Excitement

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 My Secret Garden (1973)

  Conversely, as straightforward with me as women have been in discussing their sexual thoughts of other women, and as accepting of themselves for having them, their men have been just the opposite in regard to their own homosexual thoughts. Women say that their descriptions of their own erotic fantasies of other women may even bring a fond smile to their lover’s lips; homoeroticism between women seems to be acceptable to men, and indeed is often a sexual turn-on. But any suggestion that the man might have these same feelings about other men is treated as an insult or a threat. It’s one thing for women to have this kind of thoughts, but quite another (ugly, dirty) for a man. ChristineI’ve had this fantasy many times, as often when I’m with a man as when I’m alone, masturbating. I think the first time I had it I really was in a steam bath; afterward, I couldn’t wait to get home to Ted, I was that heated up and ravenous for him. I’ve never told him about it. Not because I’m ashamed of it or anything; I have no real desire for another woman, would probably jump a mile if one approached me “that way.” No, I simply don’t tell him about it because thinking it gives me such immense pleasure when we’re screwing… and I’d hate to take the chance of losing that by breaking the secrecy. This is it:

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  Then I met a man who seemed exciting. I have met three of his male friends, and I might add that we are broad-minded and at times have a small sex party at which we are all nude. Here again I have fantasies. I am not in love with any of them, but enjoy being fucked by them while the others watch. While I am actually being penetrated, I think of one of the other men present. One is dark-skinned, as he is Italian, and has a large penis. When another man is inside me I pretend it is the Italian. I seldom come when I am fucked. I come when I play with myself or use a vibrator alone in my apartment. Yet I simulate a climax just to make the man feel happy and often use obscene language. I buy many sex books, and I even have an album of girlie pictures. When I want to feel naughty I place this on a bedside table and with my vibrator and tape recorder I actually speak out loud and think of some man or maybe some girl whose body I long to play with. I am not crackers. I am very normal but sex interests me enormously. I will never marry. I would be faithless, I know. I like my own body far too much and like other people playing with it! [Letter] AlexandraI am seventeen and have had one intimate affair with a man. Once, when we were making love in the car, we had stopped in front of the public school that I attended as a child. I remember now that I secretly laughed at the thought of how ironic it was. I tried to imagine myself as a child looking upon this situation. Perhaps because I was now doing something forbidden as a child, it excited me. My first masturbating experience was after I had read Candy. I still remember because I pretended that I was the girl in that book and for the first time I had an orgasm. I didn’t know what it was then, but I soon found out. For a while there I was reaching an orgasm at least once a day. I would read a “dirty” book and then reread the lines in my head as I masturbated. After reading an uncounted number of books, I began putting together my own stories, or fantasies.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  JessieMy husband and I do talk during sex, especially when he is feeling me. But the best sessions we have are when we both imagine that we are giving an exhibition on anything to do with sex. I usually strip while my husband lies on the bed describing every detail of me. I stand in front of our large mirror and have to do what he says. The language we use on these occasions really excites me. I end up caressing my titties and masturbating. When he strips, I part his legs and take the penis in my mouth. We have a session of oral sex, then we rub oil over each of us and go through a pattern of different positions. Rear entry in front of the mirror is best. Then we can see how we look to our imaginary audience and I can see it in me and also play with my clitoris, which by this time is really on end. [Letter] EstherI am fifty years old, and my husband is fifty-four. We have two children, both married. We are both college graduates, and my husband has an above-average income, which permits us to travel quite extensively. Since I was about twenty-eight, we have enjoyed a very active and varied sex life. My husband (I will use the name Bill) approves of all my sex activities, whether participating, assisting, or merely looking on. He would never be jealous or angry at anything I might tell him, if it enhanced my sex feeling. He insists that I mention the fact that my body is firm and trim, with about the same weight and measurements I had at thirty. We both believe that lots of sex is the best figure control a woman can practice. I do not often fantasize during coitus with Bill, but it does happen on occasion. We vocalize a lot, giving directions, telling each other how it feels, etc. I fantasize continuously while I masturbate. I conjure up many images at different times, depending how I am doing it. My most frequent image is of my boxer screwing me (this actually happens about every other day). Sometimes I fantasize sex with two men. I do it by alternating dildos between my vagina and my mouth, pretending that I am being screwed by one and Frenching the other. At times I have carried this further to include three men, by inserting a small dildo in my anus. Less elaborate fantasies have included my brother, my sister’s husband, an uncle, and numerous attractive men we know.