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When I heard that Sex and the City was in its last season, I was happy. Unnaturally happy. Normally, if I don't like a show, big deal. I don't have to watch it, I don't have to read all the articles about it, I can bury my head in a pillow when my friends start talking about it. But Sex and the City (the working title of which was Second Only to Sawing My Arm Off With a Plastic Picnic Knife in the Amount and Degree of Pain It Causes Me) was a special case.
I didn't mind the show itself that much. It was mildly entertaining, mildly annoying. Its female leads had distractingly pointy faces. But what really bothered me about the show was that it presumed to speak for me, the youngish urban female, and her supposedly newfound ability to Have Sex Like a Man and Use Bad Words. It was "shocking," "brutally candid," "honest." The media spoke of Sex and the City as if it were the fucking Rosetta stone of femininity as if women could no longer understand themselves without the assistance of premium cable.
promotion
I mean, "have sex like a man"? That's obnoxious on about a billion levels. (I'd be particularly annoyed if I were a man.) According to Sex, promiscuity was a glamorous pathology, a mutation of the second X chromosome, something unnatural, temporary, alien like obesity and cancer, an ailment of modernity that must be endured by those who yearn for the ruddy health of monogamy.
Yeah, okay, I know the show is canceled. But the machines that were so eager to hail it as the Quintessence of Our Age are still around. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that my sexual touchstone isn't a neurotic bitch with a bikini wax. It's the girl who'll fuck you for the free coffee and the anecdote.
It's me.
So you can't smoke in New York City bars anymore. It's bullshit, like banning popcorn at the movies. Still, it was warm outside that night, so it wasn't a total tragedy when Nora suggests we step out for a cigarette. Once we were nestled on a nearby stoop, she pats me on my arm and grins. "He seems really great!"
Slut phases, however long they may last, are supposed to be your own personal Mardi Gras.
Presumably she's talking about Ian, this guy who I've started seeing, whom I've left inside.
"You just seem really . . . happy," she continues. "It's nice to see. You've been with so many assholes lately. Or just guys who didn't mean anything to you."
This is true. Although neither Nora nor I worship at the Church of the Healthy Relationship, in the past few months I've really outdone myself. It's not that I'm suffocated by the prospect of imminent monogamy, but Boyfriend isn't a pre-existing role that I am holding auditions for. Intimations that I've seen the light at the end of the slut tunnel that my interactions with Random Boys are some sort of futile emotional grasping are bullshit.
Besides, I call slut phase. Nora knows about slut phases. They're standard. There comes a time in every young woman's life when her friends say: "What happened with Jane and Tyler?"
"I'm not sure, but she's kind of going through a slut phase right now, so it's probably not going anywhere?"
"Rock. Good for her."
Slut phases, however long they may last, are supposed to be your own personal Mardi Gras. You get to suspend whatever rules you may or may not have. You don't really actively care about anything. They're supposed to be healthy, cathartic. They're called "getting it out of your system," "making sure you do everything you want to do before you die." Slut phases are the product of breakups, of getting promoted or fired, of depression and birthdays. It's understood that they're not permanent.
I light a cigarette and offer another to Nora.
"What number are you at?"
"This is my third tonight."
"Not cigarettes," she says.
"Ten guys," I say, then, defensively, "Not so many." Okay, five of the ten were in the past seven months, two were in the past week. If we're not necessarily talking about intercourse here, the number shoots up to I don't even know what. Why is she even asking?
"Well, as long as you're taking care of yourself," Nora says.
It's incredible how, whenever you start sleeping around, people even other slutty people try to explain you to yourself with a vocabulary normally reserved for self-mutilators and alcoholics. Because, apparently, when you're a girl, casual sex (as opposed, of course, to formal sex) is caused by a) raw, man-eating, empowered lust; or b) confusion and insecurity. Every time you fuck someone without being totally into it, it's treated like a minor tragedy. According to golddiggers, therapists and screenwriters, sex is all about power, and if you're not careful, it's so easy to slip, drop that power and become a scared, drunk, dehumanized study in despair! Unless, of course, you're experimenting, and if you're experimenting, your mistakes are medals.
Two months ago, the cable guy freaked out when he saw a condom on the floor of my room. I wasn't home, so my roommate Lise threw a pillow over it. Earlier that morning, she had seen the guy who had worn the condom. He was in the doorway of my room, putting his pants on. I said, "Hey, this is my roommate Lise. Lise, this is . . . a guy in his underwear."
His name was John. I knew his name. What happened was, he walked into the bar, and I thought, Damn, break me off a piece of that, so I went up to him and said, "Hey, what are you drinking?" and he let me buy him another round. He was going back to Ireland in a week, and he was dirty like a traveler. An hour later, he was in my bed, I had plenty of condoms, and I couldn't think of a good reason not to.
"He was this really hot Irish guy I met," I told Lise. " I bought him a drink, and . . . yeah. It was really funny! The first thing he said when we woke up in the morning was, 'I hope I didn't give you this sty.'"
