Best Sex Writing 2008 Read online

  “Most people I talked to said Jewish women are better at giving head,” declares Kristina sagely, between bites of a mountainous ice cream sundae at the new soda fountain at FAO Schwarz in Manhattan. “And it’s partly that Jewish women have more experience.”

  “Jewish kids have the venue of summer camp,” Kristina continues. “A lot of sexual experimentation goes on there. We [non-Jewish girls] didn’t have that. Maybe you went to Girl Scout camp for one summer, but that was it. If you went to religious camp, you were some kind of zealot who probably wasn’t going to go there anyway.”

  It’s true. A lot of Jewish girls do go to camp, but many, as I did, prefer to spend their summers peacefully at home, watching cable and smoking marijuana with the descendents of Polish stockyard workers (and yes, occasionally pleasuring them orally, bringing new meaning to the phrase “smoking Pole”). Besides, despite the best (albeit bumbling) efforts of school boards across the nation, haven’t we learned by now that adolescent hormones are deeply impervious to any known form of threat, therapy, or bribe? A girl who wants a dick in her mouth is going to want it no matter where she is, and her chivalrous male peers will be only too happy to oblige—in or out of a creaky bunk bed.

  Kristina has another thought. “I have a Jewish friend, a really fantastic woman, who said to me, ‘You know, we physically have much larger mouths. They’re much bigger. There’s more room to maneuver.’”

  Bigger mouths? That was a new one—even for me. Thanks to the editorial cartoons in Der Sturmer and other fine publications over the years, I knew that Jews have big noses, cavernous ears, and gigantic, clawlike hands for stealing money, but I never realized that our mouths were large enough to swallow a Gentile baby whole. (I always assumed we at least had to chew.)

  After saying good-bye to Kristina, I spend the entire subway ride home vainly trying to fit my fist into my mouth. Frustrated, I remember my childhood friend, Alison O’Toole, who could stretch her mouth over the wide end of a powerful flashlight, the kind so thick it had a handle.

  Clearly, we’re not the only people with big mouths, be they literal or figurative. And even if we were, an argument built around a genetic trait (that would necessarily repeat itself in every generation of Jewish women) leaves the twenty or so years when according to prevailing wisdom, our mouths were clamped as tightly shut as a nun’s knees, unaccounted for. There had to be something else.

  “Yes, Jewish girls know how to use their mouths,” says Jamye Waxman, a professional sex educator and Playgirl columnist, over coffee one morning in Brooklyn. “Jewish girls are talkers. They’re opinionated. They’re not shy. But what’s behind all those outward manifestations is a confidence level. It starts in childhood. We’re not raised with an idea that sex is intrinsically shameful, or that it’s wrong to enjoy it. And when you’re confident, that affects your sexual performance.”

  A lack of shame is certainly an excellent groundwork for healthy adult sexuality. The idea that the act of sex is intrinsically dirty is indeed conspicuously absent in Jewish teachings. But openness, and an often unabashed curiosity about all physical functions, characterizes the Jewish family, and it’s not always so sexy. Remember your grandmother’s unseemly interest in your bowel movements?

  “When I first started going down on guys, I went to my aunt for pointers,” says Jamye. “I also think that the stereotype of Jewish girls giving head is indicative of something larger, which is that Jewish girls are more open about sex. I think Jewish girls are kinkier.”

  Maybe Grandma’s interest wasn’t so innocent.

  Jamye gives sex workshops at parties on behalf of Toys in Babeland, a sex toy store in Seattle and New York, where she used to work. I accompanied her to a bachelorette party at the Midtown Marriot Marquis, where she was giving a workshop to a gaggle of girls from Long Island, Jews all. Jamye, a Jewish woman from Long Island, meshes especially well with this demographic, she tells me. They understand each other.

  I am overcome with excitement. This is it! I think. This is like a meeting of some secret cabal. Like the mujahedeen training camps that linger so indelibly in the paranoiac imagination, here in this nondescript hotel suite we gather for indoctrination. Here might the ancient secrets be found. If the Elders of Zion have a synagogue sisterhood, this is it. I couldn’t think of a more perfect spot to once and for all uncover the hidden truth behind the Jewish woman’s oral fixation.

