Slutever Read online

  Admittedly, this wasn’t the easiest thing for me to wrap my head around at first. The gender gray-area thing I understood. But not being able to touch her felt strange, like she was putting a wall up between us. For instance, she usually insisted on keeping her boxers on during sex. Outwardly, I tried to be chill about it, but in my head I was like, God, what is it about me that makes people want to keep their clothes on while we fuck?! Of course, the decision wasn’t about me, it was about her and her sexual identity. But I’m a narcissist, so I don’t think about other people.

  So, if there’s no boner and the vagina is off-limits, then what’s left to do? Of course, we earlier addressed the option of building machinery to beat each other with, but neither Alice nor I was very handy. So we got creative in other ways. One of our favorite ways to fuck was for Alice to lie on top of me—generally her in her boxers and me naked—and then we’d intertwine our legs and basically just grind. And then after a while she’d start to fuck me with her fingers. This position was nice because it meant that basically our whole bodies could be touching at once, from our mouths to our toes. I Googled it, and the technical term for this is “frottage” (from the French word “to rub”—chic). It’s surprisingly effective, and amazing if you’re lazy and/or hungover. I guess you could say that this way of fucking was our way. But if you had asked me a handful of years earlier, I probably would have told you that our way didn’t even count as sex.

  Sometimes we’d do other stuff—like a strap-on situation, for instance. Despite my recent antidick rant, I’ll admit that, after meeting Alice, one of the first things I did was go to a sex store and buy a large purple dildo and leather harness, because in my head I was like, Well, this is what lesbians do, right? I just felt like my new lesbian lover wouldn’t take me seriously unless I had a fake dick in the house. But as it turned out, we only used the strap-on like five times in our three-year relationship, partly because it quickly dawned on me that I didn’t need to imitate heterosexual sex in order to validate my queer sex. Rookie mistake. Also, Alice seemed to sort of resent the fact that, just because she wore boy’s clothes and sometimes would refer to the size of her metaphorical dick (bigger than average, but not offensive), I would assume she had actual penis envy. My bad. Like, I remember this one time, she put on the strap-on, then immediately looked down and said, “Wait, I’m gay and dicks are weird. Why is this thing on me?”

  Of course, wielding a purple plastic penis is not an affront to one’s queerness, nor does it make you heteronormcore. After all, being queer isn’t about hating dicks, and using a strap-on isn’t about wanting to be a man (so if you were about to impulsively set your dildo on fire as a feminist performance art piece, you can just chill and keep reading instead). I know a lot of women who get off wearing a strap-on, either psychologically or because of the way it rubs against their clit. I know lesbians who, when they go on a Tinder date, will pack their penis in their bag—like that’s their dick. There’s no need to overintellectualize or overpoliticize it. If the point of sex is to create intimacy and to give and receive pleasure, then why restrict yourself from something that feels good just because of the patriarchy or whatever? If you ever wake up and realize that the patriarchy, dicks, or feminism is cramping your sex life, then it’s time to reevaluate.

  The point I’m trying to make is that sexuality is about intimacy, not intercourse. And for a committed slut and/or slutty anthropologist, the goal should be to go into every sexual situation accepting it for what it is—the vast, complicated, often awkward, sometimes triggering, beautifully clumsy unknown.

  CHAPTER 7

  WHAT DO I WANT?

  Hedonist or Just Immature?

  My greatest fear in life is being basic. (Or, perhaps more accurately, regressing back into basicness.) I have a literal recurring nightmare where I wake up one day with a husband, two kids, and a house in the suburbs and can’t remember how I got there, as if it’s my destiny. To avoid this becoming a reality, my strategy thus far has been to continually destroy my relationships at the first sign that they’re headed in that direction. So far, I have a 100 percent success rate with romantic sabotage.

  I’ve had this kind of defiant reaction for years. At thirty-one, I’ve yet to live with a partner. Even in my one queer relationship, which was a welcome escape from the heteronormative default settings, as soon as my girlfriend initiated talk of buying a house together, I panicked and pulled away. I’m almost positive that I’m undeniably an adult now, but still, the idea of having a baby seems literally bizarre to me (like, where would I put it?). Of course, like most nonrobots, I want to form a loving and supportive bond with a hot person. But at the same time, I suffer from a very serious disease known as Relationship FOMO: As soon as I commit myself to one person, my eggs start to panic, worried that they’re missing out on partying with cooler, smarter, more stylish sperm. It’s a constant struggle.

  In some respects, I trust my instincts to avoid conventional relationship dynamics that I suspect won’t make me happy in the long run. But other times, I wonder if this fear of normalcy is leading me to destroy valuable, loving relationships simply to preserve some juvenile idea of rebellion. I question how practical it is to view life as one endless hedonistic pursuit. Because the problem is, I really like being in a relationship. It feels good to have consistent sex with someone who you don’t hate. I mean, I don’t want to YOLO solo forever. And I think a lot of people my age are wrestling with the same question: In order to experience love and a lasting partnership, do you have to close the chapter of your life that includes experimentation, spontaneity, and, well, freedom?

