Best Sex Writing of the Year

by Jon Pressick

  Thankfully, we’re also hearing less and less of the term “marital aid,” with its heteronormative connotations and undercurrent of shame. But in eschewing outdated terms such as these, companies are overlooking the most basic and unambiguous replacement.

  If you read my blog on a regular basis, you’ll notice that I prefer to call things by their proper names. I correct and challenge coy idiots who use phrases like “C-spot” instead of clitoris, “big O” instead of orgasm, “battery-operated boyfriend” instead of vibrator, “dilly” instead of dildo, and so on. Therefore, I like the term “sex toys” because it is straightforward. It is not a euphemism. It is specific and unwavering. Sex toys are simply toys meant for play, for use during sexual activity.

  At least that’s what I thought. When I engaged my boyfriend in this debate, he asked whether “sex” is too narrow, whether it implies a partner. I’ve always considered the word to be all encompassing, but I can see his point. Still, every other option for that slot falls short.

  These days it is hip and trendy for companies to come up with their own cutesy little terms—“pleasure objects,” “erotic toys,” “love toys”—that are clearly marketing ploys more than anything else. But this clogs the industry with superfluous terms. We could play mix-and-match all day with these words, but the bottom line is that something will always be the dominant term, and I don’t particularly want that dominant term to become “pleasure products.”

  I’m not opposed to the idea of pleasure, obviously—and I do like the way “pleasure” refers to what a toy does, rather than when it is used. However, I feel that when we replace “sex” with “pleasure,” we are sugarcoating, somehow rejecting “sex” as not representative of what we want to say. It seems like an aversion to the word “sex,” which is the last thing we need. It’s also less specific. “Pleasure” is much more broad, and then you tack “products” onto it and suddenly you could be referring to great music, delicious food, really comfortable couches…

  The word “toy” comes with its own baggage, of course. In a certain context, it implies something childish and unimportant. You could argue that it is itself a euphemism. Yet despite these less than stellar connotations, I think it works better than “product” or “object”—words that sound sterile and generic, like jugs of allpurpose cleaner sitting on a shelf. They are not associated with anything in particular.

  “Toy,” on the other hand, is associated with a feeling. Not just any feeling, but a feeling that I am trying, time and again, to convey to people. Sex toys are not just mechanical devices that will get in the way of sex. They are not ominous gadgets that will turn your girlfriend into a vibrator-wielding recluse. They are toys, meant for adding playfulness and fun to your sex life. They inspire creativity and improvisation. In our sex-negative culture, where to enjoy sex (especially as a woman) is somehow blasphemous, this is essential.

  I also believe that manufacturers invent snooty terms such as “pleasure products” as a way to artificially rise above their competition, and that’s kind of shitty. Yes, LELO’s products are luxurious, but are they any more sophisticated than We-Vibe’s? No. It is all marketing. Besides, I can’t imagine myself saying, “I have a massive pleasure product collection.” Although I am picky about which sex toys I’ll review, there’s no need to use euphemisms when describing them.

  I collect sex toys. I own over five hundred dildos, vibrators, and anal toys, which I routinely hold against my vulva (not my “lady bits”), stick in my vagina (not my “vajayjay”), press against my clitoris (not my “love button”), and push up my butt (not my “backdoor”). I don’t “flick the bean”—I masturbate. Then I write about my experience in a matter-of-fact way. Because sex is normal, sex is healthy, and sex is important.

  We’re not helping people become comfortable with sex toys by coddling them with euphemisms. Euphemisms breed euphemisms. We all still censor ourselves when we talk about sex—a bad habit we need to break. Even in conversation, I have to bring myself to use the term “sex toys” rather than “adult” something-or-others…and I work with this stuff every day.

  “Sex toys” may not be an absolutely perfect way of describing the objects I put on my genitals and in my orifices day in and day out, but it’s the best option out there. By virtue of its directness, it’s the most beneficial to my personal cause of normalizing these things. I believe that the less we fear offending people, the less they’ll be offended. Which perhaps explains why I’ve been using the term “sex toys” all along—without ever thinking about it.

  We Need a New Orientation to Sex

  Cory Silverberg

  Since the summer, I’ve been working on the second book in a series that offers a different approach to sexuality and gender education for young children. The first, What Makes a Baby, is for very young kids, and this second one is geared more or less to kids aged eight to ten. After many months I have a first draft, but there are still a few topics I can’t fully wrap my head around.

  One of them is sexual orientation.

  At first, I thought I was just struggling to figure out the best way to explain or approach this topic for kids. But I now think my problem is with the construction of sexual orientation itself as it’s used in sex education and research as well as in our own lives.

  I’ve come to think that the construct of sexual orientation is more trouble than it’s worth; that what we gain from the concept is outweighed by what we lose.

