Slutever Read online

  De-mold entire house

  paint atlas of world on living room wall

  fix all broken windows (3)

  clean crab terrarium

  alphabetize all VHS tapes

  decorate upstairs bathroom (aquatic theme)

  sew rips on couch (may be impossible)

  clean kitchen (may be impossible)

  The slave was kind of an asshole, honestly. For a slave-identifying person, he was pretty full of himself. He started refusing to do certain chores, claiming moral authority over us. For instance, since no one showered, we had turned the bathtub into a terrarium, filled it with rocks and marine plants, and made it the home of our pet crab. As one does. But when Claire told the slave to clean the terrarium, he was all like, “That crab is going to die. You can’t only feed it out-of-date sandwiches from Marks and Spencer.” And we were like, “Are you a fucking crab rights activist? Mind your own business.”

  After our first fight, the relationship was never the same again. After just a month of servitude, our slave broke up with us. Apparently, even someone whose ambition in life is to be dehumanized and humiliated couldn’t handle how tragic we were.

  One of the perks of squatting is that it leaves you with a lot of good stories. It also leaves you a lot of free time to make bad art. So really, I have squatting to blame for starting my blog Slutever, which I launched around this time, at twenty-one. This was back in OG blogspot days, in 2007, back before everyone and their dog had a blog, and when people still thought it was a good idea to write in pink comic sans font on a black background.

  At the beginning, the blog was mainly just oversharey rants about the debauchery of everyday squat life, posts about my sexual fantasies (there’s an early post about finding sharks erotic, which I hope I was lying about), and stories about my sexual exploits from high school. I discovered that writing about my teenage sexual experiences was cathartic and gave me a sense of retroactive power over sexual situations that had at times felt more cursory. And, as an added bonus, people seemed to like to read it. I got my first paid writing jobs because of the blog, mostly through Vice (which was also in its early, ranty, offensive stage, so I fit right in).

  A problem, however, was that I was still dating Sam at the time. Sam was not so into my new venture of slut blogging. Sam deserves his own chapter (and gets it), but here’s some context, from my personal and biased perspective: Sam was a virgin when we met, and when I started writing publicly about stuff like peeing on a twenty-nine-year-old guy during sex when I was sixteen, he felt threatened. He didn’t like that I had an array of sexual experiences that predated him. He was also embarrassed that his family, who I was very close to, had discovered the blog and were reading it, too. It didn’t help that I then started writing about sex with Sam, particularly about the fact that he had a disability, and how that affected our sex life. I admit that I was really insensitive at the time. It took me years of offending and embarrassing my friends and lovers with things that I wrote about them to finally learn that not everyone wants the intimate details of their life blabbed about on the internet. Whoops. Live and learn, I guess. But the point is, the blog ultimately put the nail in the coffin of my and Sam’s four-year relationship. And when we broke up, his parting neg was that, going forward, no dude in his right mind was ever going to date a sex writer.

  Of course, being single made my blog way better. It’s hard to write a slut blog when you have a boyfriend, honestly. My new single self was primed for a rampage of sexual discovery, and this time, I wouldn’t just be fucking around in defiance of my totalitarian parents. This time I could write off my slutty exploits as research. There’s another John Waters quote that I love, where he says: “Before I was paid to be a writer, people thought I was crazy to just go on these little missions of things that would interest me. But now that I get paid to do it, people say ‘Oh, how interesting.’ So, I think that’s really the difference between being a writer and a crackpot.” That pretty much sums up how I felt at the time. I was no longer just a slut. I was a slut with a cause.

  The slut gods must have been looking out for me, because just days into my newfound singledom, I found myself locked in a bedroom with Kat and some random French guy. There was a party at the squat, and the three of us had gone into Kat’s bedroom to try on the elf costumes that she’d stolen from her new job as a professional elf at the London Dungeon experience, but while trying to leave Kat accidentally yanked the handle off the door. After spending twenty minutes aimlessly stabbing a pen into the hole where the knob had been, we gave up and had a threesome. With a light elf role-play component. I’d never had a threesome before, and was surprised at how playful the vibe was. I had also assumed that all group sex situations required a jealous outburst, or tears, or at the very least a light stabbing. But this was nothing like the murderous love triangles I’d seen in erotic thrillers (though the elf costumes might have played a role in that).