  Recently, I was lamenting all of this to my therapist, who’s a very glamorous Upper East Side Jewish woman in her sixties with a Susan Sontag–esque gray streak (so basically a cartoon shrink). I was giving her my usual rant—something like “I’m kinda lonely, but having a boyfriend makes me feel trapped, and oh my god am I a doomed slut who’s allergic to relationships and who’s going to die alone?!” et cetera. Usually she just nods silently, but this time she said sternly, “Karley, what do you want? Don’t tell me what you think you deserve, or what you think is realistic or fair. Tell me what you actually want, if you could have anything.” And it was funny because I was like…Wow, I don’t know if I’ve ever truly asked myself that question. I guess because I’m scared of the answer; I’m scared of sounding like a selfish, delusional egomaniac. The reality is, my dream is to be with someone who loves and respects me, who I deeply admire, who’s smart and hot and loves giving head, but who also lets me occasionally have sex with a random, and—here’s the kicker—who just naturally isn’t interested in fucking anyone but me. Basically, I want to be free to let my slut flag fly while my partner stays locked in a cage. And that’s the honest, unprogressive truth. When I told my therapist this, however, she literally cracked up. Like an actual LMAO moment. Should I take that as a sign that I’m being unrealistic?

  To be honest, there’s still a part of me that thinks, It’s fine! One day I’ll just meet the one, I’ll fall madly in love, and then I’ll just naturally never want to fuck anyone else for the rest of my life. And then there’s this other part of me that’s like, You’re delusional, ho. Because if there’s one thing I know about myself, it’s that I’m not very good at saying no to something that I want—or more like, I don’t want to say no. I’m supposed to feel guilty about that, right?

  Certain people get off on sacrificing things for the sake of their relationship, but personally, self-sacrifice has often led me to resent my partner for preventing me from realizing all of my impulsive slutty desires (as if it was somehow their fault). Like, having a family seems cool, but then what if I meet two Louis Garrel look-alikes who invite me into an MMF threesome? I’m just supposed to pass? That’s crazy. For a long time now, my sluttiness has been a fundamental part of my identity, and I don’t want to lose that—but I also don’t want to just be that. Some people argue that as we get older, we should naturally ga
in less of our life satisfaction and self-worth through sex, and instead get it from other sources, like our jobs and kids and vacation homes or whatever. But says who? What if I want to experience all the joys that love has to offer, but in forty years I also want to organize my first senior-citizen gang bang? What if I want to be a slut forever?

  It’s said that women reach our sexual peak in our thirties or even forties, whereas for men it’s something awkward like sixteen. But growing up, I just felt so sure that my twenties would be the pinnacle of my sex life—the decade when I would be the most adventurous and cellulite-free, which would naturally translate to having the best sex. (Paradoxically, I still believed this well into my midtwenties, a period when I repeatedly made the analogy that having penetrative sex felt like inserting a tampon over and over.) At thirty, I figured, things start to sag, you become a boring adult, and your sex life takes a back seat until eventually, at forty-five-ish, you switch off your uterus, buy a minivan, and sew your vagina shut forever. But since age sixteen, the pleasure I get from sex has been on a steady incline. I come more often and in more positions. I have more sexual confidence and have earned enough self-regard to avoid ending up in bed with total assholes. Today, I generally walk away from sexual encounters feeling happy and satisfied rather than limping away feeling like my vaginal walls have just endured target practice. It’s a nice place to be, honestly.

  I think part of the reason sex keeps getting better is that when I was younger, I felt like I needed to be a lot more performative during sex—like I needed to put on a show for whatever random bar stranger ended up in my bed that night. As women, we’re inundated with ideals for our physical presentation—from SoulCycle-ing our thighs into shape to spending $300 on a bra that promises to defy gravity. And of course it can be fun to play with all the trappings of the feminine aesthetic. However, there’s a difference between drawing a flirty cat eye and turning every sexual encounter into a drunken cabaret moment, giving blow jobs in a fucking backbend and waking up with a kink in my neck, and never once factoring my own sexual pleasure into this deranged sex theater. Pretty much across the board, my sexual experiences were plagued with me thinking: Do I look hot enough? Does my face look like the girl from The Ring when I come? Do I need to bleach my butthole?! And honestly I still have those thoughts during sex—especially the butthole one—but they’re less frequent, and I’m better at shoving them out of my mind in order to think about more pertinent things (like prison gang-bang porn). As I grow up, I just naturally give less of a fuck. And it’s so freeing. But annoyingly, the moment when we hit our sexual stride often coincides with the moment in our lives that we’re told “Okay, honey, you’ve had fun, but it’s time to settle down.”

  There seems to be a logical solution to all of this: If you suck at monogamy and want to continue on your slutty journey, then just be in an open relationship, duh! All you have to do is form a resilient bond with someone who you love and respect, never get jealous when they rail other people, ignore all basic societal expectations, and just casually be an enlightened sexual pioneer. Problem solved! Also, while you’re at it, maybe win the Nobel Prize, lose ten pounds, and stop blacking out every night. Cool—I’ll get right on that.