  Before I explain, let me be clear that I don’t think it makes sense to get rid of identities like “gay” or “lesbian,” “bisexual” or “straight.” For lots of people those identities are central to their experience of who they are and of the world around them. They aren’t understood or lived as a choice.

  I am also not arguing for some totalizing idea of sexual fluidity or gender fluidity. Some of us do have sexual desires and gender identities that are fluid, to be sure. But some of us also have strong and specific desires and identities that stay relatively fixed throughout our lives. And for others, while desire or identity may not be totally fluid all the time, they may still shift with time, experience, or opportunity.

  My problem with the concept of sexual orientation is also not that it creates categories, nor even that those categories become constituted as “natural” through that magical process of forgetting that we do over long periods of time, though, truth be told, this does really bug me.

  As a sex educator, I acknowledge that talking about sexual orientation can be really helpful sometimes, specifically because of those manageable categories it entails. When someone is wrapped up in knots, confused about many parts of their experience of sex, and not sure where to begin, talking about the objects of one’s sexual desire and interest in terms of sexual orientation can be helpful.

  But just because something works doesn’t mean what we give up to make it work is worth it.

  If you could forget everything you know about sexual orientation and think only of the term itself, it’s not bad. I like it because it is a question that demands answers.

  “Orientation” refers to one’s position in space and in relation to everything around it. To orient oneself in a room is to understand one’s position in relation to many other objects and people in the room, and one’s relation to the structure of the room itself (the walls, the floor, the ceiling).

  In this sense, what is one’s orientation to sex? To sexuality?

  To orient oneself in the world to sexuality would be to understand where you fit and feel in relation not only to other people and their sexuality but to sexuality as it is enacted and experienced in public: to public conversations about sex; to sex in media and culture; to sexual moments and feelings that may be impossible to put into words.

  What is one’s orientation to two people kissing on the street? To a sex toy store? To sexual and gender discrimination that takes the form of violence on the streets? To whatever draws our sexual interest or sparks desire?

  That wou
ld be a concept of sexual orientation worthy of the human experience of sex and sexuality. It opens up a thousand questions, each question a path that will take you on a journey into your thoughts, feelings, and desires about sex.

  But this isn’t what sexual orientation means in sexuality research or education, or in clinical or everyday settings.

  What sexual orientation refers to in practice is the position of one’s sexual and romantic interests in a binary system of sex. Embedded in this idea of sexual orientation is the (false) notion that there are two sexes, and two genders, and that gender is the central focus and most important aspect of sexual desire. In other words, sexual orientation is a way of organizing and conceptualizing adult relationships that says that the most salient features of our relationships are the gender of the people we have them with.

  In practice, sexual orientation poses only one question, and it is both dull and blunt: What is the gender of the people whom you are sexually attracted to and with whom you want to have intimate relationships?

  This is my problem.

  I came to this when I was trying to write about orientation for children. When I write, I start by just trying to get the ideas down. I don’t worry about comprehension level at first; I just try to describe what I see in the world. In one of those early drafts, I wrote something like this:

  Sexual orientation is the way that most adults organize their intimate and romantic relationships. Adults seem to believe that the most important aspect of who they love and who they want to be in close romantic relationships with is the gender of that other person.

  So if most of the time someone who calls themselves a woman wants to be in relationships with other women, we say her orientation is homosexual. If most of the time someone who is a woman wants to be with men, we say her orientation is heterosexual. If most of the time she is open to relationships with men or women we say her orientation is bisexual.

  And as soon as I wrote that and read it, I knew I had other problems. One is that neither I nor many others fit into the “man” or “woman” boxes easily. An even bigger problem is this:

  Why do we need to organize our relationships based on the gender of the people we are most attracted to? Why does gender need to be the most salient aspect of the object of our desire?

  If this seems like a ridiculous question to you, you don’t spend enough time with kids. It’s not a ridiculous question, and it’s one that many kids will ask, if they feel safe enough and empowered enough to do so. It’s a reasonable question, and the truth is that I don’t have a good enough answer.

  Instead of a good answer, when I was first asked this question, I was left with an intense feeling of “d’oh!”

  Why, in the face of all the amazing ways we might describe and understand our relationships of love and lust, would we use such a narrow frame of reference? More than any other subject, it was with this topic that I felt the weight of adult sexual socialization come down on a child’s understanding and experience of sexuality like a cage. Like a trap.

  I was also left wondering about what sort of alternative could be offered. The alternative can’t be some frameless “everyone just is” answer.

  I think the alternative might be found in a more expansive and creative use of the idea of orientation, one that highlights our relationships to people and ideas around us, as well as our relationship to structures of power that limit our options based on things like race, class, gender, our bodies, and whom we love and lust after.

  For now my tactic is to stall a bit. As I’m getting deeper into the writing, I am finding myself wanting more and more to postpone the introduction of concepts of adult sexual socialization. The cage has to come down at some point, but part of me wants to let those of us who still can roam free keep roaming just a little while longer.