  Around hour three of our lock-in we all got really dehydrated. Thankfully, Dylan came to our rescue by tying a water bottle to our cat’s neck and forcing it to walk along the narrow ledge between his bedroom window and our temporary jail. At one point the bottle rolled off the end of the ledge and we were pretty certain the cat was going to fall four stories to its death, but it ended up being fine. We were trapped in there for eight hours before a locksmith finally came and freed us. My biggest revelation of the saga was that group sex is amazing for when you’re drunk, because you can just take a time-out whenever you’re bored or tired and someone else will literally take over for you. Genius.

  Weirdly, my parents didn’t find this story amusing. In fact, they weren’t really fans of any of my writing. Postblog, they became more vocal about how horrified they were that I’d bailed on the life that God had planned for me and instead chosen to fall down a K-hole of amorality. Beyond just being worried about me and embarrassed for themselves, they were concerned about the long-term effects that writing about sex would have on my subsequent professional life and ability to trap a husband. Like Sam, my mother was pretty insistent that blogging about being a ho was going to make it difficult to ever find anyone to love me. Her panicked emails to me from that time are pretty classic. Being the bitch that I was, rather than being sympathetic to her quite valid personal crisis, I’d usually just post snippets from her emails on my blog as a joke. And now, because I’ve yet to mature, I’m going to do it again here. The following are a selection of excerpts from my mother’s emails from 2007 to 2009.

  Karley, there are a few things that have been bothering me lately and I need to get some things off my chest. It bothers me unbelievably that the one thing that you choose to write about is “dirty things.” Is that who you really are? Is that because you feel nobody would read your writing if it wasn’t all about sex? I know you know it bothers me. I think it’s only natural that it would bother me and Dad and anybody who loves you. Can you at least try and understand how it makes me feel?

  Karley, I went on the Vice blog today and I am seriously afraid to read your articles sometimes. I feel like whenever I enter that site I see something about vaginas, and I know that’s your favorite subject (????) so I don’t read the article in fear that you wrote it!

  Rob [my little brother] had Facebook open the other day so I took a quick look at your page, and I’m worried about what you say on your “wall.” When I looked you had written something about how your vagina had started its own PR company. Is that meant to be funny? I don’t understand your humor sometimes.

  Let Jesus back into your heart.

  This clubnight “Girlcore” that you organize, is it true that this is a lesbian night or is that just for show?

  I can’t hold my head up in the supermarket anymore because I feel like the whole town is looking at me and judging me because of your blog. Don’t you have any respect for how your actions reflect on me and Daddy?

  You are twenty three years old. Why is it that you are so “into” a nineteen year old b
oy who looks twelve? Also, you say that he acts “crazy” and that obviously does not make me feel good. It seems like instead of getting more mature as you age you are acting more crazy and talking about getting drunk and having hangovers all the time. Please set me straight if I’m wrong, but can you see why I am so worried about you?

  There has been lots of coverage in the press about HPV recently and it makes me so nervous! Are you making sure to use protection?

  I called you three times yesterday and you didn’t pick up. Please respond to this email and let me know you’re not dead.

  Instead of blogging, maybe you should try making a vision board. It’s a list of personal goals using visual images. I saw it on Oprah. Just a thought!

  They’re pretty poetic. It’s easy for me to laugh about this stuff today, because I now have a deeply loving relationship with my parents (in part because we eventually agreed to disagree about my writing). But in my early twenties, there were a few years when things were pretty bad between us. After I started my blog, I barely spoke to either of my parents for three years. In my infrequent phone conversations with my mom, a reoccurring theme was the idea that I had “been corrupted”—that I was ultimately a person of virtue but had been led astray, and that the farther away I wandered, the harder it would be for me to find my way back.