  For all the obvious tortures of monogamy, nonmonogamy comes with a whole other set of issues. For one, it’s not that easy to find people who want to date a total ho. See, there’s this idea floating around in the universe that when you truly love someone, you don’t want to fuck other people. Clearly, that’s insane. I, for one, have been deeply in love and still wanted to deep-throat the waiter. But people don’t like this version of a love story—especially when you’re dating them. And then there’s the jealousy issue, to which I am not immune. Like, I consider myself a pretty sane person, but I’ve also been known to go full Lorena Bobbitt at the inkling my partner has a crush. Being a jealous slut is a dangerous and inconvenient combination.

  And beyond the interpersonal issues, there’s also a huge social stigma to nonmonogamy. Like, when you tell people you’re in an open relationship, they usually look at you like you’re a fucking idiot. And then laugh condescendingly and say something like: “So you actually think an open relationship can work long term?” To this, my response is: “Well, do you actually think a monogamous relationship can work long term?” This usually shuts them up—or at least throws them off for a few seconds.

  It’s true: Nonmonogamy is complicated, and making it work requires serious effort. But isn’t the same true for monogamy? I’m sorry, but the idea that fucking only one person for the majority of your life is in any way “easy” is simply a joke. It’s funny: When it comes to our professional lives, we admire people who value freedom. I’m proud that I’m my own boss, that I’ve never had a mundane office job, and that I can work from home or pack up and write from a beach for a month if I want to. For the most part, I’m not beholden to anyone, and each day is a unique experience full of new and interesting people. And people respect that. And yet, when we desire the same thing from our relationships—autonomy, freedom, and diversity—people are like, “Yeah, you’re kind of a selfish asshole.” What gives?

  Deep down, I understand that if I want to form a (somewhat) stable long-term partnership with someone who I don’t quickly grow to resent, it’s likely going to have to be an open arrangement of some sort—perhaps only to a slight degree, and perhaps after a foundational period of monogamy, but the possibility needs to be there. The problem is, after years of trying, I’m still in the dark about how to make an open relationship—my romantic holy grail—not spiral into a total disaster.

  Sluts Have More Headaches

  My first attempt at nonmonogamy was while I was living in London, soon after my relationship with Sam ended. I was twenty-three, and fell really hard for this beardy Scottish musician. He lived in Glasgow but came to London a couple of times a month with his band. I met him while high on ecstasy at a squat rave, obviously. Our dangerously dilated eyes met from across the puke-covered factory floor, and I walked straight up to him and, without saying a word, grabbed his dick through his pants. I guess that’s sexual assault—but it worked.

  We started dating, and it was one of those intense, voraciously sexual romances where you fuck like five times a day and spend full weekends without leaving the bed. He was gross in all the best ways. Once, I got my period while we were having sex, and instead of being disgusted he just reached down, grabbed a handful of blood, shoved it into my mouth, and then violently made out with me. I was like…“Wait, are you the one?”

  If we’d lived in the same city we would have been inseparable. However, since we only saw each other a couple of times a month, and because we were both quite “sexually curious” (to put it lightly), we decided to date, but keep it “loose.” This meant that when we were together we were together, but when we were apart we could do whatever we wanted. And this worked wonderfully for a while. We both felt confident about how much we liked each other, which meant that neither of us was worried about the other falling in love with a random second-tier fuck. Also, since we lived in different cities, our extracurricular sex lives were clearly separate from each other—I didn’t have to know the girls he was banging or worry about running into them at parties, and vice versa. Out of sight, out of mind. And then, whenever we were in the same place, we would have missed each other so much that our time together would be super sexually charged and lovey-dovey. We once even had a conversation (while high, clearly) about how fucking other people often acted as a reminder of how much we cared about each other, because no one else matched up. It was the perfect combo of sexual freedom and romantic companionship, minus the all-too-common “If you fuck someone else I’ll chop your dick off” component.

  But then, about six months into our love affair, he moved from Glasgow to London. Cue the downward spiral. Suddenly, the fact that he was sleeping with other people was in my face, which clearly made it a lot harder to hair-flip from my consciousness. I remember once
, a couple of weeks after his move, I was at a small party at his squat (he lived in a squat like five minutes’ walk from my squat—romantic) and one of his “friends” from university came to visit him, a pretty, raven-haired Scottish girl who I instantly wanted to skin alive. He took me aside and explained that this girl was just a friend with benefits and not an actual threat. But still, I felt like there was an actual knife being twisted in my side. It was the first time I had to deal with the harsh reality that, when you’re in an open relationship, sometimes your partner is going to make the choice to be with someone else over you. And you’re not allowed to throw a fucking tantrum, because those are the rules of the game.

  Now, clearly, every open relationship is different, and people are free to set the rules and boundaries that make them feel the most happy and sane. I admit that during this first attempt at being open, I was young and naive to the whole nonmonogamy thing, and didn’t understand that openness is a constant negotiation, and in theory you should never have to feel like you’re being stabbed in the uterus. Maybe I could have salvaged that relationship if I had been better at talking about what extracurricular activities I could handle, versus what types of situations would trigger a jealousy vortex. But instead of trying to rectify the situation, I just bailed. Sigh. If it weren’t for romantic jealousy, being human would be so much more chill.