  I Am the Blogger Who Allegedly “Complicated” the Steubenville Gang Rape Case—And I Wouldn’t Change a Thing

  Alexandria Goddard

  I stayed up all night screen-grabbing tweets that joked about raping and urinating on a girl they thought might be dead. Welcome to Steubenville.

  The Steubenville rape case has come to an end and the verdict has been heard.

  Two Ohio high school football players were found guilty of raping a drunk sixteen-year-old girl.

  On Sunday, Judge Thomas Lipps ruled that Trent Mays, seventeen, and Ma’Lik Richmond, sixteen, digitally penetrated the West Virginia teenager known only as “Jane Doe.”

  Their punishment? Richmond will be held at a juvenile detention facility for at least a year and Mays for at least two years. Both are required to register as juvenile sex offenders, and the juvenile system can hold them until they are twenty-one years old.

  As a blogger who first reported on the Twitter messages surrounding the alcohol-fueled party—many messages later deleted—it is sometimes surreal to look back and revisit the events of the past eight months.

  When I first wrote about the unbelievable events that took place in this town where I lived for five years—events which culminated in a passed-out female minor, Jane Doe, being carried around unconscious as men from the high school football team boasted about rape on video, tweeted jokes about violating her and, at one point, disgustingly said how “some people deserve” to be urinated on, I had NO clue the firestorm that it would cause.

  All I wanted was justice for Jane Doe. And now with the verdict in, I am proud to have played any small part in that. And I’m proud of the thousands of people—from Anonymous to Rose-anne—who rallied to this young woman’s defense, even though no one seemed to do so the night that it mattered.

  The night she will never get back. The night of her rape.

  I lived in Steubenville for about half a decade. Over the years since I have moved away, I kept in touch with friends and would occasionally read the local websites to see what was happening back in my old hometown.

  On August 22, 2012, I learned of the arrest of two Steubenville High School football athletes for rape, kidnapping and material containing a nude minor. I would later learn through my online research that the teens had been to a series of end-of-summer parties and the victim was sexually assaulted at a third location.

  Today as I read the sickening text messages from the trial— from men who are not even on trial themselves, I found myself sobbing once again. “How dead is she?” “I wanna see the vid of u hitting her with your weiner.” “She looks dead lmao.”

  Disgusting.

  Initially, the media did not present a lot of information about this case and that struck me as odd because I knew from having lived in Steubenville that this was going to be a big deal.

  I did a few Google searches and wasn’t able to come up with much so I went to the high school football website and made a list of names. I read a few local high school forums to get a gist of who was who and then started searching Twitter. I figured I’d see what the other kids were saying about the case. You can learn a lot through these conversations.

  Through researching, I was able to determine the boys’ names and found their accounts on Twitter. The accounts were unprotected, and I started clicking through Twitter conversations. I was amazed at how much information I was able to obtain with the first two hours of searching. I had a decent idea by that time of what parties they were at, some of the names of those in attendance and knew that a photograph had been circulated.

  I actually stayed up all night reading Twitter accounts. By the time I reached partygoer Michael Nodianos’s Twitter account, I was horrified.

  I could not believe some of the things this young man was saying about this young girl. Things like “some people deserve to be peed on #whoareyou” and “you don’t sleep through a wang in the butthole.” I also knew that there was a 12:29-minute-long video as I had found a copy of the thumbnail on Google cache, and was mortified that it had been tagged with words such as “drunk,” “rape” and “offensive.”

  I just remember thinking to myself—who raised these kids
and why aren’t more kids arrested? And the ultimate question: If so many kids were tweeting about this rape, WHY DIDN’T ANYONE DO ANYTHING? TO STOP IT?

  As I got deeper into the Twitter “evidence”—because that’s clearly what it was, I began screengrabbing the tweets, wondering if they would be taken down later. It turns out, I was right.

  There were a significant number of Twitter accounts discussing the night in question, and others posturing that if their friends got in trouble for this they were going to be “pissed.” Girls were calling the victim a whore, and I was absolutely overwhelmed at the amount of information that was put out on the Internet by the time I went to bed that afternoon.

  I literally was up all night saving screenshots and taking notes. With each student account I read, the more horrified I was. It was very difficult for me to even comprehend that anyone could be this callous—let alone a child.

  After the first blog post I did, I got a surge of traffic on the Steubenville story. People in town were seeking out information about the case because the media was not providing the information about the critical role social media had played in the case.

  During my research, I had also discovered evidence of a second assault that took place last April. Nodianos actually makes reference to the “rape at Palooza” in his twelve-minute video. I started posting screenshots on my blog from the various Twitter accounts, and that is when people really became enraged.

  It is one thing to hear the rumors, but I think when people actually saw the tweets, and the vile things that were said, with their own eyes, it really drove home just how disgusting the behavior of these kids was that night.