« In Which We Want It More Than We Can Conceive »

Woman on Blanket by Ana Lieberman 2012

Not Lust

by DAYNA EVANS

In the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles, we were sitting at the bar, ordering rounds of sushi. I was drunk from two beers and an overdose of sunshine.

“I don’t think there’s anything sexier than a girl riding a guy,” I said. “I don’t care if a guy can’t come that way. I like it.”

“What do you mean a guy can’t come that way?" Tony replied. "He can. Oh, he can."

There were three of us. Me, a girlfriend, and a guy friend, Tony, who I had been sleeping with regularly since I moved to Los Angeles a month or two before.

“I just think it’s rare.”

“And what’s with a guy eating you out for, like, hours when you first meet them? That’s too intimate. Relax.”

“Too intimate?” Tony reacted somberly. “Yes,” we both responded.

“It’s going to take a while before I feel comfortable enough for you to have your face down there. And it’s kind of pointless,” my friend said. “I don’t get off on it. Hardly.”

“But I love eating pussy.”

I laughed. “Of course you do.”

My friend rolled her eyes. “You guys both need to shut up. At the end of this conversation, we’re going to split up and you’ll get to act all this shit out. Not exactly fair.”

I smiled and held on to the counter of the sushi bar. Tony just laughed, then whispered “Yeeee-ahhh.” I took a roll of tuna and popped it into my mouth, realizing how much the taste of the cold fish made me want to leave immediately and do exactly as we'd said. The conversation had covered each of our sexual preferences in inordinate detail, which would be followed by another conversation later that night about guys that can’t find your clitoris. All the fish, sex and primer, however, did nothing for me as I climbed into bed with Tony later.

“I’m super tired,” I said.

“All right, we can just go to sleep.”

I already was.

+

When I was living in a Muslim country, I couldn’t have sex at all and I would joke to my friends at home that I was now celibate, or that I’d joined a convent. They didn’t exactly believe me that I couldn’t have sex, as there were men everywhere, and I did end up having sex with a very stoic French man whom I had been lusting after for three days. We only had sex once and the remainder of the year that I was away, I tried to get him to have sex with me almost weekly because I knew that he was my only outlet for what I thought about constantly. It is true that when something is taken away, you want it more than you can conceive.

When we had sex, though, I was beside myself with how weird it was. Here I was, two months into an experience where I had sworn that I’d be celibate and I had given in to a guy with a lot of chest hair and a Joy Division tattoo. He was undeniably foxy, and the accent was a turn-on, but I don’t think the sex was that great. I was nervous. I was living in a weird place. And I didn’t know how to do the walk of shame with a head scarf.

While I was away, and after the French sex, I got an e-mail from a friend who was staying in Hawaii about the raunchy and ethereal sex she’d had in a cave off of a cliff. I immediately told all of my friends what she had told me because when you are deprived of sex, other people’s gossip about sex is almost hauntingly interesting. It turns you on. And though this woman is one of my closest friends in the world, I thought about her having sex with this guy as if it were porn.

+

“When we first met, he asked me things like, ‘Do you eat figs?’ and ‘Have you ever watched porn?’ I thought that was really charming,” she said.

“Do you?”

“What?”

“Do you watch porn?” I asked.

“Well, yeah.” It was a delayed yeah, and she laughed nervously through it. We had never really talked about sex much before, with the exception of how we both needed to masturbate to fall asleep, at least three or four times a week in my case.

“Weird, me too.”

“Yeah I think basically most girls do, but no one really talks about it.”

“I don’t know if most girls do. I didn’t start watching porn until I broke up with my boyfriend and didn’t know how to make myself come without watching it. Is that weird?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “It was funny that he asked me. It made me like him more.”

The conversation turned, as it usually does, to more tame subjects. Romance. Hand-holding. Boyfriends. Girlfriends. And all I could think about all night was my friend watching porn, me watching porn, and not knowing why that was so weird just because we were girls.

+

In college, I was in what I now casually define as a “girl gang.” It was me, another straight girl, and two lesbians. We had other periphery friends but we mostly dominated New York as a quartet of drunken sloppiness and bitch fights. The two lesbian friends did and still do give me and the fourth girl a lot of street cred. We all fancied ourselves to be pretty fierce in college, which was absurd because I am meeker than most ottomans.

The straight girl and I never talked about sex. Ever.