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  So the son and I begin, the father sitting there watching as I undress the boy, caress him, totally initiate him. But it’s not the boy that excites me in this fantasy, it isn’t the idea of having a young boy, it’s the idea of being watched by the father. I don’t know if it’s voyeurism, or if having the father there, having him bring his son to me, is some kind of sexual approval. Or if it’s having him watch the son, watch me with the son. Part of the excitement is that he’s brought the son to me. That of all the women in the world, he has picked me to initiate the boy. Or maybe the real turn-on is incest. Because I also like to fantasize family orgies. Not my family, but whole families, mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons, all come to this flat of mine. Yes, my husband is here, too, but a faceless husband. Everybody performs on everybody: The mothers show me what they’ve been doing to their daughters, and to their sons; and the fathers to the daughters… everybody! And it’s a very happy scene, very happy, very sensual. The family that fucks together stays together… I guess that’s the message. [Taped interview] LolaI was pregnant when I got married at seventeen. But as I’d begun fucking when I was fourteen, I’d had a good three years of fun playing around on my own… all of which I owe to my two brothers. One was a year older than me and the other a year younger. What happened was one day they found me messing about—quite innocently—with some boys at school. They blackmailed me, threatening all sorts of things; they said that if I didn’t go all the way with those boys—and let them watch—they’d tell our parents what I’d been up to. Since what I’d been up to was far more innocent than what they wanted me to do, I don’t know why I gave in to their threats. I suppose because I quite simply wanted to be fucked. I remember my brothers standing on the sidelines, instructing the other boys how to “do” me (we were all virgins at that point), and I remember to this day the combination of fear and excitement that their presence added to what was happening. Although neither of my brothers ever entered me themselves, they do in my fantasies, they always have.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  I imagined that I was asleep on the couch at their place, when I was awakened from my sleep by someone’s hands on the insides of my thighs. I did not look at who it was. I didn’t want to know, yet I didn’t want to stop whoever it was. The hands worked their way up until they spread my legs apart. Before I knew it I could feel the warmth of a tongue sliding across my clitoris, then, just as quickly, that tongue was deep inside me, along with a few fingers. I was pulsating from the pleasure. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. I was imagining that it was my friend’s girlfriend, that’s who I wanted it to be anyway. I felt as if I was suffocating from the pleasure and the scent of my own juices. I wanted her to kiss me so that I could taste myself. Suddenly the hands were unbuttoning my top and fondling my swollen breasts. It was at this point that I opened my eyes and saw that it was her! She said to me, knowing that I had never done anything like this before, “Do you want to try it on me?” I almost begged her to let me. I was exhilarated at the thought of touching another woman’s breasts and tasting the sweet juices of a woman. She spread my legs apart and sat between them with her back to me. She took my hands and placed them on her wonderfully large breasts. Oh, they felt perfect in the cups of my hands. I never wanted to let go! Then she turned and crossed her legs over mine so that we were facing each other, both fully naked. Our pussies were so close I could almost feel the heat from between her legs on mine. She looked at me and said, “It’s okay, you can touch it” and nodded to her vagina. I hesitated but slowly began to caress her center. It became very wet and I could see the look in her eyes. She had just come from the simple touch of my fingers. That was enough to make me come twice. She kissed me, smiled, said thank you and left as swiftly as she had come. I laid back in total peace and fell fast asleep dreaming all night of my encounter. I know these fantasies are both long, but when I have them they are in such detail! Before reading your work, I would feel dirty about my fantasies. Now I know that they are perfectly normal. I actually am able to enjoy my fantasies now and not hate myself for having them. My fiancé loves my newfound freedom too, because he benefits directly from it!