  Gathered on slate-blue love seats, several girls in their midtwenties consume sparkling wine and Cool Ranch Doritos as Jamye shrugs an enormous tote bag from a tattooed shoulder and unpacks dildos, lubricant, condoms, and cucumbers. At least half of the women in attendance sport impressive engagement rings and looks of barely suppressed panic, none more so than the anxious bride-to-be, whose brow furls with tangible consternation.

  Why so worried? Odd, I scribble in my notebook.

  Calmly, Jamye introduces herself.

  “Jamye? Waxman!” exclaims an excitable redhead perched on the sofa. “You went to high school with my husband! He came back from his reunion going on and on about how Jamye Waxman is a sex therapist!”

  After a few minutes spent on older brothers, Hebrew-school teachers, and guys who cut their lawns, the atmosphere is decidedly more relaxed and Jamye turns her attention to the main tool of her demonstration: a seven-inch cyberskin dildo.

  “This is Ricky,” says Jamye, stroking its testicles fondly.

  “Can I say something?” asks a small woman on the couch (and incidentally, because I am powerless to keep from noticing such things, the wearer of the flashiest engagement ring).

  “Sure,” Jamye replies. “I want this to be very open.”

  The woman takes a deep breath: “I hate sucking dick. I gag. I hate it.”

  WHAT?

  A chorus, formidable in its volume and insistence, echoes through the room. “Me too.” “It’s boring.” “I’m not good at it and it’s kind of gross.” The aversion to dick-sucking is nearly unanimous.

  “I did it sometimes at camp. That’s where we all met,” the girl continues, clutching a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup as she gestures to her companions, “but I mostly did it there because if you didn’t, guys would break up with you. I seriously got broken up with like three times because I didn’t suck dick enough.”

  “Penophobia, we called it,” offers the married redhead, with a manic guffaw.

  “PENOPHOBIA!” shout the others, in giddy unison.

  I glance at Jamye nervously. Somehow I have found the only Jewish women on earth unwilling to give head.

  “Gagging can be very hot,” she offers, addressing the first girl. “It’s a pretty sexy message to send to your partner that his cock is so big you choke on it. It’s dirty.”

  She offers some other helpful hints: Use your hands. Use your power. A maneuver known as “The Heartbeat of America” goes over particularly well—a pulse that matches exactly that of our great-grandmothers as they stood at the ship’s rail for their first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. Massage the prostate—it increases the intensity of his orgasm and helps prevent prostate cancer! A more convincing argument to a Jewish man for letting you stick your finger up his ass I’ve never heard.

  “I’m really good at hand jobs!” cries the Girl Who Gags. “I have to be, since I don’t give head!”

  About thirty seconds later, the Girl Who Gags reveals that she owns a vibrating cock ring.

  The session ends. I have learned to roll a condom onto a cucumber with my teeth, but I am still without answers.

  Outside, teetering dazedly around the concrete microwave of Times Square, it seemed to me that everyone was eating a hot dog, licking a popsicle, or gyrating an enormous dildo around the inside of her mouth like it was nothing.

  I had been researching, thinking about, talking about, and watching the act of fellatio for way too long. My mind was starting to show the strain. I may be Jewish, but I’m also human.

  On the long subway ride home, I begin to think about my own
sexual preferences. I enjoy giving oral sex. I have been told I am fairly adept. I am generally not squeamish about functions of the body, with a couple of exceptions, but this is hardly unusual. As Miki put it so succinctly, “I don’t think most of the girls that are into cocky and pishy are Jewish.”

  But I also talk about sex, oral and otherwise, a great deal, as did all of the Jewish women I spoke with. Not in a sordid way, but in an honest way, a way that genuinely tries to make sense of sexuality, its many meanings, joys, pitfalls. Jewish women have been at the forefront of this kind of active verbal discourse, from Emma Goldman to Gloria Steinem to Erica Jong. Somewhere along the way, the shrillness became seductive, but the sex was there all along.

