Slutever Read online

  The Gen Zs are the most liquid of all. They make even Millennials look square. Of course, it’s difficult to get exact statistics when it comes to sexual identity and behavior, but based on my own personal, not-at-all scientific analysis of the situation, I’m pretty sure that everyone below the age of twenty-six identifies as a radical queer nongendered entity. Sounds exhausting, if you ask me. Take my little brother, for example. He’s a twenty-six-year-old Vassar grad, and whenever I hang out with him and all his liberal-arts-school deep-Brooklyn vegan performance-art friends, I feel so fucking old and out of touch. Like, my bro is currently in a throuple with two people whose preferred gender pronouns are “they.” I mean, you do you (or they do them, I guess?) but that just sounds super complicated to me. It’s funny how every generation goes through the same transition—essentially from being like “Parents just don’t understand!” to “Kids these days are fucking nuts.”

  The point is, never before have we had so many options—about who we are, how we live, who we date, how we fuck, and the structure of our relationships. And even if I love making fun of the Gen Zs and their creepily self-serious green-haired identity politics, I do feel excited to live in a time when people are afforded so much personal freedom. Like, twenty years ago, if you were a gay dude, you by default wore lip gloss, obsessed over Dior, and then grew up to become the weird uncle who never gets married and spends a suspect amount of time with his roommate. If you were a gay woman, you were obligated to wear frumpy blazers and become a gym teacher. It was a simpler time. But today, you can be gay and do whatever you want. You can be a gay athlete. You can be a gay spouse. You can be a gay Kristen Stewart. God, the tyranny of choice!

  Increased cultural visibility has been integral to this shift. In the last decade, American TV shows and movies have begun to showcase more complex LGBTQ characters than ever before—and even bisexual representation is starting to be less demonic. Popular shows like Revenge, Transparent, and Broad City all feature bi characters who are distinctly not murderers. And I’ve seen firsthand how influential this type of representation can be. About a year into my relationship with Alice, my mom started watching Orange Is the New Black. If you’ve never seen it, the main character is a bisexual woman named Piper. Sure, she’s a convicted drug smuggler, but she’s ultimately a good and likable person. Literally within days of watching the show, my mom called me saying, “Oooh, I get it now—you’re like Piper!” It didn’t matter how much I’d personally explained my sexuality to her—she needed to see it on TV for it to be truly real. And you could see that as depressing, but I chose to be more optimistic than that. And while I can’t say my mother ever fully got on board with my gay relationship, over time I could tell that watching and loving shows like OITNB and Transparent made her far more curious and understanding of sexual switch-hitters. Visibility is power, because we cannot be what we cannot see.

  The recent increase in visibility of people who are “in the middle”—whether it’s packs of bisexual supermodels, or college campuses full of “theys”—has allowed space for more people to come out and explore these in-between identities for themselves. But this has been a process. Basically, it took gay and trans identities becoming more accepted in order for sexually flexible and genderqueer people to be able to come out, too. It’s only when the extremes become accepted that people feel free to meander through the gray area.

  Of course, many people are born gay, and their same-sex attraction is nonnegotiable. I don’t believe that a gay person can just choose to be straight, in some insane Mike Pence “ex-gay therapy” sort of way. But I also think that there are a lot of people out there like me—people who were taught as kids that you’re either gay or straight, and who felt comfortable enough in one of those categories to never really question it. We didn’t know what else was on the menu. Because I’m attracted to plenty of men, if I had been born thirty or maybe even ten years earlier, I most likely would have lived a straight life, and perhaps not thought about all the lesbian orgasms I was potentially missing. But because I live in a morally bankrupt cosmopolitan liberal bubble of sluttiness, I was like, “Eh, why not give gay a try?”

