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Sexuality
Sex in the In-Between
He looked hardy, and, God, I’m a sucker for hardiness. Show me a pocketknife and callused hands, and I’m ready to let you feel me up. His profile had a photo of him holding a giant golden eagle in Mongolia. Looking back, I can see it was partly the eagle I swiped right on.
April 2024Dear Woman Who Tried to Pick Me Up at a Hollywood Club in 1998
What if I’d said yes? Imagine I go home with you that night, / when I’m twenty, and when we wake up in the morning, / you ask, You know you snore? You laugh at my / nighttime retainer, which I’ll wear for the rest of my life, and say, You look hot.
April 2024Bridge Kid
As I was dabbing up cookie crumbs, the toddler appeared at the top of the stairs, sucking his thumb and crying. Only then did it occur to me that the boys had not been back up in some time. I patted his damp hair and went to check on his brothers.
March 2024Is This Desire?
Clarissa Smith on the Intersection of Human Sexuality and Pornography
Being honest or open about your Pornhub habits is not the same as telling someone, “I’ve just seen Call My Agent! on Netflix. I think you’d like it.” Part of the reason for that is that most people don’t spend terribly long on Pornhub.
February 2024Kissing Strangers in the Street
Afterward I checked my phone. There were a dozen messages from three of my girlfriends who knew where I was. Like a chorus of Muses they asked, Are you alive? The dom was in the shower. I leaned against the glass-topped desk, my abandoned martini on the nightstand. I was very much alive.
February 2024Sunbeams
February 2024From our earliest beginnings, we have been a nation obsessed with sex, titillated by it at the same time that we fear it, elaborating rules to contain it at the same time that we violate them.
Fantasy
Calling a 1-900 number, moving to the tropics, writing fan fiction
February 2024I Was Carrying a Velvet Wingback through the Streets of Houston
Who isn’t, at twenty-three, sexy? In never-been-kissed / cutoffs with buzzed hair. Did I even have a beard yet? / I looked like the virgin I was—was, at least, in all / the interesting ways. “Chicken,” they would’ve said / back then.
January 2024Basements
I was considered “good,” considered a “good influence.” It amazed me — like the cool feeling of Marshall’s tongue on my labia had amazed me — that I could possess all of these qualities; that I could be both warm and cold, virtuous and defiant; and that someone could love me for all of it.
December 2023Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen
We are thirteen, my cousin Sally and me — girls on our own, on the roam, under the big skies of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. We’re here for the summer, living in a trailer that my aunt Helen has rented as part of a lengthy effort to seduce her law-school professor Phil, who lives next door.
August 2023