Euphoria.
A sex party follow-up. Plus, a second date with a divorced dad.
My name is not Naomi. It’s a nom de plume to protect my identity. Though names and identifying details have been changed, all the stories in Gen XXX are true. My anonymity means that I rely on word of mouth to grow my subscriber base, so if you’re intrigued by what you’re reading, please: share with friends!
I’m sitting at a sidewalk table at Figaro reading my book, Melissa Febos’ Whip Smart, when two 20-something young women next to me start complaining that they can’t get on PornHub.
Wait, I think, they can’t get on PornHub?
“I had to spend two weeks at home with my parents,” one of them says. “What else was I supposed to do?”
The other woman nods sympathetically. I learn that she’s a comedy writer who is thinking of moving to NYC — maybe to write on SNL.
I want to ask the young women what kind of porn they like but then I’d give myself away.
Astrid arrives half an hour later. We’re meeting for coffee to discuss her takeover of my Hinge account.
“What do you want out of this?” she asks me.
I draw a blank.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Good content. Good dates.”
I know that Astrid is asking me what sort of relationship, if any, I desire. I avoid her direct gaze. “I mean, eventually, maybe a serious relationship,” I say. I’m not sure what I believe anymore. I’m enjoying going on lots of dates and fooling around. But, as Antoine showed me, I’m also drawn to intimacy of a more emotional sort. And I don’t think I’m able to do both things at the same time.
Later that night I go to a monthly “non-monogamous” meet up at a bar near my house. It’s not so much that I’m non-monogamous as I am “flogger curious,” and one of the guys I met at the sex party, Seth, has experience with BDSM and will be at the bar. I’m interested in talking to Seth because I might want to enlist his services with regards to impact play.
I’m really not in the mood for the non-monogamous drinks mixer, to be honest. One time, Olivia and I showed up at the mixer to see what it was all about but we got creeped out and left within the hour. Because we were newbies, fresh meat so to speak, a bunch of dudes descended upon us — Olivia, mostly, because she is beautiful and blonde and petite — as well as two swingers couples.
A lot of the folks there had colorful hair and multiple piercings; you know, the sort of fantasy and sci-fi geeks who love D&D and Star Wars and shit like that. At one point, Olivia got cornered by a triad: A chubby Cuban man, a skinny Russian and a scrawny white Southern woman with shiny braces on her teeth. As we left, Olivia and I wondered whether the people at the meet up have a hard time getting laid out in the “real” world.
“You’re showing your ignorance,” Max says to me after I tell her about my experience at that mixer. “Those folks are getting a lot of play. You guys left and they all went home and fucked. So who did well at the non-monogamy party?”
I laugh.
“Good point,” I say.
Seth and I talk for an hour. He tells me about what he does, how long he’s been doing it for, and asks me questions about my desires. I tell him that I’m not sure what it is that I want. I tell him about the time that Antoine spanked me so hard, and for so long, that I felt high. “Euphoria,” is what Seth calls it. I tell him that Antoine practiced Shibari on me, and that it was delicate and intimate and exciting and erotic.
I’m less interested in engaging in Shibari with Seth — it feels too intimate — but the impact play? Flogging? Maybe I can get into that. I’m torn. My previous experience with impact play — before Antoine, that is — was with my college boyfriend, a profoundly damaged soul whose interest in BDSM had a dark edge to it. There was nothing playful about how he approached it — nothing playful about him — and, so, I’ve always associated BDSM with emotional malevolence and manipulation. Until now.
Seth tells me about the types of floggers he has and the effects they create on the body. Stinging versus thudding. Who knew?
During my talk with Seth I keep apologizing for my sexual and erotic illiteracy. I feel nervous and naive. Exposed. Ignorant. This isn’t Seth’s fault, of course. And he doesn’t seem to mind. He has a matter-of-fact, gentle manner about him and a quiet confidence.
“There’s a whole world out there for you to explore,” Max tells me later. “I’m so excited for your entrée into kink!”
“It may be short lived!” I respond.
The morning after I meet up with Seth, Olivia calls me on her way back from a doctor’s appointment at UCLA. Her ob/gyn is going to put her on hormone replacement therapy. She’s very excited. I wonder whether the hormones will make her more horny, I say.
“I’m at maximum horniness already,” she says. “All I want to do is get fucked. But maybe that’s my anxiety.”
Olivia and I have been talking a lot about my participation in the sex party. She told her boyfriend, who seems interested in hearing more. Maybe, I say, they can go to a party together. They don’t have to do anything. They can just watch.