  I could see this in Alice when we were together, too. When we met she identified as a woman—at least, on most days—but her clothing, hair, and mannerisms all were what would classically be described as “teenage stoner bro.” Whenever we would walk into a restaurant and the hostess would say something along the lines of “Good evening, ladies,” I’d notice her flinch. The reality was, she didn’t like being seen as a girl. She would lament over having to use the women’s restroom, in part because she looked like a boy and walking into the ladies’ room usually resulted in some woman telling her she was in the wrong bathroom. However, as time went on, and as transgender culture became the only thing anyone ever wanted to talk about, she became more comfortable with expressing herself as being in the gender gray zone. “In between” suddenly felt like a valid place to hang out.

  In the wake of this new openness to flexibility, it’s natural to ask yourself: Is my life better today because I have the opportunity for sexual exploration? Obviously freedom and self-exploration are good things, but if you don’t know what you’re missing, how can you miss it? Basically, would my quality of life really have been worse without the freedom to be fucked with a strap-on? I guess you could argue that ignorance is bliss. But looking back on how much I learned and gained in my queer relationship, I can’t imagine not having had that opportunity. My time with Alice was undoubtedly the most adult, loving, supportive, and sexually fulfilling partnership that I’d ever been in. It changed me deeply—as all good relationships should. Alice was a great communicator, and she taught me that if something between us was bothering me, I should just talk to her about it, rather than act like a passive-aggressive cunt for a week and then randomly fuck someone I met on the subway out of spite (aka my strategy in all my previous relationships). She taught me that I was multiorgasmic, that being fisted is overrated, and that it’s possible to be in a relationship where you know, without question, that your partner has your back. And most importantly, being with her taught me that a relationship can be a partnership between two equals. As Rebecca Solnit wrote in her book Men Explain Things to Me, “A marriage between two people of the same gender is inherently egalitarian—one partner may happen to have more power in any number of ways, but for the most part it’s a relationship between people who have equal standing and so are free to define their roles themselves. Gay men and lesbians have already opened up the question of what qualities and roles are male and female in ways that can be liberating for straight people.”

  At the core of the slut lifestyle is the ability to be sexually curious and activated without shame. And as we grow more tolerant, and as we continue to expand the sexual menu, the slut mode of operation is just more attainable. A world without sexual borders is less about transgressing into taboo—as many conservatives and sex-negative people have long predicted—and more about emotional honesty. Soon, people will no longer be burdened to “come out.” People won’t be presumed murderers simply for being 40 percent gay (and 60 percent gay when drunk). We will just be people, wandering the earth, looking for hot people to fuck. And what could be more authentic than that?

  CHAPTER 6

  WAIT… WHAT IS SEX, EVEN?

  (AND IS THAT FLEXIBLE TOO?)

  Subchapter: Opening My Mind and Legs

  Anyone who’s read Miranda July’s fiction knows that it’s never a good sign when you relate to her characters. They tend to be lonely, insecure, and plagued by a twee sexual awkwardness, like hipsters having sex at a Belle and Sebastian concert in a Wes Anderson movie. No matter how much you love her writing, when you see yourself in her creations, it’s always paired with an existential cringe.

  When I first read July’s book of short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, in my early twenties, it all felt a little too real. One part of the story “Mon Plaisir,” in particular, reall
y got to me. It begins with a couple lying in bed, talking about their sex life. “You still like it our way, don’t you?” the woman asks. You soon find out what she means by that. “We did it in our way,” July writes. “Carl nursed and I jacked him off. Then I turned away and touched myself while Carl patted the back of my head. I came.”

  I went over and over those four sentences in my head. Does that count as sex? I wondered. Based on what I’d learned growing up, there seemed to be a limited number of ways that two people could interact that could be qualified as “sex,” and this didn’t fit the bill. Surely that was just hooking up, or second base, or tragedy…but not S-E-X.

  The reason I was so preoccupied with this story was that it reminded me of a period of my life that was defined by a particular sexual insecurity—specifically, an insecurity about whether I was even having sex at all. You might have called it a crisis of fucking. Or a fucking crisis. Or just fucking awkward.

