Slutever Page 8

  The demise of the affair was sort of inevitable. It’s difficult to maintain that level of hedonism with someone, especially when you know that the sex isn’t going to lead to an actual relationship, which Malcolm repeatedly made very clear to me. (Although he did once include the caveat: “Maybe, if you get famous, I’ll consider impregnating you.” Still crossing my fingers on that one.) He remained a friend—to this day we’re very close, and continue to act as each other’s default sex therapist—but there were no more sensual beatings, and pretty soon I was replaced by an American Apparel model.

  Down one nonboyfriend, I started focusing more of my attention on Max. He could still be dismissive of my level of interest in sex, but we connected on other levels. We could talk for hours, we made each other laugh, and I loved how after we fucked I would be covered in tiny circular bruises, simply from making contact with his bony frame. I’ve never met a man so pointy; it was truly a dream. And Max did start making more of an effort to be supportive of my writing. Like the time when he bought me the textbook Sexual Deviance: Theory, Assessment, and Treatment. It would have been better if he hadn’t followed up the gift with, “Maybe you can learn something…about yourself.” But still, I think his heart was in the right place. And in the moments when he did inevitably launch into critiques of my psyche, I felt newly capable of dismissing his criticisms. My relationship with Malcolm had armed me with a newfound slutty confidence. Like: “I’m not traumatized, I’m just a sexual cosmonaut, hello?!”

  Strangely, when I was still seeing Malcolm, he would often give me advice about Max. Once, while I was rambling through my usual list of complaints about our relationship—about how Max would ignore me, and how he would refer to me insultingly as “blogger brain,” Malcolm suddenly interrupted and said something that kind of changed the game for me. “Look, darling,” he shot back. “Allow me to explain this to you. Your boyfriend has a superiority complex, which means that he obviously doesn’t feel very powerful in the world. He’s just a bully. But you obviously care about him, so I wouldn’t let it get to you.”

  “Well, if I care about him, then why am I sleeping with you?”

  He rolled his eyes at the apparent stupidity of this question. “Because you love him so much that it makes you feel powerless, and fucking someone else makes you feel in control. Obviously.”

  The reality of that statement was dizzying. “But he’s mean to me,” I whined, because I couldn’t think of anything better to say.

  “Well, next time he’s mean to you, pick up a knife and stab him.”

  Max and I broke up when I was twenty-seven. I never used a knife on him, though I thought about it many times. The reality was, Max wasn’t enough of a sex maniac, I was potentially too much of one. Also, it was just difficult to date someone who refused to leave his apartment. After the breakup, I did what I always do when a relationship ends: I went on what I like to call a “rebound rampage,” which is where you basically just have sex with anything nearby and remotely sentient. It’s pretty much a no-fail breakup cure. This time, however, my rampage was a little more, shall I say, rampagey than usual.

  A mere week into my new single life marked the now historic Saturday when I fucked five people in less than twenty-four hours (and not at a sex party, which would have been cheating). That morning, I woke up with a nightmare headache, still wearing my PVC party dress, in a hazily familiar penthouse at the St. Regis New York. I was immediately handed a Bloody Mary by my new prostitute best friend, Madeline, who had thrown a party there the previous evening. Madeline then promptly coerced me into a threesome with another leftover party guest—a real estate guy in his forties who had apparently paid for the room. (For a moment I questioned whether the threesome was actually payment for the room, but he was really handsome, so I just went with it.) So that was two before breakfast. Then came a lunchtime relapse with Malcolm, followed by a quickie in the bathroom of an uppity Park Slope house party with my friend’s husband’s brother, and then I finally ended my record-breaking day by crawling into bed with a Spanish lesbian who I’d been clinging to for dear life since my first moment of singledom (who intuitively forced me to shower before reluctantly agreeing to finger me).