“I want a sort of Eyes Wide Shut-type situation,” she says. “Sumptuous décor and beautiful bodies.”
Eyes Wide Shut is not a movie I like very much. Olivia doesn’t either, but she loves the discourse about how bad it is, and the backstory about Kubrick’s process.
“That’s not at all what my sex party was like,” I remind her. “It was just a nice, clean house in Glendale with low lighting and some mattresses on the floor near the couches.”
I tell Olivia that I’ll try to find her something very upscale. But where to start?
Olivia wants to hear more about my conversation with Seth. She seems especially interested when I articulate my new interest in the line between the erotic and the sexual. She likes that I am exploring the distinction. I tell her that when Antoine spanked me, the turn on was the all-over euphoria; I didn’t feel in need of an orgasm. It was the overwhelm of the sensations I was experiencing that got me high. In other words, it didn’t really make me that horny.
Max FaceTimes me from a fancy house in Hawaii where she’s vacationing for the week. She’s on a lanai; there are palm trees swaying in the background. The subject of the erotic versus the sexual comes up. Max, who is queer, has some thoughts on the subject. She says that heterosexual women in this culture are led to believe that a) everything has to lead to orgasm and b) that it should be a male orgasm.
“I think that kink interrupts that,” she says. “You can have so many other sensations and so much play. It rewrites the sexual script because it doesn’t have to be the same trajectory, where first you start kissing, then you go up the person’s shirt, then down their pants, then to oral sex, then to fucking, then the guy comes, and then, if you’re lucky, you come.”
I nod my head in recognition.
“Am I wrong?” she asks.
I tell her no.
Max has a lot of other things to say. She tells me about a friend of hers who watched Dying For Sex and later complained that too many women are dependent on vibrators to get off, and that reliance on vibrators gets in the way of intimacy.
“I lost my mind,” Max explains. There is never a time that a woman’s orgasm should be pathologized, she says. “You can’t take a woman’s pleasure and say that it it’s the wrong sort of pleasure.”
Also, she points out, a lot of lesbian sex doesn’t take place without vibrators. (Max used to be married to another woman.)
I think about my vibrator, and those that preceded it, and how I’ve always carried an element of shame about them because they remind me of just how difficult it can be for me to reach orgasm. Even though I know better, my struggles with climaxing make me feel damaged in some way. Incompetent. I blame my SSRI.
A few hours after I FaceTime with Max I go out on a date with a divorced dad named Simon. I connected with Simon on the sex app a few months ago and we met up for a coffee at Lamill and then he sort of ghosted me. I wasn’t so much hurt by his disappearance than surprised: He’d made comments, unprompted, at the end of the first date about trying for a second one.
Anyway, about a week ago Simon pops up in my text messages, asking me how I am. He apologizes for being out of touch, and asks me if he can take me to dinner. I say sure, why not?
“I like that he’s doing repair,” says Olivia.
Olivia doesn’t suffer fools, not like I do, and I like the way she’s framing this. As “repair.” He does need to do repair, I think. We had a nice date and then he dropped off the face of the earth!
Simon takes me to Bacari in Silver Lake. I don’t love Bacari — I think their food is mediocre and the clientele is a little cheesy. But I’m not going to tell Simon that. I suspect he chooses Bacari because of its atmosphere. It’s like a tree house: Multiple levels of wooden decks under a canopy of trees and string lights. It feels magical. Maybe even a little romantic.
Simon picks me up from my house. He gets out of the car and walks around to the passenger door and lets me in. I feel bashful. “Thank you,” I say, as I fold myself inside. It’s a fancy BMW sedan. I’m sort of impressed, and annoyed at myself for feeling that way. Who cares what sort of car someone else drives? Then I remember that I hate BMW drivers almost as much as I hate Tesla drivers and wonder whether Simon is an asshole.
As we wait in line for our table, Simon compliments me on my nail polish.
“I like that your fingers are different than your toes,” he says. I like that he notices.
He points to my feet. “Coral.”
Dinner is nice. We spend an inordinate amount of time talking about “safe” subjects: food, mostly. I wonder if he thinks I’m boring. Then the subject of Covid comes up. I tell him about my experience of those first few months, and how terrified I was. The conversation segues to our fathers. Then to our ex-spouses. Simon has been married twice. He has an elementary school-age daughter with his most recent ex-wife.
Simon asks me whether I’m spiritual or religious. I wish I had something sophisticated to say in response to his query but I don’t. The answer is that I’m neither spiritual nor religious.
“The only time I’ve felt like I’m in the presence of something larger than me is when I’ve been in nature alone,” I tell him.