Once, we were dancing at a bar and she was wearing a skin-tight dress and bright magenta lipstick with her long fucking hair and perfectly alluring front-bangs and I thought to myself, “Damn, if I were a guy, I’d be trying to get this girl in bed from the minute I saw her.” We danced all night, even doing that dance from Clueless that Cher and Ty do at the infamous “Rollin’ with My Homies” party. It was a time I thought we were fierce.

But when I thought about her and guys, I couldn’t imagine sex. Though she did tell me once, drunkenly, that she "loved dick." At the time I thought that was pretty crude. I think I still do.

+

I went to visit a man in California whom I’d been on and off in love with for years. When my friend texted me to ask if everything was going okay, I responded “SEXCATION.”

He had an STD and couldn’t come with a condom on.

+

I was dropping off a friend at her house on a Saturday night, right before I was to go over to Tony's to have sex. He wasn't my boyfriend. I had another friend in the front seat and I had barely known either of these girls for two months. Just barely two months.

“Is his area maintained?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, what does it look like down there? Is it grubby or clean?”

“I don’t know, I don’t pay attention,” I said. “What should it look like?”

“Well his hair is curly, so I imagine it’s a mess down there.”

In better days, I would have remembered to say the carpet matches the curtains, but I was befuddled by how I had just met both girls and we were talking about my non-boyfriend's pubic hair as if it were a brunch menu. That means they were imagining me sucking on his dick, which I was now doing. Not sucking on his dick. Imagining it. He was uncircumcised, so I said so.

“Oh shit, really? Is that gross for you?”

“I don’t think so. It’s just a penis.”

Every time I thought about uncircumcised penises, I tried to remember if it was that Jewish men were uncircumcised or circumcised. I’d never taken the time to remember that detail because I didn’t really get what difference it made.

Thoughtful Date Nikki Katsikas 2010

+

The same friend whose new boyfriend had asked her if she watched porn on their first date made her come while going down on her on his first try. When she told me, I was shocked.

“Wait, no.”

“Yeah, I know.” She made the coyest smile. “I guess that’s why I started to date him.”

“How is that even possible? I’ve never even had one guy who I was dating for years make that happen for me.” The term “make that happen for me” was my shyest way of saying what I thought was gross until I had actually garnered pleasure from it.

“He’s a good guy. We clicked.”

+

Three of us went to a party. Me, a girlfriend, and Tony. Tony and I had decided to stop sleeping together because, as he put it, I’d “caught feelings,” as if they were something you could catch, like pneumonia. Regardless, we were trying to be friends, which I saw right through the minute I showed up at his apartment and changed my shirt in front of him. He raised his eyebrows.

“Oh you gonna wear that one with your bra showing?”

“So?”

“Is that how it is?”

“I’m a liberated woman.” My friend reapplied her lipstick.

We got high and went to the party. I got drunk on vodka, which I never drink, out of a Styrofoam cup, which felt environmentally ignorant. Me. My girlfriend. Former flame. And a gay man who was wearing all white as if he’d just painted a house. His bottoms were sweatpants.

“This guy I used to hook up with told me the most disturbing thing the other day on gchat,” I began. “He said he can’t have sex more than three times with someone if it isn’t love sex. Three times!”

“Yeah, so?” Sweatpants said.

“I mean, come on, dude. It’s just sex. Why get so involved?”

"I think it's sad that you feel that way.” I turned to Tony.

“We have sex all the time and it’s not love sex.”

He laughed.

“It doesn’t have to be. Sex is a carnal, physical desire.”

“Yeah, she’s on some carnal shit. You’re talking about something else,” Tony said.

“No, I mean I can’t have sex with a person more than three times if I can’t have a conversation with them about something. That’s pathetic.” Sweatpants said, then rolled his eyes.

“Sex feels good. The same way that eating a donut feels good. Or running three miles feels good. If you sleep with the same person more than three times, you probably think it feels good with them. So why stop doing it just because you need some intellectual fucking stimulation?” I was gesturing.

Later that night, Tony told my girlfriend that he lusted after her endlessly and wanted to take her home. I drove home in a rage, then cry-yelled over the phone to him about how he should only want to sleep with me.

In that talk, sex felt really complicated despite how an hour earlier I was simplifying it to nothing. We don’t date anymore and I don't think about him really, but I do think about the sex.

Dayna Evans is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She last wrote in these pages about the grey room. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She tumbls here.

The Birds and the Bees Gigi Chen 2012

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Angel Olsen's most recent album is entitled Half Way Home.