The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

Explicitly Succinct

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Really? Really?

I like sex, most of the time. As a relatively normal, red-blooded individual I get my hankerings for it on a semi-regular basis, and occasionally I indulge, if the mood is right for both of us, or if the moon is shining through the window at the right angle. I like the feel of it, the taste of it, the build-up to the best part, and I’m always grateful that I can actually experience said ‘best part’, if as stated before, the conditions are optimum. I am not a prude about it, not really, but I don’t enjoy discussing it with everyone, because not everyone is up for intelligent conversation about it. I like to talk about it in a way that’s more common when the person I’m speaking with is the person I intend to do it with. Anything else is just…lowbrow?

Like I said, I’m not a prude, but I do have some rules about it. Erotica works when you’re a bored housewife or a teenager who has outgrown her Judy Blume, but it likely doesn‘t appeal much to the people who always look at the bigger picture. I have a friend who used to spend hours in the erotica section of the bookstore, and once or twice I stood there with her, laughing hysterically because I was embarrassed to be seen there, and because the writing that I stole quick glances at was so bad. She would buy book after book, written by people who didn’t have names, and she’d take them home to her apartment where the walls seldom rattled and the sheets didn’t need much cleaning.

The problem with this sort of writing is that it means nothing. There’s no substance to it, no heavy wood for the fire. It’s like a collection of dried out branches which catch easily, but extinguish before you get a chance to get warm. It is an amuse bouche that leaves you feeling distinctly unsatisfied, leaving you feeling cheated, disillusioned: hungry. If I can’t have the whole meal, why would I try to trick myself into settling for a morsel on a garbage can lid?

While I appreciate sex and know its risks and benefits, I don’t like to be manipulated by it. I do not want to be told that buying a certain brand of deodorant is most certain to make me look like Angelina Jolie and have the same kind of appeal as she does. That’s not going to happen. Tell me why the product is worth my time in terms of real quantitative and qualitative results, and leave the sexual intrigue alone. It’s an insult to people with a modicum of good sense.

While I agree that maybe our culture is a little too restrained in some ways, I have to admit that I actually like the mystery we’ve built around sex. I like that we hint at it, rather than make it all too sticky and wet. I’d rather see a handsome man clothed than standing in all his glory, sweat gathering on whatever protrudes from his body. Part of the fun of sexual tension is the slow build to it. I don’t like to be cheated. It would be like the punch line before the rest of the joke, and who needs that? Not that men are…well you know what I mean. While I’m sure that the reason for keeping things under wraps has more to do with morality than with building a mystery, I prefer to look at it in a more positive light. Give me the anticipation and the spring of sexual tension over the blatant (and often badly written) exploitation any day. It lasts longer, for one thing.

My friend, A., is someone who spent most of her adult life with the same man. She met him when they were twelve, started dating at around sixteen, got married at twenty and had the kids some years after that. As one might imagine, she got bored. After something like fourteen years of marriage, she began to look and feel a little irrelevant. Her weight was up, her hair was muddy and she often found herself locked in the bathroom on the verge of an all-out crying jag. On the surface, everything was fine, but somewhere deep down, all was not well. Enter ‘Soccer Dad’, a self-important tool who spoke with a different accent and who had perfected the kind of ‘come hither’ look that makes a soccer mom buckle at the knees. After some clumsy fumbling, an affair blossomed between them, and with it came A’s alter-ego whom we’ll refer to as ‘Anaïs’.

Anaïs dropped all of A’s extra weight and dyed her dirty blonde hair red. She started dressing A. in low-cut blouses and brought back a long-dead smoking habit. Anaïs liked sex in cars in parking lots by the mall or the beach, and she even let Soccer Dad into A’s family home while the husband and kids were away on a camping trip, sleeping and such in the marital bed without guilt or second-thoughts. Anaïs was a monster, a self-serving vampire who was steadily working to rid A. of her family and every bit of clarity she had in reserve. She made A. believe the lies, the love and most of all, the sex. She moved A. into areas of her sexuality that had never been part of her marriage or her past. There were trips to the hospital (bleeding which would not abate, a miscarriage that happened on a business trip), and eventually, to the abortionist, where A. had to endure one of the most difficult consequences of Anaïs’ laissez-faire attitude, and it must be noted, that Soccer Dad did not go to hold her hand, though he said he did indeed love her.

Was A’s husband perfect? Not at all, but he was a loving, devoted partner who did not suspect his wife of adultery. He did not sense the touch of another man’s hands lingering on his wife after he came in the front door of his home, narrowly missing the other man as he ran out the back. He did not suspect that her sudden transformation was rooted in anything more than a phase of important self-discovery. He loved her. That was real.

Anaïs then began taking A. to the sex clubs with Soccer Dad, who told her that he was ‘curious’ about them, though it was likely he had been there many times before. She engaged in all sorts of different expressions of love for her man, most notably group sex and lesbian sex, while he either watched her or involved himself in a minimal role. Perhaps he was mostly interested in seeing how far he could push her, how far she’d take it to prove her love, and he watched her degrade herself and share herself with strangers without feeling much more than satisfaction. Her husband, thinking she had been out with girlfriends or at business meetings, would be asleep by the time she got home, and would not witness the physical pain or the emotional assault which tended to come along in the car and follow her into the house.

After a while, it got boring. Anaïs had overstayed her welcome, and A. decided to reclaim herself. She said that the idea of acting out those sexual fantasies was far more exciting than actually doing it, and that it only left her sore and uninspired. After a while, she said, they were just bodies. She let Soccer Dad go, who it turns out might be a gay man in a misogynist’s body, and gained back some of the weight, but her hair stayed red.

We lost touch in the middle of it all, but mended things when it was all over. ‘It was just sex’, she said matter-of-factly. ‘I thought it would be something more, but it never was. What mattered was what I already had, and I took it for granted’.

She did not lose her husband, because he never found out. Thanks to Anaïs, though, she’s still working on reclaiming her self-respect.

What I got from her experience was that we make sex way more important than we should, as evidenced by the salacious and cheeky way some people like to bait us by thinking they are being edgy by mentioning it. It can be fun and light, or it can be serious and ceremonial, but at the end of the day it’s just sex, you know? There’s nothing particularly spectacular about it, when you consider that what you see in pornography happens in lots of private bedrooms across the globe without the implants or the stupid dialogue. If you use it in the wrong way, it can destroy you, and if you keep it special, it can fill you up with all kinds of wonder.

I’ve been bored and sexless in the past, so I get the appeal of quick, anonymous nibbles on it in whatever form you can get it, but the truth of the matter is that it is just sex, and we really need to get over ourselves, you know?

There are other things in life which matter a lot more than this, hard as that may be to believe.