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  Most of the guys that I have had sex with wouldn’t get uptight about knowing that I was thinking about someone else when I was having sex with them. I’m sure that sexy girls who turn them on come into their thoughts, too. Besides, a guy has no right to get angry about what I’m thinking about as long as I’m giving him what he wants. I masturbate almost every day, and I almost always fantasize when I do. One of my favorites is to think about having a boy who turns me on tied up. He is helpless, and I take down his pants and play with his penis. When he is almost ready to come I stop and just watch him suffer. Then I make him do what I guess is called cunnilingus to me before I finally play with his penis until he comes. When I pet with boys I like to have them do cunnilingus (I usually just call it eating my pie) to me, and when I masturbate I like to think about guys doing that to me. Sometimes when I masturbate I play with my nipples and then I like to imagine that a boy is sucking on them. Lots of the time, I just imagine that a guy is fucking me and that my finger is his penis going in and out of me. I keep doing it until I’m worn out from coming. One of my weirdest fantasies is about being spanked. I imagine that some guy who really turns me on grabs me, lifts my skirt, takes down my panties, and spanks my bottom until it really hurts. Then when I cry he kisses my bottom all over and does cunnilingus to me. I have sucked some guys’ penises when I’ve petted with them, and every once in a while I’ll think about that when I masturbate. I sometimes suck on my thumb when I try to imagine that. I guess that the most common thing in all of my fantasies is to think about having the boy under my control and being able to make him do whatever I want him to do to please me. I think about myself sitting on a big chair like a throne with my skirt pulled up and my panties off and the boy is kneeling between my legs doing cunnilingus to me. Sometimes if I really feel devilish I imagine that I pee in his mouth and he has to swallow it. In the fantasies like this the boy’s hands are tied so that he cannot touch me except with his mouth. Usually he is naked and sometimes I imagine that I am whipping him when he is kneeling in front of me like that. I usually add to these fantasies in whatever way I feel like at the time. I have other fantasies, but these are my favorites right now.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  MaraI have actually acted out one of my fantasies, that of having sex with a colored man. When I describe this to my husband it really gets him going. If I add on top of this image the idea of being on exhibition, it gets me so keyed up I can even see the expressions on the faces of the people watching. When my husband and I talk about these things it is easier to explain what we really think and feel, but of course most people, especially women, don’t want to talk about taboo subjects. If you brought up the subject they would think you were sex-mad, when really it’s the most interesting thing there is, and you are able by talking, and only by talking, to find out what makes people different. [Letter] JoanI think my fantasies began when I was quite young, but I have always remembered the first thing that really started me off. I still find it exciting to think about. I was about twelve and knew as much about sex as the next girl, I suppose. One day, two other girls and myself were in the park with several boys fifteen or sixteen years old. They bullied a younger boy to expose himself to us. This obviously fascinated all three of us girls, and as you might have guessed, the next thing that happened was an intensive petting session between us and the older boys. It may sound strange, but I can’t really remember if one of those boys really got all the way inside me or not. But throughout it all, and still to this day, I can remember seeing that small red knob coming out through the foreskin, and I remember wondering whatever that little red thing was that was coming out toward me.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  A: It’s beautiful when you get someone to talk to you. I love that. Fantastic. I can really lose my mind. It’s only half a fuck when you do it silently, it’s like you’re by yourself. But when a guy’s inside you and saying, “Oh baby, I love to fuck you like this,” and telling you about how it feels and then I tell him how it feels and what I’m thinking and when he hears that, oh wow, he just fucks me all the wilder. Oh, yes, I love to chat while I’m fucking. It gives me encouragement, makes me want to do even wilder things. If a guy doesn’t talk to you while he’s fucking you, you don’t dare to do certain things. It’s like he’s cheering you on when he talks. Guys spend a lot of time wondering what chicks are thinking about when they’re fucking them… I think it worries some of them. But the only way fucking can get better is when you tell them, and they like it. And you’ve got to say it right, you’ve got to use the exciting words, you’ve got to be vulgar, or it doesn’t mean anything. Because when you’re fucking, you should use fucking words. You’ve got to be vulgar, really vulgar. Q: Fucking is not about vaginas and other medical terms, it’s about cunts and cocks… A: You’re not going to the doctor, are you? You’re being fucked. I love to say, “Oh, I’d love to be naughty, darling, I’m thinking such naughty things…” Q: When you think of him fucking another guy, where are you in your fantasies? Watching? Are you fucking, too? A: My favorite is that he’s fucking me while another guy is fucking him. That way I can imagine what he’s feeling, too. It’s also like I’m sharing in what he’s feeling, like the cock going into him is also going into me, so like there’s extra pressure from above. I’m getting two cocks. Q: When you think about other girls are you in the active role or the passive role? A: I like to be the aggressive one. Maybe because that way I’m like a guy fucking a chick. I like to be able to think what he’s feeling, because what he does to me makes me feel so good. So I think about me doing wild things with these other chicks. Q: Most women I’ve talked to say they have had thoughts about other women. They seem to accept this; they don’t feel guilty about it. A: When I see a girl naked, I usually get excited. Then I think, wow. Q: Wow, you’d like to fuck her, or see her being fucked? A: Mostly that I’d like to see her legs apart, see her being fucked by some guy. Q: Your guy?

