he came to Culver Creek. They were freshmen together, she said, both scholarship kids with, as she put it, “a shared interest in booze and mischief.” The phrase booze and mischief left me worrying I’d stumbled into what my mother referred to as “the wrong crowd,” but for the wrong crowd, they both seemed awfully smart. As she lit a new cigarette off the butt of her previous one, she told me that the Colonel was smart but hadn’t done much living when he got to the Creek. “I got rid of that problem quickly.” She smiled. “By November, I’d gotten him his first girlfriend, a perfectly nice non–Weekday Warrior named Janice.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  when the lover’s body floats slowly down into the oceanic void. But not Katrina; for Katrina and her bossy games, he was fully here, electrified, daydreaming about it even when they were apart. Amazingly, his desire hadn’t faded over the whole of the five months they had been together. If anything it had grown, gotten wild: lush unruly green life that overran the tidily landscaped paths and garden beds of proper behavior. He suspected that, although Katrina was too proud to openly say so, they had been having a type of sex that she had long craved but never before known to ask for. That this was the first time in her life that she was experiencing the mind-scrambling effects of good sex— the kind of sex where you travel across the country for just a couple hours together, after which you talk about buying property, or moving in together, or just generally entwining lives in a way logistically unjustified by a short period of intimacy. In short, the sex that Katrina and he were having was in the category that meant that when a pregnancy test comes up positive—keeping the baby is very much an option. Except for two caveats: First, she didn’t know that he was once a transsexual, and second, after all his mental gymnastics, after all the lessons of transition and detransition, fatherhood remained the one affront to his gender that he still couldn’t stomach without a creeping sense of horror. To become a father by his own body, as his father was to him, and his father before him, and on and on, would sentence him to a lifetime of grappling with that horror. God, he’d hidden so much of his past from her, a past murky, half-spoken, all of it covered by the pretext that he was trying to protect their relationship from the office. It tired Ames, despite erasure having become a second nature mode of dealing with his past. In his office now, Katrina scoots forward in her chair and takes his hand. “Ames, help me,” she says softly. “What do you want to do? I’m not asking you to decide anything for me. I surprised myself by finding out I’m excited. I feel vulnerable saying that, so please, give me some sense of what this means for you.” She touches her stomach again. The baby-yet-not-yet-a-baby beneath her hand. He remembers hearing that a fetal pulse is detectable at four weeks. He remembers that she has miscarried before. The quiet pain of that. It hurts to think about what she might be going through. “You told me you were sterile and now I’m pregnant,” she says. “Now the only thing you have to tell me after my doctor’s confirmation—that you asked for—is that your testicles are atrophied? This is not how most men react to finding out they are a potential father.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “Yeah, but that was before you started on your birth control.” She first called her PrEP “birth control” at a Chinese place in Sunset Park where he felt safe that none of his wife’s friends would possibly run into him. It popped into her head as a joke, but he looked at her and said, “Fuck, I just got so hard.” He signaled for the check, told her that she wouldn’t get to see a movie that night, and drove her right home to put her facedown on her floral bedspread. In the morning, she sexted him one of the sexiest, but most ostensibly non-sexual, sexts of her life—a short video of her cramming a couple of her big blue Truvada pills into one of those distinctive pastel birth control day-of-the-month clamshell cases. From then on, her “birth control pills” were part of their sex life. There was another reason, beyond the stigma, taboo, and eroticization, that their particular brand of bugchasing had bite for Reese: She really did want to be a mom. She wanted it worse than anything. She had spent her whole adulthood with the queers, ingesting their radical relationships and polyamory and gender roles, but somehow, she still never displaced from the pinnacle of womanhood those nice white Wisconsin moms who had populated her childhood. She never lost that secret fervor to grow up into one of them. In motherhood she could imagine herself apart from her loneliness and neediness, because as a mother, she believed, you were never truly alone. No matter that her own and her trans friends’ actual experiences of unconditional parental love always turned out to be awfully conditional. Perhaps equally important, as a mother, she saw herself finally granted the womanhood that she suspected the goddesses of her childhood took as their natural due. She’d set herself up for it, once. She’d been in a lesbian relationship with a trans woman named Amy —a woman with a good job in tech, and who became so suburban- presentable that when she spoke, you imagined her words in Martha Stewart’s signature typeface. With Amy, Reese had gotten as close to domesticity as she figured possible for a trans girl—the trust and boredom and stability that now had the faded aspect of a dream recalled right after you wake. They even had an apartment by Prospect Park—the kind of bright, airy space that evinced enough good taste and stalwart respectability that the idea of showing adoption agencies where they lived had been one of the lesser obstacles to motherhood. But now, three years later, as Reese’s odometer clicked up into her midthirties, she began to think about what she called the Sex and the City Problem.