“Or on drugs,” he says.
I nod my head.
“The divine,” he says.
“A sort of euphoria,” I say.
After dinner, Simon takes me to Magpies for soft serve. We grab a slice of strawberry pie and drive up to a spot on Effie Street with a great view of Hollywood. We talk for a bit and I drop a piece of the pie under the passenger seat but fish it out before it can melt all over the carpeting. I wonder if Simon’s going to kiss me. Whether he even wants to.
“I guess I should take you home,” he says after we finish eating.
Outside my house, in the car, we talk a bit more. No kiss. I remember what one guy I dated told me about my giving off “don’t touch me” vibes during our second date. “But I was standing there at my car, facing you directly, with my shoulders back and smiling!” I’d said to him. “My body language was saying I was open for business.”
(I didn’t really use the phrase “open for business.”)
“I’m telling you that it didn’t come across that way,” he’d said.
Things are starting to feel a bit awkward in the BMW. I wonder if I’m overstaying my welcome, or if I’m giving off “don’t touch me” vibes. My body feels stiff. I hate this! Why can’t I just act like a normal human being?
At a certain point I tell Simon that I guess I should go. He makes a comment about a third date — but I figure that maybe he feels compelled to do so. Then I blurt something out — I forget what, and we lock lips.
We kiss for 10-20 seconds. Very light kissing. No tongue. He makes a comment about my nice mouth.
“Thank you again for dinner,” I say, and I exit the car. I notice that Simon waits until I’m in my front door before leaving. I wonder whether I’ll ever hear from him again, and then admit to myself that I want to.
The day I meet up with Astrid, I hand over my phone so she can start swiping through men on Hinge. She likes three of them, and sends them messages, but to no avail. None of them respond.
“I have the worst luck with this,” I text her the next morning.
“I really don’t think it’s about luck,” she says.
Astrid says that it’s a numbers game. She may be right. But I find it hard to believe that so many men would be so disinterested in my profile that they’d ignore my outreach. My pictures are great. My answers make me seem interesting. I’m not coming across as trying too hard, but I’m also making it clear that I know how to put in effort. Is it my age? Something else? Olivia always had a fairly easy time on Hinge, and Alison has had success as well.
Astrid and I discuss the possibility that I delete my Hinge profile altogether and start anew.
I tell Max that I’m not attracted to Seth. Is that okay? I ask. I don’t want to fuck him; I just want to be flogged by him.
She suggests we have an intake session to plan a scene. “I think that’s hot because you’ll see if there’s more chemistry,” she says.
“I don’t think there’s chemistry,” I say flatly. “I’m just not attracted to him.”
I tell Max about the dozens of tools and floggers that Seth showed me pictures of.
“Now, that’s a sex nerd,” she says.
“I thought that sex nerds were the sort of people I saw at the non-monogamy party,” I say. “The D&D players.”
“Maybe some of them are sex nerds but sex nerds are a special breed,” she says. “They love talking about things like what sorts of toys they have, or how they learned Shibari.”
Max says that Antoine is a sex nerd. “He is?” is ask. I laugh and tell her that Olivia once called him a “pervert.”
“A sex nerd is like a car nerd,” Max says. “I’m an art nerd, for example. I’ll talk about different sizes and shapes of brushes and pens.”
“Kinky,” I say.
Max tells me again that she’s excited for my entree into BDSM but asks me to avoid doing what I always do, meaning, overthink things.
“Here’s my assignment for you,” she says. “Stop trying to figure it all out before you do it. Ask questions but don’t ask for answers. You can do your reading after you get the shit beat out of you.”
I write this all down so that I can remember it in the future. Then I realize that I’m doing the exact thing Max just told me not to do so I go outside to get some sunshine.
The morning after my date with the divorced dad, he sends me a text.
“I really enjoyed your company last night. Conversation flowed nicely, and I appreciate the rhetorical-question-as-consent for the goodnight kiss.”
“I agree,” I say. “And thank you again for dinner. That was very generous of you.”
A few minutes later I write him again.
“As for the rhetorical question, I don’t even remember what it is that I said exactly. I worry that it was something awkward.”
I end this sentence with the emoji of a monkey covering its eyes. And I wait.
“‘Are you going to kiss me now?’” Simon finally writes.
Jesus. What a bossypants I am! I tell Simon I’m mortified.
“I liked it,” he says.
Coming this Saturday: A wide-ranging conversation with writer Kimberly Harrington, author of the recent Mother Tongue essay “In Sluts We Trust.” As with all my Q&As, it is only available to paid subscribers, so won’t you consider upgrading your subscription?