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  My husband encourages me to fantasize and urges me to describe my fantasies to him. He becomes very aroused, for instance, if I tell him that I masturbated that day and describe to him what I was thinking about while I masturbated. I have even at times told him of some of my fantasizing while we were making love. Any verbalization of this kind adds to his excitement. He has at times asked me to pretend he was an old lover and to describe my feelings and reactions. I have also asked my husband to pretend I am someone else while making love to me. I have once or twice pretended I was a boy and asked my husband to pretend the same while balling me anally. But although it excites him to hear me telling him my fantasies while we’re making love, he later becomes depressed at the thought of what I’ve been thinking. He asks to hear my fantasies, but later I’m afraid they repel him; he becomes disgusted with himself for becoming excited by that kind of thing. All in all, I think I’ve decided to keep my very pleasurable fantasies to myself in future. [Letter] WinnieOkay, here goes… (I may have to go and masturbate before I can finish this, as my mind goes blank.) I have often thought it would be very yummy (and now that I think of it, very messy, too) if somebody would pee inside me (depends on who’s washing the sheets). I never had this actually occur, but often thought about it and talked about it to men who seem to think it might be impossible. It is impossible—why? think I—because they can’t pee and have a hard-on at the same time? I suppose this is destined to remain a fantasy, unless I can find some physical wizard. Also, I’ve been thinking about something and can’t remember if I talked to you about it when we met: I recently was wondering if it isn’t unpleasant to have all of your fantasies played out and then you don’t have any more. See what I mean? Like… if a person does all those things she thinks she would like to do, where will she get any more fantasies? Just a thought. [Letter from a friend] LorettaThe most significant thing I have discovered about my fantasies is that they are far more exciting as fantasies than as reality. I speak from experience. Carrying them out was a disappointment. The fantasy was, in truth, more exciting than doing it. I shall say no more than that my fantasy was to be dominated, to be tied up. [Letter]

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  When we got home I asked her if seeing Alan Ladd always did that to her, and she replied that it was so and that she often fantasized about him when we were making love. But she said it wasn’t the same as seeing him in a film because I wasn’t tough enough with her. In fact, she thought I was too kind with her, so there and then I knocked her onto the settee, stripped off her clothes and mine, switched out the lights and told her to call me Alan and to do what she wanted with me or tell me what she wanted Alan to do to her. It was fantastic! She told me she had always wanted him to fuck her while he was on his horse and she was sitting astride facing him. So we pretended this, with me sitting on the settee while she played jockey on me. Unfortunately, that first time didn’t last long, as you can well imagine. Now I realize how totally uninhibited we were then for such a young couple, because all the time she was crying out, “Fuck me harder, Alan—what a lovely big cock you have,” and so on and so forth; no wonder I came quickly. As soon as I had come, she knelt in front of me and said, “I’ve always wanted to suck you off, Alan, and now I am.” And my God, so she did! We went to bed and she was insatiable. In fact, it was so wonderful that next day I went to an army surplus store and bought an army officer’s trench coat and also a felt slouch hat of the type he wore. I wore them home from the office, and when I went in the house she burst out crying. Apparently she had been afraid of what I might have thought about her behavior and would regret what had happened the night before. May I say that I am one man who never objected to my wife—I should say, my late wife’s—fantasizing with Alan Ladd. In fact, I must have seen more of his films than any other man in the world. This, however, was not the end. When Sean Connery made his debut as James Bond in the films of the books by Ian Fleming, she found that he “turned her on,” as the modern idiom says, and away we went again. Of course, we had become more sophisticated as we grew older and would have looked silly necking in the cinema. But as soon as we’d left the cinema, and I was driving home, she would have my slacks open and would suck me off, while I was driving with one hand and bringing her off with the other. This is not advocated in the Highway Code, by the way, but as I always drive an automatic, there was no hand brake or gear lever in the way.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  It wasn’t until I was at college in the late eighties that I actually read Sexual Politics, pressed into my hands by a fellow student of English literature who, like me, was trying to assimilate the alien language and sensibilities of Victorian literature. By that time, feminist literary theory had developed into a relatively well-trafficked critical genre; it was no longer unusual for critics to examine literary texts through its prism. But I wasn’t yet aware of that. Having been taught in high school to read literary texts according to principles derived from the New Criticism—close reading, dissection of metaphor and symbol—it was shocking and exhilarating to discover Millett’s audacious coupling of an explicit political critique with a technically skilled literary dissection. Her book exploded the tidy conceit in which I had been schooled: that literary criticism and social politics were things apart from one another. Rereading Sexual Politics today, I am struck anew by two things. One is that, while Millett was publicly cast in the polarizing role of polemicist, there is often in her tone the cool, controlled archness of the literary essayist, a role she might easily have inhabited had the times not called upon her to do otherwise. The book is suffused with a strain of very dark, angry humor, an aspect