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Each surprise was carefully calculated for the effect it would produce. The slaves. Thenceforth he first unexpected letter piqued his curiosity, as did that first sight of her in made it his custom to take the waiting room; suddenly seeing her dressed as an elegant woman stirred a virgin in marriage to his intense desire; then seeing her dressed as a man intensified the excitingly bed each night, and kill her the next morning. This he transgressive nature of their liaison. The surprises put him off balance, yet continued to do for three left him quivering with anticipation of the next one. Even an unpleasant years, until a clamor rose surprise, such as the encounter with Caterina that Mathilde had set up, kept among the people, some of whom fled the country with him emotional and weak. Meeting the somewhat bland Caterina at that their daughters. • Now the moment only made him long that much more for Mathilde. vizier had two daughters. In seduction, you need to create constant tension and suspense, a feel- The elder was called Shahrazad, and the ing that with you nothing is predictable. Do not think of this as a painful younger Dunyazad. challenge. You are creating drama in real life, so pour your creative energies Shahrazad possessed many into it, have some fun. There are all kinds of calculated surprises you can accomplishments and was versed in the wisdom of the spring on your victims—sending a letter from out of the blue, showing up poets and the legends of unexpectedly, taking them to a place they have never been. But best of all ancient kings. • That day are surprises that reveal something new about your character. This needs to Shahrazad noticed her be set up. In those first few weeks, your targets will tend to make certain father's anxiety and asked him what it was that snap judgments about you, based on appearances. Perhaps they see you as troubled him. When the a bit shy, practical, puritanical. You know that this is not the real you, but it vizier told her of his is how you act in social situations. Let them, however, have these impres- predicament, she said: "Give me in marriage to sions, and in fact accentuate them a little, without overacting: for instance, 246 • The Art of Seduction this king; either I shall die seem a little more reserved than usual. Now you have room to suddenly and be a ransom for the surprise them with some bold or poetic or naughty action. Once they have daughters of Moslems, or changed their minds about you, surprise them again, as Mathilde did with live and be the cause of their deliverance." He Casanova—first a nun who wants an affair, then a libertine, then a seduc-earnestly pleaded with her tress with a sadistic streak. As they strain to figure you out, they will be against such a hazard; but

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  passion kindled the very gap, they will have to come to you. You can befriend them, as Lauzun did marrow of his bones. This the Grande Mademoiselle, moving steadily closer while always maintaining girl was not one who spent the distance appropriate for friends of the opposite sex. You can also play her time in spinning soft fibers of wool, or in cat and mouse with them, first seeming interested, then stepping back— arranging her hair in actively luring them to follow you into your web. Whatever you do, and different styles. She was whatever kind of seduction you are practicing, you must at all cost avoid one of Diana's warriors, the natural tendency to crowd your targets. Do not make the mistake of wearing her tunic pinned together with a brooch, her thinking they will lose interest unless you apply pressure, or that they will tresses carelessly caught enjoy a flood of attention. Too much attention early on will actually just back by a white ribbon, suggest insecurity, and raise doubts as to your motives. Worst of all, it gives and carrying in her hand a light javelin or her your targets no room for imagination. Take a step back; let the thoughts bow. . . . • The sun on you are provoking come to them as if they were their own. This is doubly high had passed its zenith, important if you are dealing with someone who has a deep effect on you. when she entered a grove whose trees had never felt We can never really understand the opposite sex. They are always mys-the axe. Here she took her terious to us, and it is this mystery that provides the tension so delightful in quiver from her shoulders, seduction; but it is also a source of unease. Freud famously wondered what unstrung her pliant bow, and lay down on the women really wanted; even to this most insightful of psychological turf, resting her head on thinkers, the opposite sex was a foreign land. For both men and women, her painted quiver. When there are deep-rooted feelings of fear and anxiety in relation to the oppo-Jupiter saw her thus, tired site sex. In the initial stages of a seduction, then, you must find ways to and unprotected, he said: "Here is a secret of calm any sense of mistrust that the other person may experience. (A sense which my wife will know of danger and fear can heighten the seduction later on, but if you stir such nothing; or if she does get emotions in the first stages, you will more likely scare the target away.) Es-to know of it, it will be worth her reproaches!" • tablish a neutral distance, seem harmless, and you give yourself room to Without wasting time he move. Casanova cultivated a slight femininity in his character—an interest assumed the appearance in clothes, theater, domestic matters—that young girls found comforting. and the dress of Diana, and spoke to the girl.