Slutever Read online

  More often than not, when I initiated sex, Max would accuse me of not actually being horny, saying that I just constantly needed to be fucked in order to validate his feelings for me, and therefore validate myself. By this point in my life, I was highly experienced in being on the receiving end of this particular criticism. For years I had been told that my high sex drive was a sign of something darker in me, of desperation, a lack of confidence, a plea for attention. And while it didn’t feel that way—especially with Max, given that I really cared about him—part of me couldn’t help but start to believe it. But that’s the way it goes, right? When a guy wants a lot of sex, it’s because he’s horny and thinks sex is fun, duh. But when a girl wants a lot of sex, it’s like: “Bitch, what’s your childhood trauma?”

  And so, because I was weak-kneed and weak-willed, I attempted to subvert my own desires to match his—in life and also in sex. I told myself: I’ve done the slutty thing; perhaps it’s time to be the female eunuch.

  An Atypical Mentor

  I was summoned into Malcolm’s office one winter afternoon, by an email from his assistant. I already knew who he was. When I arrived he was sitting straight-faced behind a large oak desk, petting his Persian cat like a supervillain. “I’ve seen your films,” Malcolm said to me, referring primarily to a video I’d made of myself masturbating on a fire escape in a fur coat, which I had put on the internet and called art. “They’re good. You’re interesting. I wanted to meet you.”

  Malcolm ran an erotic literary journal and hung out with porn stars, but still managed to be taken seriously because he was a man and dressed well. I assumed he wanted me to write for him, which was really exciting, considering that I’d been living in New York joblessly for three months at this point. Malcolm was British and nihilistic and twenty years older than me, and when he was taking care of himself, in certain lights, he could look James Bond handsome. He and all his model ex-girlfriends had been heroin addicts in New York in the nineties, and hung around with Vincent Gallo and Harmony Korine. I was far too impressed by this.

  “You should let me photograph you,” he said, looking me up and down. “Nude.”

  I squirmed nervously in my chair. “Are you a photographer?” I asked.

  “Not really.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

  “Why not? Your tits are bad?”

  “Uh…no, they’re fine.”

  “Your ass then…is your ass bad?”

  “No, it’s fine.”

  “It’s gotta be your pussy, then. Is it…” He made a so-so gesture.

  Then came a long pause that was seemingly only awkward for me. His quiet confidence terrified me. “So, there’s something I wanted to ask you about,” Malcolm said, finally breaking the silence.

  “My writing?” I asked.

  He looked at me like I was an idiot. “I wanted to know, if we fucked, would you get weird afterward?”

  “W-what do you mean by ‘weird’?” I stuttered.

  “Weird as in emotional,” he said flatly, as if this were obvious.

  “I wouldn’t get weird,” I answered too quickly. “Why, would you get weird?”

  He thought about this for a moment, then shrugged. “Maybe. But I get quite cranky when I don’t get what I want.”

  We started fucking regularly. First once a week, then more often. (While Max and I still hadn’t discussed monogamy by this point, this certainly deterred my ambition of self-castration.) Malcolm’s apartment was directly above his office. I would visit in the late afternoons and he’d drag me from room to room by my hair, bend me over armchairs, tie me to the bed and hit me with a variety of expensive leather things. He loved to constantly remind me that everyone working in the office downstairs could hear my body being dragged along the floor, and ask me how it felt to take the L train back to “embarrassing Brooklyn” with cum in my hair. One of my favorite early texts from him read: Be home at 8. Tired but would be good to beat u. I cherished it like a love letter.

  I liked that Malcolm was stereotypically sleazy, like the perverted boss from a shitty erotic novel or something. He liked to pull off my underwear and shove them down my throat while we fucked, or force me to blow him while he made important phones calls to…whoever. His casual pervertedness gave me license to emulate all the sleazy, over-the-top theatrical stuff I loved to watch in porn, like attempting to deep-throat while hanging upside down off a desk (although I would advise not eating kale salad immediately before trying this; it is not the food you want coming back up through your nose, believe me).