  “The stereotype of the Jewish woman who is too busy filing her nails to have sex always seemed odd to me,” Erica Jong tells me a few days later. Whether the Jewish woman is being painted as frigid or animalistic is beside the point, she continues. Regardless of intent, a Jewish woman’s mouth is fraught with sexual meaning.

  Perhaps, today, it is a mystical thing, a powerful thing, to be pleasured orally by a Jewish girl. The force between our parted lips is, after all, the same that parted the Red Sea as our forebears marched to freedom.

  It’s been a long voyage of discovery, and while it may be a while before I can once again gaze upon a penis without a dizzying flurry of analysis, I have discovered a valuable truth. When a Jewish woman gives a blowjob, it means something. The thing itself may vary. It can be an assertion—of power, of selflessness, of confidence or ability. It can be an affirmation, a reclaiming of cultural sexuality or a rebellion against a culture that has rendered her sexless. It can be manipulative or pure, exhibitionist or nostalgic, or it can simply be that she can’t go five minutes without using her mouth. It can be all these things at once. More notable is what it isn’t: it isn’t coerced, and it isn’t guilty.

  Ultimately, the quest to ascribe a single meaning to the blowjob in Jewish culture is futile—its meanings are multiple, contradictory, and as the vast, moistened schism between the1970s and today demonstrates, forever in flux.

  Just ask the former president who, according to Monica Lewinsky biographer Andrew Morton, joked to his Jewish paramour: “What do you get when you cross a Jewish girl with an Apple? A computer who won’t go down on you.”

  Double Your Panic

  Kevin Keck

  Cary and Mary Forney were not the most attractive girls in high school—if a poll had been taken I doubt either of them would have made the top twenty-five in a class of two hundred—but, as the only identical twins, their rankings jumped considerably from the average “I’d have to have a few beers to consider that” to the highly coveted “I’d give my right pinky for some of that. Swear to God.”

  When one stated the desire for “some of that,” it was understood that one was speaking in the plural: the Forney sisters (and how that name worked so dreadfully against them in the magically alliterative minds of adolescent boys!) were an item only as a pair. I lay awake many nights in my bed, sweating over the collision of happenstance and divine intervention necessary to sandwich me between the Forney sisters.

  Thus the Horny Sisters, as they had been known since the first seventh grader learned the word and sent the definition tittering through the class, were elevated to such a desirable state simply because of their rarity. Oh, plenty of guys bagged the Dellinger sisters in high school, but they were three years apart, and it was always separately. (The Dellinger girls inherited their mother’s Playmate prettiness but also their father’s competitive streak—he was the football coach at our high school.)

  It was common knowledge that to sleep with one sister inevitably meant you would sleep with the other; such was their sibling rivalry, and certainly the reason our football team scored more with the coach’s daughters than they ever did against opposing teams. However, the Forney daughters were stalked as a pair—in large part because they were rarely separated.

  The Forneys were also a formidable softball force, a pitcher-catcher combo that made our school a serious contender for the length of their reign. I was not the only guy to attend games to watch their four identical double-Ds (oh, the perfection of God’s symmetry!) fight against their sports bras. Their father was—as far as I know—at every game. His expression perpetually inhabited that ambiguous area between seriously anxious and mildly angry. He couldn’t have been more than forty, but he looked closer to sixty. At the time, I chalked it up to his unfiltered Camels and job at the hosiery mill. What was it about those twins that has harbored in my memory for over half my life now? It has something to do with extremes of desire, I think. If you’re a straight guy prone to viewing the world in terms of superlatives, then it is one thing to have a three-way with two women, something else altogether if they are sisters (or Swedish, or—heaven help me!—mother and daughter), and yet something else if they are identical twins. What could be better than two similarly hot women with a dash of incestuous taboo? Triplets, of course. It doesn’t take a math wizard to figure that out. Only a Greek god might possibly know the carnal majesty of triplets, but the taste of twins on this earth is, however rare, still a possibility under the right circumstances.