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  ploited the story. A mix of the masculine and the feminine, the violent and the tender, will always seem transgressive and appealing. Love is supposed to be tender and delicate, but in fact it can release violent and destructive emotions; and the possible violence of love, the way it breaks down our normal reasonableness, is just what attracts us. Approach romance's violent side by mixing a cruel streak into your tender attentions, particularly in the latter stages of the seduction, when the target is in your clutches. The courtesan Lola Montez was known to turn to violence, using a whip now and then, and Lou Andreas-Salomé could be exceptionally cruel to her men, playing coquettish games, turning alternately icy and demanding. Her cruelty only kept her targets coming back for more. A masochistic involvement can represent a great transgressive release. The more illicit your seduction feels, the more powerful its effect. Give your targets the feeling that they are committing a kind of crime, a deed whose guilt they share with you. Create public moments in which the two of you know something that those around you do not. It could be phrases and looks that only you recognize, a secret. Byron's seductive appeal to Lady Frances was connected to the nearness of her husband—in his company, for example, she had a love letter of Byron's hidden in her bosom. Johannes, the protagonist of Søren Kierkegaard's The Seducer's Diary, sent a message to his target, the young Cordelia, in the middle of a dinner party they were both attending; she could not reveal to the other guests that it was from him, for then she would have to do some explaining. He might also say something in public that would have a special meaning for her, since it referred to something in one of his letters. All of this added spice to the affair by giving it a feeling of a shared secret, even a guilty crime. It is critical to play on tensions like these in public, creating a sense of complicity and collusion against the world. In the Tristan and Isolde legend, the famous lovers reach the heights of bliss and exhilaration exactly because of the taboos they break. Isolde is engaged to King Mark; she will soon be a married woman. Tristan is a loyal subject and warrior in the service of King Mark, who is his father's age. The whole affair has a feeling of stealing away the bride from the father. Epitomizing the concept of love in the Western world, the legend has had immense influence over the ages, and a crucial part of it is the idea that without obstacles, without a feeling of transgression, love is weak and flavorless.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “Cool,” said Reese, who knew that that explanation wasn’t factual, but had only really agreed to make sure he wasn’t going to try to bottom with her. Within the hour, she had him back in her room and confessing from whom he’d gotten HIV and where. Within two hours, Reese convinced him to talk about his wife’s disappointment, how she was unwilling to let him fuck a child into her even though his HIV had declined to undetectable levels. He described how much his wife hated the IVF treatments, how their clinical nature reminded her over and over what he had done to put her on a cold doctor’s table instead of in their warm marital bed. “You re getting a lot more candor out of me than I’m used to,” her cowboy said, sounding surprised at himself, even as he squeezed Reese’s tits. “The power of pussy, I guess.” “You might get my pussy,” she responded, enjoying herself and aping his cowboy drawl, “but a good woman’II flay your soul.” “Ain’t that the truth,” he drawled back. He lifted a big paw to the back of her neck and brought her face close to his. She sighed, went limp. Her eyes glassily held his. “Tell you what,” he told her, “first ’m going to own your pussy...” He paused, and with his hand still on her neck, he slowly, firmly, pushed her face down into a pillow. “Then we'll see about my soul.” Now he slides back into the car, with a little brown bag full of lube and condoms, and a tickling of anticipation slides across Reese’s stomach. “Do we really need these tonight?” he asks her, holding up the bag. “You know I’m gonna want to knock you up.” This was why she still put up with him: He got it. With him, she’d discovered sex that was really and truly dangerous. Cis women, she supposed, rubbed against a frisson of danger every time they had sex. The risk, the thrill, that they might get pregnant—a single fuck to fuck up (or bless?) their lives. For cis women, Reese imagined, sex was a game played at the precipice of a cliff. But until her cowboy, she hadn’t ever had the pleasure of that particular danger. Only now, with his HIV, had she found an analogue to a cis woman’s life changer. Her cowboy could fuck her and mark her forever. He could fuck her and end her. His cock could obliterate her. His viral load was undetectable, he said, but she never asked to see any papers. That would kill the sweetness and danger of it. He liked to play close to the edge too, pushing to knock her up, to impregnate her with a viral seed. Make her the mommy, her body host to new life, part of her but not, just as mothers eternal. “We agreed on condoms always. You said you didn’t want it on your conscience,” she said.