  Fucking Malcolm was an entirely new experience for me. He was tall, with broad shoulders and a muscular frame, and I liked that he could pick me up and throw me around. Before him, every guy I’d dated was under 120 pounds, so the fact that he posed a legitimate physical threat to me made sex seem more…I don’t know, significant? Essentially, he contradicted everything I thought I liked about men. And about myself.

  Malcolm and Max were polar opposites when it came to sex. The couple of times Max had read my writing—which was only ever after I threw a tantrum about it—he had literally flinched with embarrassment. On multiple occasions he told me that writing about sex and dating wasn’t “serious writing,” and that the subject of sexuality was “girly”—girly, of course, being synonymous with “insignificant.” But Malcolm loved my writing, and soon started commissioning me to write for his literary journal. He’d say stuff like “You’re like Gore Vidal, if Gore Vidal was a slutty feminist blogger with a bad dye job.” When I told Max about my longtime fantasy of sleeping with two men at once, he practically kicked me out of bed, saying that being fucked by two guys was degrading (meanwhile, I knew he wanted to have a threesome with me and another girl). But when I told Malcolm about my fantasy, his response was: “Baby, if you’re good, I’ll think about getting you a spit roast for Christmas.”

  Malcolm liked to jerk off while I told him stories about sneaking out of my parents’ house in high school to fuck awkward skateboarders who weren’t old enough to drive. The sluttier the story, the more into it he was. For most of my life, I’d dealt with people calling me a slut in a mean way. But with Malcolm, it wasn’t just that he was turned on by my ho-ishness; it was clear that he respected it. It was a point of connection for us. Malcolm was the first person to make me feel like my sex life wasn’t something to be ashamed of but rather part of what made me interesting—like my sluttiness was a sign of my curiosity about life.

  Malcolm also loved making these grand, sweeping statements about my personality. Some of them were true, and some of them were certainly not true, but the ones that weren’t sounded so good that I tried to make them so. For instance, he was constantly telling me that I was a sociopath, which I wasn’t—I clearly had a ton of feelings, increasingly for him—but because he said it, I’d think, Holy shit, I guess I am?! “You’re the purest sociopath I know,” he’d say. “You don’t beat yourself up about things that don’t matter. You’re like a shark—you don’t think, you just keep moving.” To this day, I think my general lack of regret is a result of him programming that trait into my brain.

  Sometimes his feedback was less positive. For instance, he was always saying that I would be way hotter if I didn’t wear such cheap shoes. He once threw a pair of my “hideous” Zara sandals out the window of a ten-story hotel and made me walk home barefoot. He started to dictate what I could and couldn’t wear to our meetings. He once told me, “The next time I see you I don’t want you to be wearing any of that hideous blue eye shadow. And I don’t want you coming here in the underwear you’ve been wearing all day, either. From now on you should bring a fresh pair of underwear in your bag. Understood?”

  I always said yes. Within a couple of months, I was doing almost anything he asked me to. It felt good to be so malleable. With Max it was different—I felt like I was drowning, like I was sinking under the weight of my emotions and he didn’t even notice. But with Malcolm, my lack of power felt like a decisi
on. I was in control of my submission, and it made me feel sane, somehow. Maybe I was like trauma victims who reenact their abuse through BDSM, and then it acts as a form of therapy—but with emotional abuse and manipulation? Who knows? Either way, I was learning that when you’re in lust with someone, it’s far more satisfying to be objectified than to be ignored.

  Unsurprisingly, a lot of people thought of Malcolm as a perv (like, in a bad way), but they didn’t know him like I did. In my eyes, he was the ideal male feminist. Not the self-congratulatory, condescending kind of male feminist who says shit like “Sigh, all of the inequality women face makes me so sad,” and then treats you like a wounded bird in need of rescuing. They’re the worst. Instead, Malcolm was the sort of guy who just didn’t judge you, and who wanted you to be the most powerful version of yourself possible. And he understood that sex is a form of power.