  Following my rampage, I felt weirdly proud of myself—like, “Wow, that was an unusually productive Saturday! Have I just fully actualized my slut potential?” But another part of me couldn’t get that line from Max out of my head. You know the one: “The hole you’re trying to fill is not in your pussy, your ass, or your mouth. 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.” (That line is so good, by the way—totally worth enduring a two-plus-year abusive relationship for.) Something about this particular rampage felt like it was crossing a line, even for me. Because as I’ve often wondered throughout the course of my sexual experience: How much is too much? At what point do you go from being a hedonistic, thrill-seeking neoslut to having a legitimate problem? What constitutes too much sex (an amount we’re supposed to feel bad about), compared with the appropriate amount of sex, compared with not enough sex (which we’re also supposed to feel bad about)?

  It’s not just sluts, or even just women, who question this. Of course, we all know about the sexual double standard. However, as much leeway as we give men when it comes to promiscuity, there is actually a limit to how much sex we let men get away with before we start vilifying them, too. Having a lot of sex with a lot of different partners is typically criticized across genders, though the criticisms differ slightly. It tends to go like this: If you’re a man who sleeps with many different women, you’re generally thought of as being kind of an asshole, an unethical player type, or, worst case, a predator. Whereas if you’re a woman who has a lot of sexual partners, then you must have “issues.” Basically, as Max so eloquently put it: There’s a gaping hole in your life, and you’re trying to fill it through your pussy.

  It’s not only old people or religious extremists who think this way. Even young folks today are pretty divided over whether casual sex with a lot of people is okay. While the nebulously defined Millennial generation has liberalized on a lot of issues that our parents were weird about—for instance, having premarital sex and being gay—having casual sex with many different partners is something a lot of us are still not really down with. A Cornell University study surveying 24,000 undergraduates throughout twenty-two different colleges all over the United States found that 60 percent of students said they would “lose respect for a man or a woman who hooks up with a lot of people.” Despite the vast social progress our society has made in recent years, we’re still having growing pains when it comes to sex outside the confines of long-term romantic relationships. But aside from the social stigma, is there any actual evidence to say that having a lot of sex with many different people is, in fact, bad for you?

  To answer this, I went to Dr. Zhana Vrangalova, a doctor of psychology, professor of human sexuality at NYU, and pioneering sex researcher on the topic of casual sex and its link to mental health. Dr. Zhana also happens to be one of my closest friends, which meant that it was easy to sit her down over bowls of ramen in order to pick her enlightened brain for answers to all my slutty questions.

  Zhana noted that while there is a long-held puritanical assumption that having sex with many people is harmful for both sexes, there’s actually little data to back this up. “Casual sex has many potential benefits,” Zhana told me. “For instance: sexual pleasure; an increased sense of self-confidence, desirability, and freedom; and satisfaction of our biological need for adventure. Study after study finds that people have more positive reactions after hookups than negative ones. Other studies show that casual sex has little or no impact on longer-term psychological well-being, meaning things like self-esteem, life satisfaction, depression, and anxiety.”

  In her TEDx talk “Is Casual Sex Bad for You?” Zhana makes the argument that whether casual sex can be good for your psychological well
-being depends on who you are and how you do it. So, obviously, the next question becomes: How do I know I’m of the slut genotype, and how can I tell if I’m slutting around in the right way? Zhana broke it down for me, starting with who you are.

  So, we know that sexual orientation exists on a spectrum. This is often evaluated using the Kinsey scale, which measures a person’s sexual orientation on a scale of 0 (exclusively heterosexual) to 6 (exclusively homosexual). What you may not know is that there’s also a sluttiness spectrum—surprise! The proper name for this is not, unfortunately, “the slut scale” but rather sociosexual orientation, which measures how oriented a person is toward casual sex, ranging from highly restricted to highly unrestricted. If you have an unrestricted sociosexuality, that means you’re someone who desires a lot of casual sex, you like fucking randoms, you crave novelty, maybe you sometimes casually fuck five people in a day (hi!), et cetera. And if you’re someone with a restricted sociosexuality, that means you’re not interested in casual sex, you don’t think about it, and you might even think sluts are immoral monsters.