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  crept up the stairs, and peeked through the crack in the door: it was Diet-ivory was all it was. He rich taking pictures of herself in the mirror, studying her face from every kissed the statue, and imagined that it kissed him angle. back, spoke to it and embraced it, and thought Marlene Dietrich had a distance from her own self: she could study her he felt his fingers sink into the limbs he touched, so face, her legs, her body, as if she were someone else. This gave her the that he was afraid lest a ability to mold her look, transforming her appearance for effect. She could bruise appear where he had pose in just the way that would most excite a man, her blankness letting pressed the flesh. him see her according to his fantasy, whether of sadism, voluptuousness, or Sometimes he addressed it in flattering speeches, danger. And every man who met her, or who watched her on screen, fan-sometimes brought the kind tasized endlessly about her. The effect worked on women as well; in the of presents that girls words of one writer, she projected "sex without gender." But this self-enjoy. . . . He dressed the limbs of his statue in distance gave her a certain coldness, whether on film or in person. She was woman's robes, and put like a beautiful object, something to fetishize and admire the way we adrings on its fingers, long mire a work of art. necklaces round its neck. . . . All this finery The fetish is an object that commands an emotional response and that became the image well, but makes us breathe life into it. Because it is an object we can imagine what-it was no less lovely ever we want to about it. Most people are too moody, complex, and reac-unadorned. Pygmalion then placed the statue on a tive to let us see them as objects that we can fetishize. The power of the couch that was covered with Fetishistic Star comes from an ability to become an object, and not just any cloths of Tynan purple, object but an object we fetishize, one that stimulates a variety of fantasies. laid its head to rest on soft Fetishistic Stars are perfect, like the statue of a Greek god or goddess. The down pillows, as if it could appreciate them, and called effect is startling, and seductive. Its principal requirement is self-distance. If it his bedfellow. • The you see yourself as an object, then others will too. An ethereal, dreamlike festival of Venus, which is air will heighten the effect. celebrated with the greatest The Star • 123 You are a blank screen. Float through life noncommittally and people pomp all through Cyprus, will want to seize you and consume you. Of all the parts of your body that was now in progress, and heifers, their crooked horns

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  They arrived at the château. The husband came to meet them, and the truth, I found myself in a vast cage of mirrors on young man expressed his admiration of the building: "What you see is which images were so nothing," Madame interrupted, "I must take you to Monsieur's apartment." artistically painted that Before he could ask what she meant, the subject was quickly changed. The they produced the illusion of all the objects they husband was indeed a bore, but he excused himself after supper. Now represented. Madame and the young man were alone. She invited him to walk with her —VIVANT DENON,"NO in the gardens; it was a splendid evening, and as they walked, she slipped TOMORROW," IN MICHEL FEHER, her arm in his. She was not worried that he would take advantage of her, ED., THE LIBERTINE READER she said, because she knew how attached he was to her good friend the countess. They talked of other things, and then she returned to the topic of 213 214 • The Art of Seduction A few short years ago, in his lover: "Is she making you quite happy? Oh, I fear the contrary, and this our native city, where fraud distresses me. . . . Are you not often the victim of her strange whims?" To and cunning prosper more the young man's surprise, Madame began to talk of the countess in a way than love or loyalty, there was a noblewoman of that made it seem that she had been unfaithful to him (which was some-striking beauty and thing he had suspected). Madame sighed—she regretted saying such things impeccable breeding, who about her friend, and asked him to forgive her; then, as if a new thought was endowed by Nature with as lofty a had occurred to her, she mentioned a nearby pavilion, a delightful place, temperament and shrewd full of pleasant memories. But the shame of it was, it was locked and she an intellect as could be had no key. And yet they found their way to the pavilion, and lo and be-found in any other woman hold, the door had been left open. It was dark inside, but the young man of her time. . . . • This lady, being of gentle birth could sense that it was a place for trysts. They entered and sank onto a sofa, and finding herself married and before he knew what had come over him, he took her in his arms. off to a master woollen- Madame seemed to push him away, but then gave in. Finally she came to draper because he happened to be very rich, was unable her senses: they must return to the house. Had he gone too far? He must to stifle her heartfelt try to control himself. contempt, for she was As they strolled back to the house, Madame remarked, "What a deli-firmly of the opinion that no man of low condition,