  “You used to be such a good girl,” she’d say repeatedly. Sometimes she’d be crying. While I clearly wasn’t going to take her life advice, this still wasn’t easy to hear.

  “Good girl” is a phrase that often gets used in our culture, whether it’s Drake cooing that “you’re a good girl and you know it,” or our dads repeatedly telling us to “be a good girl” throughout our adolescence. Usually, being a “good girl” means something along the lines of being quiet, polite, and well-behaved, and not sucking strangers’ dicks in an alleyway behind a warehouse party. I don’t know…sounds kinda boring to me. Of course, what goes hand in hand with the idea of the good girl is the trope of the “good girl gone bad”—this notion that as women, we are naturally sweet and pure and good-hearted, until one fateful day when we eat the forbidden fruit, and then it all goes to shit.

  Of course, this is reductive and harmful (and, like, makes no sense). No one is either all good or all bad. We are neither Madonnas nor whores. We don’t all start out pure and become “corrupted.” Just like men, women are complex human beings, and can’t be reduced to this infantilizing polarity. The reality is, being a girl who likes to fuck, who pursues visceral sexual experiences, is neither good nor bad—but it does make life more interesting.

  CHAPTER 2

  HARNESSING MY SLUT POWERS

  Temporarily Insane

  The hole you’re trying to fill is not in your pussy, your ass, or your mouth,” Max told me, sometime around the beginning of our relationship. “You need to figure out what’s missing in your life and tend to it, otherwise you’re just going to end up fucking yourself into oblivion.”

  Was that an insult, or just really good advice? I couldn’t tell. But it didn’t matter. Honestly, I loved it when Max spoke to me this way, because it meant that he was analyzing me. Or at least that he was thinking about me at times other than when he was inside me. I took this as a sign that we must be soul mates.

  I knew from the start that our relationship was a bad idea, but I was okay with that. Truth be told, I found it oddly thrilling to think that my romance with Max could potentially ruin my life. I was twenty-four, had just arrived in New York City, and was falling in what I suppose would be called love. Max—the object of my obsession—was a twenty-three-year-old, Asperger’s-esque chemistry student and documentary filmmaker who I’d masturbated to at least forty times before we’d ever actually met. Max was beautiful: six foot one and 113 pounds, like an overgrown dandelion, aka my ideal male body type. When he inhaled, it looked as if his ribs were about to pierce through his skin. His deep-set eyes were like two caves. As I’ve made quite clear, I melt for that translucent, tuberculo look.

  My relationship with Max began in my head. I was still living in London at the time, and happened to come across one of his documentaries online, in which he traveled to the rain forest to be ritualistically burned and dosed with hallucinogenic venom. When I saw him on my laptop screen, I swear I nearly gasped. His shirtless body, which was covered in bug bites and dirt, looked worryingly underinflated. He was the personification of every mental sketch I’d ever created of the “perfect boy.” His voice alone made me want to fuck him: warped and uncomfortably deep, like a cassette tape that had been left out in the sun too long. The problem, of course, was that I lived in London and he lived thousands of miles away in New York. Woe was me.

  Around this time, I was toying with the idea of the internet as a sort of God figure—if you wanted something, I thought, all you had to do was ask the internet for it and it would be yours. My theory was that, since almost everyone has a Google alert for their name, if you blog about someone enough, they will eventually see it. And if you seem desperate enough, they will eventually fuck you.

  This strategy had sort of worked for me once before. A couple of months earlier, I’d written a blog post about my childhood obsession with that sickly wheelchair kid from the movie The Secret Garden. He was my first ever crush, which confused my mother, seeing as the character was literally an invalid. In my blog post, I included the name of the actor who played him, who I knew was now twenty-eight and also lived in London (though at this point unfortunately had some color in his cheeks and was sans wheelchair). I wrote about how I slept under a poster of him all throughout my tweens, and how I’d lie in bed at night and imagine what color his pee was (luminous yellow). Ya know, nothing too scary. My Google God premonition was correct, because within days the actor sent me an email, informing me that the color of his pee depended on the amount of fluids he drank, but that it was generally normal colored. Amazing. Unfortunately we never fucked, although we did awkwardly kiss once when I ran into him in the street outside a bar at 2 a.m., which to this day is one of the highlights of my life, because it made me feel that, on some level, I was in control of the universe. Some people pray; I blog.