I said, "I like third-wave feminism. It's so fucking easy."
This is what I say, because if I had said, "I dunno, I fucked him because I couldn't think of a good reason not to," well, that's when they start grinning nervously and thinking, "She's a lovely girl, but so confused and insecure."
Not that I've always been like this. In high school, I always looked at the real slutty girls with a mixture of confusion, awe and jealous contempt. Take Melissa, who'd walk in to a room in Vans and an oversized T-shirt and the air would crackle. What was she doing right that you weren't? Well, sucking Gabe's dick in the bathroom for one. But really, you shouldn't talk about her like that, she's probably really troubled, you don't behave like that if you respect yourself, seriously, you don't. Not even if Gabe is way hot.
Now, well, it's a case-by case analysis. Five years later, I have come to terms with the facts: Gabe was hot, and I wished it were me in the bathroom with him. Now that I know that, I don't see any reason to let another Gabe slip.
And I know this is the experience of a bunch of other girls. We were good not too good, but good for a while. Then, one morning, we woke up and thought, this is no fun, what's the point?
Thing is, when conquests are currency, between girls, activities can take a turn for the self-consciously dramatic. More than once I've gotten a 4 a.m. call from Leah, my friend and neighbor: "Carrie, oh my God. You have to see this one. He's so fine. Come over."
"Leah, I just got in. I want to sleep."
"Whatever, come over! Okay? We'll say . . . shit. Okay. Can you pretend you left something here that you need to pick up?"
"At four a.m.?"
"Okay. Here's what we'll do. You call me back, and we'll pretend you got locked out and need to crash. Okay? Shit, he's coming out of the bathroom. Call me back in thirty seconds."
And I do. I go over. I tell the sad tale of my lockout in great detail. My audience is a beaming Leah, who winks at me with her hand on the shoulder of a very cute, very disgruntled boy in boxer shorts.
Last March, I was putting on green eyeliner in the bathroom of a sunny Echo Park bungalow. I'd never been to L.A. before. I made the trip to see my cousin Viv, who moved there to intern at Ms. but was writing for Us Weekly at night to feed herself. A double agent. That night, we were going out to dance at this little rockstar bar, so we were in front of the medicine cabinet mirror making ourselves into rockstars, talking about the boys we were going to pull and how Viv couldn't talk about her Us gig at Ms. because Ms. was full of super-intense second-wavers who would view freelance celebrity journalism as prostitution, a betrayal of the Movement. Using a pinkie to smudge the eyeliner up toward my temple, filled with satisfaction at the prospect of looking hot, I was moved to say, "I like third-wave feminism. It's so fucking easy."
"Yeah, and you get to be so fucking easy," Viv replied, smirking through hot-pink lip gloss.
I should state from the outset that I really don't know much about third-wave feminism, except that my ideas about it are probably wrong. (I think this has something to do with L7.) Somehow, I picked up the idea that it was a philosophy which dictated that it was okay to fuck a lot, show up to your grad-school interview in a plastic miniskirt and think Gloria Steinem was a total pill. It was kind of DIY: self-identification came first, then anything done by a self-identified feminist was an act of feminism, because this was her time the dawning of the Age of the Self-Aware Slut.
But something unfortunate and inevitable has happened, which is that the freedom and beauty of the slut has been noticed, codified and replicated. Now it's not just a way to be, it's an aspiration, a point of competition. It's the girl who sees how long she can go without sleeping at her own place, like my friend Melanie. It's the girl who's trying to "collect all fifty states," like Alex, who lived down the hall from me. All this counting! Like any defined system of measurement including the system of poodle-skirt wearing chastity it can get oppressive.
Slut culture is accepted on a lot of levels, though the actual act of fucking many people may not be.
See, the first thing they'll teach you in Cultural Studies 101 is Reclamation of Terms. Epithets like "bitch", "nigger" and "faggot" are picked up by the groups they're directed at, then spat back ironically, proudly ostensibly with a new meaning. (There is debate as to whether this process is constructive; I'm not sure what I think.) As was bound to happen, "slut" got picked up, mashed around a bit and printed across baby tees in sparkly letters. Along the way, it lost most of its meaning much faster than any of those other terms. (A T-shirt with "faggot" written across it in sparkly letters I have yet to see.)
I suppose I'm talking about a very specific demographic here. I've lived in New York my whole life, and although I was involuntarily chaste until college, I learned to shrug at The Counterculture pretty early on. Although I can't speak for more than maybe ten people twelve, tops I don't think I have to argue that slut culture is pervasive and accepted on a lot of levels, though the actual act of fucking many people may not be, depending on where you are and who you're with. (And that's fine. I'd much rather live in a world where sleeping around is condoned conditionally than one where it's unacceptable.)