of Millett’s writing that seems to have been barely noticed—or was perhaps invisible—upon publication. Take, for example, the way she dispatches Freud’s injunction that appropriate sexual development calls for an evolution from clitoral to vaginal orgasm. She calls this “a difficult passage in which Freud foresaw that many women might go astray. Even among the successful the project has consumed so much of their productive youth that their minds stagnate” (199). If Sexual Politics has endured, it is not just because so much of the political work it recommends remains undone, but also because it is an astringent pleasure to be in the company of Millett on the page. The other remarkable fact that rereading Sexual Politics now brings to light is this: at the time it was written, literature was agreed to be something worth fighting over. Whatever arguments there are still to be made about the status of women within contemporary society, it seems beyond imagining that a book which made its case via literary analyses of John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin—or even D. H. Lawrence and Jean Genet—would be championed as Sexual Politics was. It is similarly unimaginable that a book offering a feminist critique of leading contemporary novelists would gain the kind of cultural traction achieved by Sexual Politics, with its analyses of Norman Mailer and Henry Miller.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  Behind this sentence stood Antelope High, a building of gray cinderblock that was the town’s only school, serving all grades. You had to walk past a gaggle of high-school kids smoking to get up the steps. Boys had carved their hair into large doo-dah rolls. The girls wore cat’s-eye liner and beehives. You could smell the hair oil and peroxide ten feet away. In Leechfield the older boys had been crew-cut. Most had worn button-down shirts and cardigans like the teenagers on TV, except for a few farm kids who showed up in clean overalls and brogans. These Colorado kids seemed older somehow. The girls smoked right in public, instead of hiding in the bathroom or behind the skating rink like they had back home. Somebody’s transistor radio hidden in pocket or handbag was playing what sounded like “Louie Louie.” A black-haired girl with unbelievably precise ebony spit curls on both her pale cheeks was doing the Dirty Dog to this song right in front of everybody. She humped the air and held her white frosted lips pooched out. I’d only seen that dance done in Texas at a slumber party by somebody’s wicked cousin from Louisiana. I moved past her all slack-jawed, for I judged that dance the moral equivalent of a strip show. We walked up waxed entry stairs to a wall covered with brass hooks screwed floor to ceiling at exact intervals. Sleds were stacked off to one side, next to low shelves for boots. For the first time, I realized I’d get to see snow there. There’d be snowballs and lumpy snowmen and sledding like I’d only seen in books. I resolved to fatten up, maybe even get some Wate-On, which was what Junior Dillard’s brother had ordered from the back of a comic book to beef up for football. He’d later complained that it turned his teeth gray. But I was sick of shopping for baby clothes when vast circular racks of dresses marked “Chubbies” got picked over by the bigger girls. Gray teeth or no, I wanted to make more of myself. Lecia tipped my face up with a finger under my chin. She said if I got in a nickel’s worth of trouble that day she’d snatch me bald-headed after school. Then she glanced around to be sure nobody saw before smashing my arms against my sides in what was supposed to be a hug. She went clicking off in her new patent-leather shoes. She needn’t have bothered threatening me, for there were no teachers around to get in trouble with. The school had taken up something called self-paced learning, which meant kids worked independently through a progression of reading folders and math folders. Student monitors oversaw the classes. The teachers stayed in the lounge all day smoking and eating from big Tupperware containers they took turns bringing in—brownies and cupcakes and cookies by the boatload. I was put in the fourth grade.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  She asks me do I need to stay home again, seeing as how I earped yesterday. And I say no way. Lecia sits up in her heap of bedcovers, blinking. I’ve got my plaid satchel in my lap. I’ve matched my Ban-Lon socks and folded them to the exact right length; I’m immaculately turned out in my school clothes like I’ve never been before. Really, I say, I feel lots better. There’s stuff at school I’d rather eat a bug than miss.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  “This affair had however no ruinous consequences, the young gentleman escaping then, and many more times undiscovered. But the warmth of my constitution, that made the pleasures of love a kind of necessary of life to me, having betrayed me into indiscretions fatal to my private fortune, I fell at length to the public; from which, it is probable, I might have met with the worst of ruin, if my better fate had not thrown me into this safe and agreeable refuge.” Here Louisa ended; and these little histories having brought the time for the girls to retire, and to prepare for the revels of the evening, I staid with Mrs. Cole, till Emily came, and told us the company was met, and waited for us. Mrs. Cole on this, taking me by the hand, with a smile of encouragement, led me up stairs, preceded by Louisa, who was come to hasten us, and lighted us with two candles, one in each hand. On the landing-place of the first pair of stairs, we were met by a young gentleman, extremely well dressed, and a very pretty figure, to whom I was to be indebted for the first essay of the pleasures of the house. He saluted me with great gallantry, and handed me into the drawing room, the floor of which was overspread with a Turkey carpet, and all its furniture voluptuously adapted to every demand of the most studied luxury; now too it was, by means of a profuse illumination, enlivened by a light scarce inferior, and perhaps more favourable to joy, more tenderly pleasing, than that of broad sunshine. On my entrance into the room, I had the satisfaction! to hear a buzz of approbation run through the whole company, which now consisted of four gentlemen, including my particular (this was the cant term of the house for one’s gallant for the time), the three young-women, in a neat flowing dishabille, the mistress of the academy, and myself. I was welcomed and saluted by a kiss all round, in which, however, it was easy to discover, in the superior warmth of that of the men, the distinction of the sexes. Awed, and confounded as I was, at seeing myself surrounded, caressed, and made court to by so many strangers, I could not immediately familiarize myself to all that air of gaiety and joy, which dictated their compliments, and animated their caresses.