  I was eighteen when I met Sam, in a park near campus, soon after I arrived in London for university. One evening, while stumbling back to my dorm, I ran into some people drinking wine on the grass who looked attractive enough to muster up some drunken energy for. We were all freshmen, navigating that clumsy-yet-exciting phase of college where you feel like you’re finally an adult in charge of a newfound sexual agency, when in reality you’re just having blacked-out sex with DJs and setting your house on fire when trying to boil spaghetti. (This is actually the only phase of college I ever had to navigate—remember, I dropped out after one semester, because I’m lazy and/or a genius.) I walked over to the group, and by chance I sat down next to Sam, a smiley nineteen-year-old with a big mop of tangled dyed-black hair, wearing a tattered vintage suit that he’d mended with safety pins and electrical tape á la a homeless person. His ripped clothing hung limply off his lanky body, and he had these elegant collarbones that jutted out beneath his pink freckled skin. His nails were painted sparkly black, and he was absently strumming “Wonderwall” on an acoustic guitar. As we talked, it wasn’t so much that there were butterflies in my stomach as huge bats. (Today, I think acoustic guitars need a trigger warning, but back then they were basically porn. Remember, this was when I made style-inspiration mood boards that heavily featured Christina Aguilera.)

  The first thing I noticed about Sam—aside from the fact that he looked like the personification of “backpacking around Europe”—was his voice: deep and powerful, but also soft, with a feminine quality. I was mesmerized. (Being a new transplant, I was still in the phase where I thought British people sounded exotic, rather than like frogs pretending to be fancy.) He told me about his band, which he’d started when he was sixteen, and who were about to release their first record. Everything about Sam seemed intimidatingly cool and foreign to me. He told me that he’d spent half of his childhood living in a castle north of London, and the other half in Sweden, but that his family usually summered in Morocco, which is where he learned to play the tbilat drums. I told him that I grew up in the same town as Snooki, and that my family vacationed at the Jersey Shore, which was where I’d developed my taste for fried shrimp. When he asked me what I was passionate about, I replied enthusiastically, “Well, I’m really good at soccer,” to which he responded, “What’s soccer?” We had a lot in common.

  It wasn’t until an hour later, when Sam got up to leave, that I noticed he walked with crutches—specifically, metal crutches that had been sloppily decorated with blue sparkles and an array of shiny stickers. I assumed he’d broken his leg or something, and didn’t mention it. We exchanged numbers and made vague plans to meet up again. But as soon as he left I got that cheesy heart-sinking feeling that people write bad poems about, and I ended up chasing him down the street. “Sorry,” I said, out of breath. “I just missed you.” We made out. It felt very low-budget rom-com. I invited him back to my place, but he made an excuse about being tired and then crutched off into the night, leaving me horny and alone, clutching a bottle of cheap cider. I was slightly appalled, honestly. I’ve always felt that, as a general rule, if someone tries to have sex with you, you should have sex with them back—it’s only polite.

  On our second date, after pounding vodka Red Bulls at the university bar and then aggressively dry-humping back at his house, Sam told me that he had permanently damaged his spine in a childhood accident, after which he was never able to walk without the assistance of medical crutches and leg braces that started at his feet and came up over his knees, Forrest Gump–style. And then he dropped that he was a virgin. I think I was more thrown off by the virginity than the disability, honestly.

  My first question was: “Can you have sex?” That probably sounds insensitive, but it made sense in context—I mean, I was literally straddling him in a bedazzled push-up bra. He laughed and said that yes, he could have sex, but he just hadn’t…yet. He told me he wanted to “take things slow” because he “really liked me,” saying that sex would be more meaningful if we waited until we felt close to one another. I pretended to agree, but inside, my brain was quietly short-circuiting. Getting to know someone before you fuck? It seemed a bizarre concept. Surely people had sex to assess if they wanted to get to know someone, not the other way around. It’s just the Millennial way.