  That this desire is real is evident all around us: the Doublemint Twins (“Double your pleasure, double your fun…” Does anyone truly believe that’s about gum?), the Coors Light Twins, the Barbi Twins… The sexual myth of twinship is perhaps best illustrated by the manner in which the eighteenth birthday of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen was met with a countdown that began years before the actual event. (I live in North Carolina where such a countdown ends at the age of sixteen; our state motto is “First in Flight”—you’d never guess we were speaking in Freudian terms.) The days remaining until the Olsens’ legality were scratched off by disc jockeys and frat boys with the cheerfulness of Charles Manson coming before his parole board. At the time, I felt a little sorry for them. In retrospect, I should have felt sorry for their father.

  Recently, my wife gave birth to identical twin girls. It was not what I intended when I humbled myself as a boy in church and dared pray for something as exotic as identical twins. Whether or not my prayer made a difference is open to speculation. My friend John says it’s chance. My father thinks it’s genetics. I do not like to think there is a God, because if there is, he or she has a quirky sense of how the universe should be run, though I can’t help but think that the God of my Universe would behave exactly in this manner: meddling in the strange matters of lust and leaving the easier problems of famine, disease, and violence to us.

  Incidentally, violence and famine seem like easy problems compared to raising hot twins (my wife is a former Teen Miss South Carolina, and barring the infiltration of too many of my genes, the girls will most likely take after their mother). It’s problematic enough that suddenly everything that comes along with a new baby—diapers, food, clothing, orthodontia, et cetera—has been doubled. But let’s be realistic: I can plan for all that. That’s just about money. What I can’t plan for is every football player, every band geek, every long-haired-dope-smoking-slacker (ah, my brothers!) who will be circling my little girls like sexual vultures. (Coincidentally, the sexual vulture who eventually preyed upon the Forney sisters was named Elizabeth—she was a softball player at a rival school, and the three of them were busted in a meth distribution ring a few years ago.)

  During my own predatory adolescence I was always baffled as to why the fathers of the girls I dated glared at me as though I were a war criminal. At the time I suspected it was because I was rather…well, faggy. Had I lived in a large city, my long bangs, disposition toward pastel colors, and love of Siouxsie and the Banshees would have attracted absolutely no attention at all. Instead I grew up in a place where the Ku Klux Klan still holds the occasional “parade.” Intolerance was as much a part of the landscape as mimosa trees and roadside vegetable stands.

  Of course, it’s not like I had the privilege of meeting every dad in the county
. My dating prowess in high school was so frail that I don’t have a representative sample of fathers to go on here: my statistics are culled from only two subjects.

  The first girl I ever dated, the very perfectly named Barbie, had to escort me to meet her father; I was still a month away from my driver’s license, and this simple fact was probably what caused him to dismiss me with a snort and a shake of the head before he returned to waxing his boat. Without a car, what threat was I? He knew not to take me seriously, and his instinct was correct because Barbie soon dismissed me as well to trade up for a college boy.

  Shelley’s father sized me up quite differently. I know this because when I arrived to pick her up, the first thing he said was: “I don’t like you.” I smiled sheepishly and said, “Well, I’m pretty likable.” He glared at me. He must have sensed the sexual desperation oozing from my pores. He was a squat man with the arms of a longshoreman, muscles built by labor and not vanity. The way the light silhouetted him in the doorway, he appeared to be a mythical creature with the torso of a gorilla and the legs of a ballet dancer.

  “Shelley’s still getting ready,” he said, and turned away from the door without inviting me in.

  I stepped in hesitantly and shut the door behind me. I walked into the living room where Shelley’s father was watching “Wheel of Fortune” and took a seat on the couch. The contestants solved two puzzles before he muted the television and turned to me.

  “Where are y’all going tonight?”

  “The movies.”

  “What movie?”

  “I’m not really sure; we thought we’d decide when we got to the theater.”