  The 2014 Cornell study “Who Benefits from Casual Sex? The Moderating Role of Sociosexuality,” (Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2014) examined the influence of sociosexuality on the psychological well-being of single undergraduates following casual sex encounters. The study, conducted by Dr. Zhana, found that unrestricted students typically reported higher well-being and lower levels of depression and anxiety during the weeks when they got laid compared to the weeks when they didn’t. However, for the restricted students it was the opposite: In the weeks they hooked up, their well-being suffered. So the message is pretty clear: Not everyone is wired to be a ho.

  God, I wish someone had told me this sooner! Life would have been so much easier if I could have blamed my sluttiness on science, rather than some apparent lack of self-worth. It also would have potentially made dating a lot more straightforward. Like, when you think about it, it’s bizarre that, starting when we’re really young, we’re told to seek out a partner who we’re compatible with—someone who’s interested in the same things that we are, who’s equally ambitious, and who shares a similar vision of the future. And yet nowhere along the line did someone think to say: “Oh, and also, you should probably choose someone who has a similar level of sluttiness to you.” That tiny piece of advice could likely prevent a plethora of sexually mismatched marriages. And personally, I’d like to think this knowledge could have steered me away from dating people who seemed fundamentally less interested in—or even dismissive of—sexual exploration. Or at least it could have helped me give context to my sexual interests and behavior, making me less vulnerable to the critique of partners—and people in general—who didn’t approach sex in the same way that I do. But maybe that’s delusional. When I want to fuck someone, I’m rarely thinking rationally. Although, who is?

  But back to Dr. Zhana and the science of sluttiness. Now that we’ve addressed the who you are part, let’s try how you do it. Zhana stressed that motivation is a huge factor in the outcome of our hookups. Based on self-determination theory, a well-established theory of human motivation and personality, we know there are two types of motivations for the choices we make in our lives: autonomous and nonautonomous. Extensive research shows that when we do things for the “right” (autonomous) reasons, our well-being flourishes, but when we do those exact same things for the “wrong” (nonautonomous) reasons, our well-being suffers. And that’s pretty intuitive—like, choosing to have sex because you’re horny or sexually curious, or because the dude looks like Louis Garrel, usually leaves you feeling glamorous and in control, whereas hooking up with someone because you were depressed or feeling ugly can leave you with a shame hangover. The bottom line is that, when identifying unhealthy sexual behavior, what’s critical is not the amount of sex we’re having, but rather how and why. One can have a lot of sex in a healthy way, and a very small amount of sex in an unhealthy way. And that’s something I’ve certainly learned firsthand.

  I’ll preface this story by saying I’m not a person who regrets very much (potentially thanks to Malcolm’s brainwashing, as previously mentioned). I understand that regret is useful in that, in theory, it prevents us from making the same mistakes over and over. But it’s also often an unnecessary form of self-punishment. Ideally, we would just learn from our mistakes and move on, lest we risk ending up in “woe is me” victim purgatory. However, there have been a couple of specific instances when I’ve regretted my sexual behavior, times that felt particularly destructive, and as Zhana predicted, my regrets came from my motivations to fuck, rather than the body count.

  The time that most sticks out in my mind was when I cheated on my ex-girlfriend. Alice and I had been dating for more than a year, and were in a monogamous stretch of our relationship. We were going through a rough patch, and I was feeling jealous and anxious about her continued friendship with a girl who she’d been sleeping with back when we first met and were trying an open relationship. Turns out my anxiety was warranted, because I woke up Christmas morning to a text from Alice confessing that she’d cheated on me (being a Jew, she lacked respect for Jesus’s b-day). I pretty much wanted to die, and spent the following weeks drinking myself into oblivion, crying in bodegas, and just generally feeling like an emotional train wreck. Eventually she and I worked it out, and we decided not to break up over it. I told her that I could forgive and move on. Those were apparently lies, because a month later I was still a hot mess, boiling with rage and resentment. So one night I went out, drank a million tequilas, and went home with this ex-Mormon filmmaker lesbian, specifically because I wanted to get back at my girlfriend. I was in full-on drunken cunt mode and wanted revenge. But afterward I thought, Wait, who am I? Not because the sex was bad—the girl was cool and hot, and we continue to be friends today—but I felt disgusted with myself because I was out of control. My emotions had gotten the better of me, and I was having mindless, detached sex out of spite with the intent of hurting someone I cared about. That is certainly not classy slut behavior.