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  A treasured and fundamental ingredient of classical gastronomy since Roman times, it will likely disappear entirely from menus in my lifetime. A tragedy, but a predictable one. The PETA folks have been very clever in picking foie gras as a front. Though they know full well that there are worse, more widespread examples of institutionalized animal cruelty (mass-produced chicken, for instance), they likely saw this as an easy win. What politician can realistically be expected to stand up for chefs, taking the public position that they are for the force-feeding of cute ducks and geese so a few rich people who can afford it can sup on their distended livers? Not a vote-getter . . . We shall surely lose this struggle in the end. I'm resigned to it—just as I'm resigned to the fact that I can no longer smoke in a bar in New York, a pub in Ireland, or a restaurant in Sicily. But in the losing, I'd sure like to see the rotten fucks who terrorized Chef Manrique's family identified, arrested, convicted, sentenced to prison for a very long time, and mistreated terribly there—learning firsthand, one would hope, about the gag reflex. It's no less than they deserve. SLEAZE GONE BY Oooh. I'm so bad. I'm so street . . . A pretty glib, wildly over-romanticized look at the New York City of my misspent youth, as written for British readers. Like crack was somehow a good thing? What a twat I was when I wrote this. Not that I don't miss the Forty-second Street grind houses and the Terminal Bar and Hawaii Kai. But feigning nostalgia for getting ripped off at knifepoint? Withdrawal symptoms? Selling my possessions on the street? Dope dealers with clubs and guns? Feral crackheads? Who was I kidding? The bullshit meter is flashing bright red. PURE AND UNCUT LUXURY An earnest attempt at food porn, and a pretty good one, I think, as I'm getting a hard-on rereading it. I did not exaggerate. This is exactly how good Masa was that magical evening. Whenever I want to treat myself to something very special, I take myself there and indulge. Beg, borrow, steal, stick up a liquor store— whatever it takes to get the money—but for God's sake, go! Bring plenty of extra, as you'll want additional pieces of tuna. THE HUNGRY AMERICAN My love affair with Vietnam continues. What I failed to mention in this piece is that on this, my second trip to the country, as soon as I arrived (with Chris and Lydia in tow), as soon as we stepped through the airport doors, saw Linh, looked out at that enchanted place we'd previously come to adore, we all burst into tears. Why Vietnam, above all other countries I've visited? Maybe it's pheromonic. Maybe every person has a special place, a place that's just right for them. Maybe it's Linh and Madame Ngoc and the friends I've made there.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  A meaningless life for a human being has none of the dignity of animal unselfconsciousness; we cannot simply eat, sleep, hunt and reproduce – we are meaning-seeking creatures. The Western world has done away with religion but not with religious impulses; we seem to need some higher purpose, some point to our lives – money and leisure, social progress, are just not enough. 26 Winterson is surely right here. The cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz earlier suggested that human beings are ‘symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking animals’, who are driven to ‘make sense out of experience, and give it some form and order’. 27 Humanity ‘cannot live in a world it is unable to understand.’ Nobody is sure why human beings find the concept of ‘meaning’ to be so significant; what we do know is that humans flourish when they have it and wither when they don’t. As mentioned, I discovered Marxism in the late 1960s. It was exhilarating, offering me precisely what Winterson identified as central human needs – ‘some higher purpose, some point to our lives’. So let me tell you a little more about my own teenage longings for certainty, how I once believed these were met in Marxism and what I learned from my encounter with this worldview. Reflections of a Lapsed Marxist I was a nerdy scientist during my teenage years, studying at the Methodist College Belfast, one of Northern Ireland’s largest schools. I loved the natural sciences for two reasons: first, they allowed me to engage with the beauty and mystery of nature in an intellectually rigorous way and, second, because they seemed to offer me evidence-based certainties about life. My growing fascination with chemistry helped me grasp how a good scientific theory could organise and explain what otherwise was a jumble of observations. Dmitri Mendeleev’s brilliant analytical tool of the Periodic Table of the Elements (1869) organised chemical elements in a way that both accounted for their distinct properties, while suggesting (correctly) that there were gaps in the scheme that would be filled with as yet undiscovered elements. It seemed to me that, just as Mendeleev had found a way of bringing theoretical order to the otherwise puzzling habits of chemical elements, Marx had developed a way of thinking that brought order and meaning to the historical process, enabling not merely its comprehension but its acceleration through informed human intervention towards its inevitable goal. Marx’s theory was my first experience of a big picture approach to reality and I found it deeply satisfying, even inspiring. Marxism seemed able to make sense of the social world but, more importantly, it created space for me .