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  or three months later they ther very beautiful or very kind or in the last resort very haul it out covered with a wicked; very witty or very stupid, but something. shining deposit of crystals. The smallest twig, no —ALFRED DE MUSSET bigger than a torn-tit's claw, is studded with a galaxy of scintillating diamonds. The Keys to Seduction original branch is no longer recognizable. • What I have called crystallization We all have a self-image that is more flattering than the truth: we is a mental process which think of ourselves as more generous, selfless, honest, kindly, intelli- draws from everything that happens new proofs of the gent, or good-looking than in fact we are. It is extremely difficult for us to perfection of the loved be honest with ourselves about our own limitations; we have a desperate one. . . . • A man in love need to idealize ourselves. As the writer Angela Carter remarks, we would sees every perfection in the rather align ourselves with angels than with the higher primates from object of his love, but his attention is liable to which we are actually descended. 282 • The Art of Seduction wander after a time because This need to idealize extends to our romantic entanglements, because one gets tired of anything when we fall in love, or under the spell of another person, we see a reflec-uniform, even perfect tion of ourselves. The choice we make in deciding to become involved happiness. • This is what happens next to fix the with another person reveals something important and intimate about us: we attention: • 6. Doubt resist seeing ourselves as having fallen for someone who is cheap or tacky or creeps in. . . . He is met tasteless, because it reflects badly on who we are. Furthermore, we are often with indifference, coldness, likely to fall for someone who resembles us in some way. Should that peror even anger if he appears too confident. . . . The son be deficient, or worst of all ordinary, then there is something deficient lover begins to be less sure and ordinary about us. No, at all costs the loved one must be overvalued of the good fortune he was and idealized, at least for the sake of our own self-esteem. Besides, in a anticipating and subjects his grounds for hope to a world that is harsh and full of disappointment, it is a great pleasure to be critical examination. • He able to fantasize about a person you are involved with. tries to recoup by indulging This makes the seducer's task easy: people are dying to be given the in other pleasures but finds them inane. He is seized

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  The dreamy way that Iris talked about what should have been horror made Reese jealous. Before Stanley, Reese’s own sex games only flirted with possession, and alone with her Hitachi, images from Iris’s stories kept making cameos in her fantasies. Hands on her throat. Slaps to her face. Fight leaving her body. To Iris, though, Reese said little, other than “whoa.” Once, Reese asked Iris if she needed help, to get away from those men. In response, Iris grimaced and said, “It’s not like that.” And for once, Reese, the transsexual who hadn’t gone to college, much less Brown, was embarrassed by her sensibilities, as she clutched her pearls, primly imagining the sensationalism of an SVU episode featuring sex trafficking instead of whatever Iris actually got, emotionally or otherwise, from the men with whom she disappeared. It was the same tone of uninformed concern that older cis people used with Reese when they discovered she was a transsexual: Oh dear, your life must really not be okay. The response always surprised them: I chose this. I want it. It makes me feel right. Whatever Iris was getting, Iris got it because she found in it something she wanted and Iris had shared it with Reese, because she had sensed that lurking in an unspoken place Reese craved something kindred. The least Reese could do was to be honest, to not pretend like she didn’t understand the chaos that separated what can be wanted and what can be said. Consider for a moment Reese’s own damage: She met Stanley on a fetish site with the word “tranny” in its name. During that period of her life, Reese only ever dated on fetish sites. She disdained the trans girls who disdained tranny chasers. It’s stupid to rule out every single man who has come to the understanding that he desires your body. It’s a mark of prudish inexperience to think that being fetishized and objectified isn’t the hottest thing going in the bedroom. Reese’s dating practice prescribed that the only chasers you had to avoid were the crypto-trans women, the ones who want to be women but are too closeted to handle it, and so they live their fantasies through you. You can feel it when you're with a crypto- trans. A crypto-trans has to evacuate you, your personhood, to use you, to fantasize that he is you getting fucked even as he fucks you. You're just a body for him to live through vicariously. It’s the most alienating thing in the world. It’s like being psychically worn. Like you're a glove. Reese fled at the first sign of a crypto-trans. She wished they’d just become ladies and stop being so weird.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “Are you sure you're okay with this?” she asked. “If the genders were reversed, and some man had told his female employee to take a day off of work and come over Id be appalled.” She had her fingers entwined in his hair even as she asked, so he couldn’t pull back his head, and ended up responding to her ass, his mouth speaking an inch from her right ass cheek as if it were a microphone. “Trust me, I love it,” he told her ass. “I’m in heaven. I’ve always had a thing for bossy women. Getting with my actual boss is like secret-hotness level unlocked. You have consent or whatever, just please let me keep my face here.” “Should I be more of your boss about this, then?” He looked up at her, unable to believe his luck. To find a toppy femme who was already literally in charge of him? Lotto odds. “Yes,” he said. “Please.” “Fine.” She laughed, and turned to face him, so that his nose was level with her crotch. “Make me a PowerPoint presentation about why I should let you stay down there with your face in my pussy.” He closed his eyes, inhaled happily; a dawning awareness that this play turned her on as much as it did him chiseled loose a layer of the calcification that had begun to encrust his libido, and by extension, his heart, and by extension, his life. The next day she sent