  Once, Malcolm told me that the greatest sexual quality is composure. It sounds slightly off base at first. Adjectives like “wild” and “deranged” feel more obviously sexy, as compared to “God, he’s so composed!” Plus, this assertion seemed especially counterintuitive coming from a sex maniac. But eventually I’ve come to agree with him. Composure in the bedroom isn’t about putting restrictions on yourself, or only fucking missionary or whatever—it’s about knowing how you want to fuck, making autonomous decisions, and getting the most out of sex. There’s this stigma that sluts are “out of control,” but that’s not always the case. You can be a hedonist and still have composure. You can be a sex maniac and also be a decent human being who communicates your desires in a way that doesn’t offend anyone. You can be a slut with poise. You can even, so I’ve heard, be a slut with morals! You just have to get the dance right.

  Of course, any conversation about “right” and “wrong” reasons to have sex can get messy, because what’s right for one person isn’t going to be right for everyone. I, like many people, grew up in an environment where I was told that I should only have sex for love (and only after I was married, as if that task weren’t already impossible). Today, most of society has moved away from that extreme, but we are still living in the hangover of that morality. We’re often told that sex should be driven by romance and a deep emotional connection—that you should only fuck someone if you care about them (at least a little bit). And I agree that that’s a great reason to fuck. But who says that romance has to be what motivates us to have sex? Why can’t we have sex simply because we’re bored, or stressed, or because we’re broke and sex doesn’t cost any money (at least, usually)? Or because we want something to talk about at a dinner party? Or because I just broke up with my boyfriend and banging my personal trainer sounds like way more fun than crying while ordering Seamless?

  That said, I don’t think Max’s critique that I try
to feed my ego through my pussy is totally off base. I’ll admit that at certain difficult points in my life—periods when I was dealing with a lot of work stress, or after a breakup or whatever—I would turn to casual sex as a distraction, or as a quick and easy form of validation. And maybe those aren’t the absolute best reasons to be sleeping around, but it’s not the worst way to deal with a low period, either. I have friends who turn to alcohol or drugs during particularly rough or stressful times—not to the point of addiction, but to a point of excess, as an escape.

  So why is it “wrong” to use sex as a coping mechanism? If sex is something that makes me feel good, then of course I’m going to seek it out at times when I’m feeling shitty. And maybe it doesn’t fix things, but it’s still useful. They say the best way to get over someone is to get under someone else. Well, certainly for me, after breakups, casual sex has been a very welcome distraction—a pillowy segue into singledom, and probably ultimately more healthy (for me) than pounding martinis and Xanax.

  Sex has connected me to people in myriad ways. Sure, at points it has fueled and intensified my romantic love for someone. But sex has also been so much more than that for me. It has made my life more dynamic. It has been a shortcut to intimacy. It has been a source of rebellion and provocation, as well as a continual form of entertainment—for myself, but also for other people, given that I’ve literally made a career out of ranting about it. But also, sex has made me seem more interesting to myself. It has colored my personal narrative. Over the years, I have come to see my sex life as a marker of my curiosity and my freedom (granted, with a little help from a sadistic older man). It has become an integral part of the personal story that I tell myself about who I am. It’s like Joan Didion’s famous adage: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Or more like, we tell ourselves stories in order to fuck. Or even better, we fuck in order to tell ourselves stories.