  Two months into our affair, Malcolm invited me on a trip to California, to help him work on an art book he was making. My job was to interview the artists, and his job was to, ya know, schmooze and smoke cigarettes and lounge around in his red cashmere slippers. It was our first time spending any real time together while fully dressed. We flew to San Francisco and stayed at the Fairmont, and all along the way he found every excuse he could to tell people that I was his wife. “My wife and I would like to upgrade our room. What’s the largest bed you have? We might be having guests.” I pretended to hate it.

  My secondary job for the trip was to find us a girl for a threesome. I was only made aware of this upon arrival. “Technically you’re working for me now, which makes me your boss, which means you have to do whatever I say,” he said flatly, chain-smoking in the hotel robe. “It’s my life’s dream to get a blow job from two girls in Palm Springs while listening to Cher. Can you make that happen, baby, please?”

  “But we’re in San Francisco.”

  “Just make it work.”

  “But I don’t know anyone here,” I whined.

  “Ugh…” He rolled his eyes. “What about all the insecure girls who read your blog? Won’t one of them come over?”

  I found this insulting, but also, like, potentially genius? I was still in that early relationship phase where I wanted to impress him. I wanted to come across like a skilled procurer. So I got out my phone and tweeted: “In SF, looking for guest star in a 3some tonight. Email pics.” By dinnertime I had four replies. We passed my phone back and forth across the table, comparing nudes. I could tell he was pleasantly surprised. We settled on a tanned, voluptuous twenty-one-year-old who, like clockwork, showed up at our hotel at 9 p.m. and excitedly took part in our ménage, all to the soundtrack of “If I Could Turn Back Time.” It really was perfect…minus the part where the girl got her period and I ended up with bloodstains on my bra and teeth, but whatever, menstruation happens.

  Later that night, while basking in our post-threesome glow, Malcolm told me, “You really are good, baby. You’re like a top whore. A prime fuck. You could make a lot of money doing this, if you wanted to.” I had never felt so proud.

  Unsurprisingly, I fell in love with Malcolm and wanted him to be my boyfriend. It seemed like the perfect way to segue out of my sort-of ongoing but ultimately destructive relationship with Max, who I was still technically dating despite the fact that sometimes I think he legitimately forgot I existed. Malcolm, unfortunately, did not agree. “Come on,” I’d say to him. “We’re perfect for each other.”

  “No we’re not,” he’d say. “And if you break up with your boyfriend, I’ll stop fucking you.”

  Over the next couple of weeks, our relationship grew increasingly, shall we say, avant-garde. Back in New York, I got a call from Malcolm one evening telling me that his old friend was coming to town from London—a trip for his birthday weekend—and that Malcolm wanted to give me to him as a present. “You’ll like him,” Malcolm told me. “He makes hideous art that sells for a lot of money.”

  “What am I supposed to do with him?” I asked.

  “Everything except anal. He’s not that good a friend.”

  Said friend showed up at my apartment later that night. He was tall, blond, and unnervingly polite—like nineties Hugh Grant, only somehow more apologetic. He drank water while I chugged wine, we made small talk, and then we had sex for like forty-five minutes. At one point, while we were fucking, I started to get off on the whole sex-as-currency thing, and I said something along the lines of, “You think I’m a whore, don’t you?”—but like, in a sexy, dirty-talk way, so it sounded less embarrassing in context. Still, as soon as I said it, he suddenly froze, blushed intensely, and mumbled in his cute British accent, “Oh no, really, I don’t think that. You seem like a nice, sweet girl, and I’m so enjoying spending time with you!”