Anyway, the slut has been taken and dressed up. You can take her out in public. She's the ultimate party trick. In certain breeds Samantha Jones comes to mind sexual aggression has become a companion to generally desirable qualities like confidence and ambition. This slut is glam and aggressive, maybe a little bit unfulfilled, but not very dangerous. She's a type, and she can be dealt with and dismissed as such.
My friends and I are conferring over greasy omlettes on a Saturday morning, catching up after a few nights spent apart.
"My tits are covered with hickeys now," says Aja, glaring at Lucy. "What are you, one of those goddamn aquarium-cleaning fish?"
Aja and Lucy are roommates, and fucking one means fucking both of them. They don't hook up with each other independently of their frequent three-ways.
"Sorry," Lucy responds. She's quiet and brilliant and beautiful, and a simple apology from her is enough to calm Aja down.
"Wait," I ask. "Who were you guys with?"
"One of my anthro students," Lucy answers. "We ran into him. He had me for section last semester and told me he had a crush on me. So we had him over. It was nice. He was cute."
"Ha, teacher sex!" interjects Nora. "That's so hot. I took a guy back to my boss's office last night. I'm so into that lately."
"Was this the guy from Wednesday?"
Nora shakes her head coyly.
"No. What'd you do last night, Carrie?"
"There was a roof party in Greenpoint. I dunno. Hung out. Smooched a bit with this guy Brad who I knew from school." At this point, I feel painfully inadequate. I'm ready to duck under the table and hide. Aja and Lucy probably don't care at all, but I feel like a sixth-grader who had the audacity to sit at the eighth-grade table and is feeling the appropriate shame. " . . . um, while his girlfriend was in the bathroom."
This is a total lie. He didn't even have a girlfriend. But whatever. Save.
When Nora and I lived together, we had amazing parties. At one of them a pre-Christmas affair maybe twenty people were still hanging around at 2 a.m. We grab one of the empty Vodka bottles to play Spin the Bottle. We like to pretend we're doing it ironically. The first time, it was hard to warm the straight guys up to kissing each other, but we refused to grant exceptions. Now, they go at it happily, some of them very happily. Wasn't ever a problem with the straight girls, most of whom had made out with girls before anyway. It's a given at this point that all eyes will be on any pair of chicks kissing. Maybe the attention helped.
How would I even know what sexual engagement felt like? Like the "slut phase," girl-on-girl moments are expected, understood, anticipated.
It's been one of those nights. I've kissed pretty much everyone in the room. I like kissing the girls they're all pretty and fun. I've known Nora forever, and it feels sort of right that we kiss each other every now and then. We've been through each other's boyfriends and breakups; we crawl into each other's beds in the morning to commiserate; we fall asleep on each other's shoulders in taxis. I kissed her a couple of times during Spin the Bottle, but now that's over. We're getting ready for bed, brushing our teeth together. In the doorway of the bathroom we say goodnight, then we kiss each other lightly on the mouth.
This goodnight kiss is not standard practice, but it's not the first time either. It's remarkable, because there is no one around to be dramatic for. We're not even being dramatic for ourselves. It's not passionate or experimental or dirty, but it's not an asexual gesture either. It's an acknowledgement of mutual sexiness, but not really a sexual engagement.
But, then, how would I even know what sexual engagement felt like? Like the "slut phase," these girl-on-girl moments are expected, understood, anticipated, required for graduation. But if I'm busy crossing off items on my to-do list and submitting it for departmental approval, do I ever get to find out what it's like to get with a girl because and only because I want her? When do I get to be a slut on my own terms, and not because it's the phase I'm going through?
Nowadays, the mistake isn't sleeping around. The mistake is believing that a slut persona is your own invention.
Those of us who call ourselves sluts, then do our best to merit the title, tend to alternate between extreme willfulness and total passivity, smug satisfaction and profound self-doubt. But the one thing I keep coming back to is that conversation I had with Viv, in front of her bathroom mirror in Echo Park: It's so fucking easy.
Sex today, Being a Girl today well, it is easy in the sense that you don't have to worry about Doing the Right Thing. You don't have to worry about a Reputation (a word I feel silly even writing, because I can't bring myself to understand that it may exist somewhere). It's about impulse, and the power to act on it. But right now, I'm here asking the Zeitgeist if it wants to meet for drinks and chat a bit, and what is there to say? I know there is something happening, that right now I am living in a way I never imagined I would. I'm convinced that confusion is the most fundamental and meaningful response to sex, and none of the models available allow for that confusion. Confusion is something you resign yourself to when necessary, something you work your way out of, not something you embrace.
I'm fairly certain that if my thirteen-year-old self could see me now, she'd be kind of horrified. But to the best of my knowledge, I'm enjoying it. I'm figuring out that you can embrace confusion. Tightly. You can take it out and have your way with it in the bathroom of the Bulgarian bar. It does what you need it to. It feels right, even when nothing else does.n°
is a Manhattanite by birth and breeding. Still, she has lived in a lot of places and done a lot of things, and will probably live in others and do more. She is pretty sure she graduated from Columbia, but they never sent her a diploma.