  And so I began writing a series of irrationally obsessive blog posts about my infatuation with Max: how I would set a place setting for him at my dinner table every night and imagine he was there eating with me; how I would make out with my hand in the shower and pretend it was his mouth I was tonguing, and so on. Lo and behold, within a week the internet gods had answered my request in the form of a Facebook message from the Lust of My Life. It read simply: “I’ve seen the blogs. Are you ever in New York? If so, we should hang out.” I almost puked.

  Coincidentally (or not?), six months later I was deported from the UK after being caught coming back into London on the Eurostar with an expired visa. Whoops? And so I moved to New York, because…well, where else is there? Max and I had not kept in contact in the months leading up to this point (aka he never replied to my responding message, which involved asking if I could change my Facebook status to “in a relationship”), but I took my sudden deportation as a sign from the sex gods that he and I were meant to be. All I needed to do now was get his attention. I wanted to do something grand—to make a big impression—and so I creepily found out where he lived through a mutual acquaintance, put on a ten-dollar thrift-store polyester wedding dress I’d bought back in the ninth grade, and sat on the doorstep of his apartment building in ninety-degree heat, waiting for him to come home. Obviously. What felt like hours later, but might have been twenty minutes, I watched as Max’s mantis-like body moved toward me in an awkward lurch. As I gazed up at him, my body perspiring profusely under the layers of polyester, he flashed me a look of simultaneous confusion and fear. “I think we may have met in a past life,” he said after a long pause. We fucked within thirty minutes.

  And so began the start of what I defined as a relationship, but what most people would probably call a tragedy. The problem with Max was that he didn’t really
like to, ya know, leave his apartment or interact with other human beings or have fun or have sex or be nice to me. It put a bit of a damper on things, honestly. But still, he seemed to like having me around once in a while, and I was just dumbfounded by the fact that I was somewhat regularly IRL-fucking the guy who I’d been masturbating to online for more than a year.

  With Max, I suddenly found myself doing cliché “scary girlfriend” things that I’d seen in movies, like secretly smelling his dirty underwear or making myself come while watching him sleep. I was, quite plainly, creepily infatuated with him. Or at least, with the fantasy of him that I’d created in my head.

  The problem is, when you’re in love with someone and they’re indifferent to you, it drives you fucking insane. It seems unlikely that Max was entirely apathetic toward me, given that we were dating or whatever, but it did appear that way a lot of the time. I was new to New York, but I was barely making any friends, always wanting to keep my calendar open in case Max decided last minute that he wanted to hang out with me. I started to feel out of control in my emotions around him. Sometimes, after we’d have sex, I’d suddenly burst into tears, and he’d just stare at me, perplexed, as if having any emotions at all was an abstract concept. Or worse, simply embarrassing.

  And then there was the sex issue. Max and I would have sex somewhat regularly—usually after taking a low dose of a psychedelic research chemical that he’d ordered on the dark web—but he generally just didn’t care that much about sex. He was “above it,” as he liked to say (he was also “above” food and friends and basically anything that one might derive uncomplicated and therefore unsophisticated pleasure from). But then randomly, one morning I found a pair of girls’ underwear down the side of his bed. When I timidly brought it up, he insisted that they had been there “since before we met.” To be fair, we had only been dating for about three months at this point, and his room looked like it hadn’t been cleaned for three years. Also, we’d never had the “so we’re not fucking anyone else” talk. But I mean, I didn’t think it was necessary with him, especially given the conversation we’d had at my birthday dinner, when he spent forty-five minutes talking admiringly about this Russian cult of eunuchs known as the Skoptsy, who castrated themselves in order to be rid of sexual desire. “Once you are freed from sexual desire,” Max told me, “or sexual desire is transmuted into work, suddenly the world becomes engorged with possibilities.” Best birthday ever.