  Sam and I dated for basically infinity before we slept together. I was a virgin to delayed gratification, but Sam refused to fuck me, and of course it made me fall in love with him. Anytime he gave me permission to be around him, I would drop everything to be by his side. I started skipping classes so that I could sit on the sidelines and watch his band practice, like a budget Yoko-in-training. I’d spend money I didn’t have on train tickets to middle-of-nowhere Wales to surprise him at his gigs. I couldn’t remember a time when I had been so tragically unaloof. I kept thinking, Is this the trick my mom taught me when I was thirteen, which I promptly ignored? Ya know: If you want someone to like you, don’t sleep with them right away? Apparently nothing gets me wet like rejection.

  For months we would kiss and grope, but that’s as far as it got. On multiple occasions, while making out, I tried to sneakily unbutton Sam’s pants without him noticing, which always resulted in him annoyedly swatting my hand away. More than once I thought to myself, Wait…am I a rapist? We would often sleep in the same bed, but Sam would keep all his clothes on—like, no lie, even his shoes. Each night we’d get under the covers and he would turn his back to me, and I’d just lie there and wait for his breathing to change, so that I knew he was asleep, and then I’d ever-so-quietly stick my hands down my tights and make myself come to the sound of his light snoring. I’m sure all these anecdotes are making me sound super sane.

  I understand now, looking back on it all, that a big reason Sam wanted to wait was because he wasn’t confident in his body. But of course, when you’re an insecure teenager, everything is about me—what’s wrong with me, and woe is me, and my feelings are hurt, and I’m desperate for dick, et cetera. I was needy and wore my heart on my sleeve—a dangerous combination—and since we weren’t having sex, I constantly prodded Sam for other forms of validation. I cringe thinking about this now, but in those first few months of dating I actually asked him to write a song about me. That’s straight-up psych ward–level behavior. Surely that tops the list of things you should never ask someone you’ve just started dating, even worse than “Where is this going?” However, instead of immediately deleting my number, he actually wrote me the song. How unironically romantic? I took this as a sign that he must like me for me, because he clearly wasn’t just tolerating my personality in exchange for all the sex we weren’t having.

  I can rationally understand why Sam might have been insecure about being naked with me, but I loved the way he looked. I loved that he was thin but strong. Walking around on crutches for years had made his arms and chest quite muscular, but in an athletic, statue-of-David way, rather than a creepy whey-protein way. I liked that his body was unique. He was beautiful, but he didn’t look like anyone else—both in terms of his body, and
the fact that he dressed like Edward Scissorhands at the Warped Tour. I think one of his main concerns was that he wouldn’t be able to fuck me “adequately”—or, at least, how other guys in the past had fucked me. If only he knew how low the bar was.

  As we became closer, I tried to talk to him about all of this—about how he didn’t have to be nervous around me, and I wasn’t going to judge him, and I thought he was so hot, and blah blah blah please get your dick out. And it was sort of working. But then I made the mistake of telling about my aforementioned childhood obsession with Colin, the freckle-faced, wheelchair-bound character from The Secret Garden. “I used to masturbate to that scene of him angrily wheeling around the garden,” I told Sam enthusiastically. In my blond head, this seemed like a funny anecdote to tell him in the midst of our serious discussion about body confidence and the future of our sex life—like a “See, I’m into disabled guys, don’t worry,” wink wink type of thing. He was not pleased.

  The issue, which I stupidly did not realize would be an issue, was that he started to think I was fetishizing him. He told me that he wanted me to be into him despite his disability, not because of it—a sentiment he often repeated throughout the course of our relationship. In my defense, the whole Secret Garden thing was just a coincidence. Before meeting Sam, I was never “into disabled guys” (or not into them). I was just trying to lighten the mood with an offensive anecdote, okay? Of course, I did love Sam “for him,” and I by no means wanted to fuck him out of pity. Or because of some power thing where I got off on him being “less able” than me. Or because the metal on his legs looked vaguely bondage. Or, for the record, because he made me wait and I just loved the chase (our four years together is surely proof of that). Let’s be real, I was eighteen—I mainly wanted to fuck him because he was in a band.