him an email while they were both at the office. Still waiting on that PowerPoint deck we discussed. When can I expect it to be delivered? He wasn’t sure whether to respond openly. Here he was, with all his secret queer credentials, and this divorced straight woman had completely wrong-footed him. Which, of course, was so insanely hot that he briefly considered finding an out-of-the-way bathroom in which to jerk off. LOL, he responded weakly. No, I’m serious. I'll expect you to present your slides to me by close of day Tuesday. If youre late, I'll make you present them in a conference room. Your choice. This thing he had with Katrina—their power games, the thrill of sneaking around at the office and the explicitness of their flirting—it had all come together to make for really good sex. In his previous life, Ames had transitioned to live as a woman before he had ever had really good sex, and he wasn’t sure that post-detransition, he’d ever have truly good sex again. Every other dalliance he’d attempted as a heterosexual man had disconnected his body and mind, fostering an inability to display real excitement or joy even as he performed all the necessary acts, until eventually, his partner took that disconnect as indifference and let go of him. When that happened he’d drift away without effort, like in shipwreck movies, that ubiquitous shot

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  An hour later, they were three drinks deep. She’d made a concoction of gin, Green Chartreuse, and some ancient floral liquor of unknown provenance, along with a splash of orange juice from the fridge. It wouldn’t have been on a cocktail menu, but the fancy liquor made it drinkable. She’d changed into a pair of tight, white high-waisted jeans that he’d bought her that afternoon, and as she had when they lived together, she lay on the couch with her legs over his lap. He told her about a trip he’d taken to Bolivia, where he drank ayahuasca, and about visiting his vegan sister in Australia, where he’d adopted her vegan diet for three months and lost a lot of weight. Then, sipping his drink and gazing out the window at a view of the lit-up Williamsburg Bridge a few blocks beyond his balcony, he tentatively began to speak with regret of the year of wreckage that followed failure of his firm, his divorce, and of course, Reese’s departure to Amy. After a long pause, she realized that he expected her to respond in kind. To confess her sins and ask for penance, to admit the errors that she had learned in his absence. Carefully she phrased a statement that she had just wanted to leave him alone, and that’s why she hadn’t checked in on him. He waved it away magnanimously. “It’s fine,” he said. “I had a hard time after the divorce. Maybe I wasn’t so kind to you either. Things are better now. This gig ’m starting with my friend’s fund could last a year, and even if it doesn’t pan out to a long-term thing, it'll still be lucrative.” The kind of money he hinted at was attractive to Reese. Yes, Amy did okay, but not in the realm of Stanley. With Stanley she’d have a dining set for every room. He gave her a mischievous look and said, “Don’t move, I want to do something.” He stood up, his body looking taller than ever now that he’d grown lean. She obeyed, lying still on the couch, and he moved behind her, out of her line of sight. She heard the dry rustle of the big paper shopping bag that she’d left by the door. A moment later, he returned, and knelt at the couch beside her. She raised her head questioningly. “T said don’t move,” he said. “Sorry!” “Keep your eyes on the ceiling.” Gently, he unbuttoned the top button of her new jeans. She wondered if she should stop him, whatever he was going to do. “T still have a girlfriend,” she said. “I’m in a lesbian relationship.” “T know.” He didn’t remove his hands as he spoke. “I looked at your Instagram a few months ago. Youre prettier than her.”

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  emptiness. As a seducer, you must never mistake a person's appearance for Charlotta: Sir, you make the reality. People are always susceptible to being seduced, because in fact me ashamed. . . . • Don everyone lacks a sense of completeness, feels something missing deep in- John: Pretty Charlotta, you are not marry'd, are side. Bring their doubts and anxieties to the surface and they can be led and you? • Charlotta: No, Sir, lured to follow you. but I am soon to be, with No one can see you as someone to follow or fall in love with unless Pierrot, son to Goody Simonetta. • Don John: they first reflect on themselves somehow, and on what they are missing. Be-What! Shou'd such a one fore the seduction proceeds, you must place a mirror in front of them in as you be Wife to a 208 • The Art of Seduction Peasant! No, no; that's a which they glimpse that inner emptiness. Made aware of a lack, they now profanation of so much can focus on you as the person who can fill that empty space. Remember: Beauty. You was not born most of us are lazy. To relieve our feelings of boredom or inadequacy on to live in a Village. You certainly deserve a better our own takes too much effort; letting someone else do the job is both Fortune, and Heaven, easier and more exciting. The desire to have someone fill up our emptiness which knows it well, is the weakness on which all seducers prey. Make people anxious about the brought me hither on purpose to hinder this future, make them depressed, make them question their identity, make Marriage and do justice to them sense the boredom that gnaws at their life. The ground is prepared. your Charms; for in short, The seeds of seduction can be sown. fair Charlotta, I love you In Plato's dialogue Symposium—the West's oldest treatise on love, and a with all my Heart, and if you'll consent I'll deliver text that has had a determining influence on our ideas of desire—the cour-you from this miserable tesan Diotima explains to Socrates the parentage of Eros, the god of love. Place, and put you in the Eros's father was Contrivance, or Cunning, and his mother was Poverty, or Condition you deserve. This Love is doubtless Need. Eros takes after his parents: he is constantly in need, which he is con-sudden, but 'tis an Effect of stantly contriving to fill. As the god of love, he knows that love cannot be your great Beauty. I love induced in another person unless they too feel need. And that is what his you as much in a quarter of an Hour as I shou'd arrows do: piercing people's flesh, they make them feel a lack, an ache, a another in six Months. hunger. This is the essence of your task as a seducer. Like Eros, you must —MOLIÈRE, DON JOHN; OR,