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  I was now embarked, and thoroughly determined on any voyage the company would take me on. The first that stood up, to open the ball, were a cornet of horse, and that sweetest of olive-beauties, the soft and amorous Louisa. He led her to the couch (nothing loth), on which he gave her the fall, and extended her at length with an air of roughness and vigour, relishing high of amorous eagerness and impatience. The girl, spreading herself to the best advantage, with her head upon the pillow, was so concentered in that she was about, that our presence was the least of her care and concern. Her petticoats, thrown up with her shift, discovered to the company the finest turned legs and thighs that could be imagined, and in broad display, that gave us a full view of that delicious cleft of flesh, into which the pleasing hair, grown mount over it, parted and presented a most inviting entrance, between two close hedges, delicately soft and pouting. Her gallant was now ready, having disencumbered himself from his clothes, overloaded with lace, and presently, his shirt removed, shewed us his forces at high plight, bandied and ready for action. But giving us no time to consider the dimensions, he threw himself instantly over his charming antagonist who received him as he pushed at once dead at mark, like a heroine, without flinching; for surely never was girl constitutionally truer to the taste of joy, or sincerer in the expressions of its sensations, than she was: we could observe pleasure lighten in her eyes, as he introduced his plenipotentiary instrument into her; till, at length, having indulged her to its utmost reach, its irritations grew so violent, and gave her the spurs so furiously, that collected within herself, and lost to every thing but the enjoyment of her favourite feelings, she retarded his thrusts with a just concert of spring heaves, keeping time so exactly with the most pathetic sighs, that one might have numbered the strokes in agitation by their distinct murmurs, whilst her active limbs kept wreathing and intertwisting with his, in convulsive folds: then the turtle-billing kisses, and the poignant painless lovebites, which they both exchanged, in a rage of delight, all conspiring towards the melting period. It soon came on, when Louisa, in the ravings of her pleasure-frensy, impotent of all restraint, cried out: “Oh Sir!...

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  Joey was hired to fly along, to squire us through plane changes. He right off got wasted on scotch in the bar while Lecia and I wolfed peanuts and sipped Shirley Temples. Our square-bottomed stools were covered in black Naugahyde. They swiveled, bumping into each other like big padded metronomes marking off the morning. On the bar before us, our twin Barbies sat, backs ramrod straight. They had on matching prom dresses in baby-blue crinoline with silver sashes. But we’d lost their white plastic sandals in transit, so their arched feet stuck out bare. Joey’s first act on the plane, after he’d buckled Lecia and me into our seats across the aisle, was to barf volubly into his airsick bag. Lecia and I then dug down in our seat pockets, so our Barbies could do their own make-believe barfing, which troubled the old woman cat-a-corner from me. She sighed disapproval. She shook her head so hard at me her cheek wattles shook above the triple strands of blue-tinted pearls. We moved from Barbie barfing to Barbie fart-jokes and kept those up at top volume clear to Albuquerque, where I announced that my Barbie batched her prom dress with diarrhea squirts. She’d be forced to wear a TWA napkin to the prom, with a rubber-band belt, and minus any underpants. In Albuquerque, we boarded the wrong plane. Airlines discourage that sort of thing, naturally. They post a fellow at the gate to read your ticket before you even step on a runway. It says right on the front where you paid to fly to. But somehow, against odds I can’t fathom, we all wound up in Mexico City, illegally, of course. Maybe Joey even booked us there on purpose. Mother had planted in his noggin her romantic notion of disappearing to Mexico. He may have fancied living cheap in some beach shack flapped over by palm trees, with an Aztec princess bringing him rock lobsters and tortillas patted out with her own small hands. The federales who met us at the customs gate had other ideas, especially when it turned out that Joey had dropped his wallet—with all evidence of U.S. citizenship—in the airplane toilet. He claimed he’d been rising from the toilet and suddenly bent over sick. His bowels had just seized up. He didn’t know what fell in the blue toilet water till after he’d zipped up. Then he patted around and found his back pocket light. All his ID had flushed away with an eardrum-sucking pop somewhere over the Sonora desert. He patted his pockets to show the small, official-looking crowd how it happened. Joey had that drunk man’s myopic sense of how interesting this all was for everybody. Meanwhile, the capitán shifted his weight from one shiny black boot to the other. He whispered to the customs officials. When he lifted one sinewy hand, two men with rifles at the baggage rack trotted over. Our luggage was called for and disemboweled —dresses, jeans, nylon pajamas.