  Afterward I collapsed on my bed, my adrenaline still rushing. It amazed me how much I’d been into this scenario—I liked opening the door, not knowing who was on the other side, but knowing that whoever it was would get to do what he wanted with me. The idea that I was a thing that could be given to someone felt wrong and exciting at the same time. I wanted to be one of Malcolm’s things—preferably stored in his closet and dragged out for periodic use. I couldn’t tell if my sudden submissive urges were entirely new, or if they’d always been there, somewhere deep in my subconscious, and only now did I finally feel comfortable indulging them. Either way, I was going with it. The following afternoon I showed up at Malcolm’s, excited to tell him about the previous evening.

  “Can we do that again soon?” I asked him giddily. “With one of your other friends?”

  He looked at me and smiled—one of those slow, satisfied smiles that your mom gives you when you wash the dishes without her having to ask. “You know what you are?” he said. “You’re pagan. You live life virtually unencumbered by morals or values.”

  “I have values,” I said defensively.

  He shrugged. “That’s what I love most about you: You have a genuine capacity for amorality.”

  It was the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me.

  Is this degrading? (And do I give a fuck?)

  You likely won’t be surprised to hear that whenever I would regale my friends with tales of Malcolm and our sexy adventures, they tended to be vaguely horrified. The general consensus was that Malcolm was a pervert, and that the way he treated me was “degrading.” Now, the pervert part I agreed with—but a pervert in a Tom Ford suit, which somehow feels less offensive?—however, the degrading part was something I never fully understood. That word, “degrading,” is one that has come up in relation to my sex life many times over the years, before Malcolm was ever in the picture and since. But I never quite knew what it meant exactly. Can something be simultaneously degrading and fun? And if I enjoy things that are widely thought of as degrading, does that mean there’s something wrong with me? Deep thoughts.

  One of my first encounters with the term was in high school, when I was still a virgin. I was fourteen years old, riding the JV soccer bus back from an away game, when one of the older girls on the team decided to give us naive freshmen a sex talk. Amid other wildly off-base pieces of wisdom the elder shared with us that night (for instance, that giving a blow job with a flavored condom tastes like sucking on a lollipop) was the insistence that you should never let a guy fuck you doggy-style, because it’s degrading. At the time, this made sense to me. If a guy cared about you, I thought, surely he would want to see your face while you were making love, right? Of course, age and experience taught me that you can be fucked from behind and still be a respectable human being (and that flavored condoms taste like battery acid). But experience has also taught me that sometimes the fact that a sexual act is a bit dirty or undignified is precisely why it’s sexy. Like, isn’t that sort of the whole point of doggy-style? That I want to be bent over and treated like an animal? As Jessa from Girls said after being told that doggy-style was degrading: “What if I want to feel like I have udders?”

  A century ago, Sigmund Freud famously threw his h
ands up when confronted with female desire. Freud wrote, “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’” Bro seemed to be confused about a lot of things female-related, but I’m with him on this one. It’s roundly acknowledged by now that female sexual arousal is more complex than that of our male counterparts: Basically, (straight) guys are just happy to see boobs, whereas female sexuality is a messy tug-of-war between body and mind. We want romance, and yet we fall for guys who ignore us. We want security, but we also randomly have rape fantasies (admit it). We are feminists, and yet we’re desperate for an older guy to spit on us and lock us in a closet. Have our vaginas gone rogue?

  As women, we’re told that being objectified is bad. Okay, fine. But there’s a time and a place for everything. And if there’s one thing I learned from Malcolm, it’s that I personally can be very turned on by a skilled objectifier. It’s no secret that women are often turned on by being wanted—not as in “I want to take care of you,” but more as in “I want to bend you over my desk.” Of course, when I’m dating someone, I want them to value me for my ideas and accomplishments and humor or whatever. But when I’m fucking someone, I want them to value my lack of a gag reflex. Within the context of a relationship or a hookup with someone who respects you, being treated like a sex toy can be really hot. Like, I don’t always want to be a whole person. That’s exhausting. Sometimes I just want to be my boobs.