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  mediately he went to work, molding her into the Lola of his imagination. EDGAR MORIN, THE STARS, He changed her hair, drew a silver line down her nose to make it seem TRANSLATED BY RICHARD HOWARD thinner, taught her to look at the camera with the insolence he had seen onstage. When filming began, he created a lighting system just for her—a light that tracked her wherever she went, and was strategically heightened When Pygmalion saw by gauze and smoke. Obsessed with his "creation," he followed her every- these women, living such where. No one else could go near her. wicked lives, he was 121 122 • The Art of Seduction revolted by the many faults The Blue Angel was a huge success in Germany. Audiences were fasci-which nature has nated with Dietrich: that cold, brutal stare as she spread her legs over a implanted in the female stool, baring her underwear; her effortless way of commanding attention sex, and long lived a bachelor existence, without on screen. Others besides von Sternberg became obsessed with her. A man any wife to share his home. dying of cancer, Count Sascha Kolowrat, had one last wish: to see Mar-But meanwhile, with lene's legs in person. Dietrich obliged, visiting him in the hospital and lift-marvelous artistry, he ing up her skirt; he sighed and said "Thank you. Now I can die happy." skillfully carved a snowy ivory statue. He made it Soon Paramount Studios brought Dietrich to Hollywood, where everyone lovelier than any woman was quickly talking about her. At a party, all eyes would turn toward her born, and fell in love with when she came into the room. She would be escorted by the most hand-his own creation. The statue had all the some men in Hollywood, and would be wearing an outfit both beautiful appearance of a real girl, so and unusual—gold-lame pajamas, a sailor suit with a yachting cap. The that it seemed to be alive, next day the look would be copied by women all over town; next it would to want to move, did not modesty forbid. So cleverly spread to magazines, and a whole new trend would start. did his art conceal its art. The real object of fascination, however, was unquestionably Dietrich's Pygmalion gazed in face. What had enthralled von Sternberg was her blankness—with a simple wonder, and in his heart lighting trick he could make that face do whatever he wanted. Dietrich there rose a passionate love for this image of a human eventually stopped working with von Sternberg, but never forgot what he form. Often he ran his had taught her. One night in 1951, the director Fritz Lang, who was about hands over the work, to direct her in the film Rancho Notorious, was driving past his office when feeling it to see whether it was flesh or ivory, and he saw a light flash in the window. Fearing a burglary, he got out of his car, would not yet admit that

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Reese wanted to end their games, to get hit in a way that would affirm, once and for all, what she wanted to feel about her womanhood: her delicacy, her helplessness, her infuriating attractiveness. After all, Every woman adores a Fascist. Reese spent a lifetime observing cis women confirm their genders through male violence. Watch any movie on the Lifetime channel. Go to any schoolyard. Or just watch your local heterosexuals drinking in a bar. Hear women define themselves through pain, or rage against the assumption that they do, which still places pain front and center. Hear the strange sense of satisfaction when they talk about the men who have hurt them—the unspoken subtext of it being because I am a woman. The quiet dignity of saying ow anytime a man gets a little rough—asserting that you are a woman, and thus delicate and capable of sustaining harm. A girl could be twice the size of the man —that little ow reminds him that he is a man, she is a woman. Once, Reese’s friend Catherine was walking home drunk with her boyfriend when he tried to flirt with her by pushing her into a bush. She bounced back out of that bush like an enraged wolverine: spitting, scratching, fighting. For the rest of her relationship with him, he would say, “Careful, Catherine is aggressive,” and Catherine would wince, understanding her womanhood was on the line every time. A good woman, she heard in the subtext, would have stayed in the bush and cried. If only some man would push Reese into a bush, she’d know what to do. Anyone who had shared a hotel room wall with Reese and Stanley could attest that Stanley had laid hands on Reese before. He took his belt to her ass on their second date and told her he wouldn’t stop until she cried—tears fell after six strokes, she sobbed after eight, and twenty minutes later she shuddered her way to a tectonic orgasm. A few years back, Reese might have thought their play extremely racy, titillating, and far beyond the sexual ken of most women—she thought of the desire for violence in sex as some kind of resulting damage from being trans. Then, at around age twenty-three, she watched the Catherine Deneuve film, Belle de Jour, and recognized her own sexuality in the upper-crust Belle’s secret desire to be mistreated and abused as a whore. Which meant that the strain of masochism that ran through her sexuality was only as racy as a fifty- year-old film that shared a marquee with romances starring Doris Day. Everything about Reese’s sexuality, she realized, was banal. Sex at the edge of abuse is banal. And when it comes to gender, consent makes it all pretend, which left consensual violence lacking real value in Reese’s tally of gender affirmation.