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  The first that stood up, to open the ball, were a cornet of horse, and that sweetest of olive-beauties, the soft and amorous Louisa. He led her to the couch (nothing loth), on which he gave her the fall, and extended her at length with an air of roughness and vigour, relishing high of amorous eagerness and impatience. The girl, spreading herself to the best advantage, with her head upon the pillow, was so concentered in that she was about, that our presence was the least of her care and concern. Her petticoats, thrown up with her shift, discovered to the company the finest turned legs and thighs that could be imagined, and in broad display, that gave us a full view of that delicious cleft of flesh, into which the pleasing hair, grown mount over it, parted and presented a most inviting entrance, between two close hedges, delicately soft and pouting. Her gallant was now ready, having disencumbered himself from his clothes, overloaded with lace, and presently, his shirt removed, shewed us his forces at high plight, bandied and ready for action. But giving us no time to consider the dimensions, he threw himself instantly over his charming antagonist who received him as he pushed at once dead at mark, like a heroine, without flinching; for surely never was girl constitutionally truer to the taste of joy, or sincerer in the expressions of its sensations, than she was: we could observe pleasure lighten in her eyes, as he introduced his plenipotentiary instrument into her; till, at length, having indulged her to its utmost reach, its irritations grew so violent, and gave her the spurs so furiously, that collected within herself, and lost to every thing but the enjoyment of her favourite feelings, she retarded his thrusts with a just concert of spring heaves, keeping time so exactly with the most pathetic sighs, that one might have numbered the strokes in agitation by their distinct murmurs, whilst her active limbs kept wreathing and intertwisting with his, in convulsive folds: then the turtle-billing kisses, and the poignant painless lovebites, which they both exchanged, in a rage of delight, all conspiring towards the melting period. It soon came on, when Louisa, in the ravings of her pleasure-frensy, impotent of all restraint, cried out: “Oh Sir!... Good Sir! pray do not spare me! ah! ah!...” All her accents now faultering into heart-fetched sighs, she closed her eyes in the sweet death, in the instant of which we could easily see the signs in the quiet, dying, languid posture of her late so furious driver, who was stopped of a sudden, breathing short, panting, and, for that time, giving up the spirit of pleasure. As soon as he was dismounted, Louisa sprung up, shook her petticoats, and running up to me, gave me a kiss, and drew me to the side-board, to which she was herself handed by her gallant, where they made me pledge them in a glass of wine, and toast a droll health of Louisa’s proposal in high frolic.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "But you were acquainted with him, were you not?" "Yes, we had been at some Kindergarten or other together, but, being three years younger than he, I was always in a lower class. Anyhow, that evening, upon perceiving him, I was about to leave the room, when the gentleman in the evening suit turned round. It was the pianist. As our eyes met again, I felt a strange flutter within me, and the fascination of his looks was so powerful that I was hardly able to move. Then, attracted onwards as I was, instead of quitting the green room, I walked on slowly, almost reluctantly, towards the group. The musician, without staring, did not, however, turn his eyes away from me. I was quivering from head to foot. He seemed to be slowly drawing me to him, and I must confess the feeling was such a pleasant one that I yielded entirely to it. "Just then Briancourt, who had not seen me, turned round, and recognizing me, nodded in his off-hand way. As he did so, the pianist's eyes brightened, and he whispered something to him, whereupon the General's son, without giving him any answer, turned towards me, and, taking me by the hand, said: "'Camille, allow me to introduce you to my friend Réné. M. Réné Teleny—M. Camille Des Grieux.' "I bowed, blushing. The pianist stretched forth his ungloved hand. In my fit of nervousness I had pulled off both my gloves, so that I now put my bare hand into his. "He had a perfect hand for a man, rather large than small, strong yet soft, and with long, tapering fingers, so that his grasp was firm and steady.