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “I saw you looking at me,” Amy said—boldly, in Reese’s opinion. “You look familiar, have we met before? Maybe we know each other from online?” “No,” said Reese, not thinking before she spoke. “I would have remembered.” Amy smiled, unsure if she’d been offered a compliment. “You look spookily like someone I used to know,” Reese said. “Who was she?” Amy asked. And suddenly the trap that Reese had inadvertently set for herself sprung. There was no way to admit that she had been thinking of a boy. Such admissions will scar a baby trans. Fuck it, Reese thought. Ill flirt my way out of this one; it’s what I want anyway. “An old lover,” Reese said, and looked hard at Amy, whose backlit face remained slightly shadowed with her hair haloed. “One of my best.” Amy laughed lightly, then squinted at Reese to see if she had been teased. Reese indicated nothing, simply held her gaze. “All right,” Amy said after a moment, with a slight nod, as if affirming an offer. “Good.” All week they texted each other and it was breathplay—a tiny suffocation veering toward death between every blip of dopamine- bestowing communication. On a night that Stanley had gone to dinner with his friends, and Reese knew he’d be out for hours, she invited Amy over. Reese ignored Amy’s questioning eyes, which cast about the lush masculine apartment, and just led her to Stanley’s bed, stripped her bare to finger and toy her until she came. Afterward, Amy observed, “You have a working fireplace in your apartment?” Reese understood that Amy was asking a question she couldn’t bring herself to say directly. “He pays for everything.” “He?” “My boyfriend. Or whatever he is.” “Tf he’s not your boyfriend, what is he?” “Mostly an asshole.” Amy laughed, assuming that Reese’s insult had been affectionate; careful to maintain a tactful distance between her own hopes and the primacy she assumed Reese still gave to her boyfriend in matters of love. But Reese betrayed no humor. Amy caught her laugh, suddenly protective. “He’s an asshole?” “Unquestionably so.” “Why don’t you leave?” Reese shrugged. She had half affected a world-weary attitude about Stanley to impress Amy, but at the question, the weariness congealed into a real emotion. “And go where?” In one of those wild leaps that come only at the outset of a devastating crush, Amy blurted out: “Come live with me!” Reese turned, cocked her head to the side, then reached out to tip Amy’s chin toward her. “You want to U-Haul already? You really are a lesbian, huh?”

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  “So first day of summer, I’m in grand old Vine Station with this boy named Justin and we’re at his house watching TV on the couch—and mind you, I’m already dating Jake—actually I’m still dating him, miraculously enough, but Justin is a friend of mine from when I was a kid and so we’re watching TV and literally chatting about the SATs or something, and Justin puts his arm around me and I think, Oh that’s nice, we’ve been friends for so long and this is totally comfortable , and we’re just chatting and then I’m in the middle of a sentence about analogies or something and like a hawk he reaches down and he honks my boob. HONK . A much-too-firm, two- to three-second HONK . And the first thing I thought was Okay, how do I extricate this claw from my boob before it leaves permanent marks? and the second thing I thought was God, I can’t wait to tell Takumi and the Colonel .” The Colonel laughed. I stared, stunned partly by the force of the voice emanating from the petite (but God, curvy) girl and partly by the gigantic stacks of books that lined her walls. Her library filled her bookshelves and then overflowed into waist-high stacks of books everywhere, piled haphazardly against the walls. If just one of them moved, I thought, the domino effect could engulf the three of us in an asphyxiating mass of literature. “Who’s the guy that’s not laughing at my very funny story?” she asked. “Oh, right. Alaska, this is Pudge. Pudge memorizes people’s last words. Pudge, this is Alaska. She got her boob honked over the summer.” She walked over to me with her hand extended, then made a quick move downward at the last moment and pulled down my shorts. “Those are the biggest shorts in the state of Alabama!” “I like them baggy,” I said, embarrassed, and pulled them up. They had been cool back home in Florida. “So far in our relationship, Pudge, I’ve seen your chicken legs entirely too often,” the Colonel deadpanned. “So, Alaska. Sell us some cigarettes.” And then somehow, the Colonel talked me into paying five dollars for a pack of Marlboro Lights I had no intention of ever smoking. He asked Alaska to join us, but she said, “I have to find Takumi and tell him about The Honk.” She turned to me and asked, “Have you seen him?” I had no idea whether I’d seen Takumi, since I had no idea who he was. I just shook my head. “All right. Meet ya at the lake in a few minutes, then.” The Colonel nodded. — At the edge of the lake, just before the sandy (and, the Colonel told me, fake) beach, we sat down in an Adirondack swing.