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In the past two weeks, since the world changed, I've learned a lot about Afghanistan, about civil liberties, about what an ignorant person I've been all my lucky life and about how my next-door neighbors really feel about Arabs. This is also the first time in my (completely un-college-educated) life I've approached something so visceral from such a distance learning from the computer and television screen rather than from what goes into and goes on around my body. It felt lonely. "Unilateral," "overt force," "evil" what do these things mean, really? But the interaction between two people's bodies, the meaning of that is right there in the action. We're all ghosts, and these bodies are like our pads of paper or our bullhorns.
So, in an attempt to understand what this new war has meant to people's lives, in this country and others, I thought someone should ask them about the sex they've been having since that first airplane crashed into the World Trade Center. I was surprised (and maybe a little jealous) at what some of them reported the solace found and the big, unique orgasms. As for me, I felt physically useless and uninterested in sex for ten days straight.
Erik Swanson
Maine
I broke up with my girlfriend. This tragedy made me realize what a self-centered jerk she is. The Globe had an article on post-traumatic stress disorder. It said that a common response when we feel threatened is to create enemies. It makes me think I'm wrong, I should love her and understand her. Realize that nobody's perfect. I'm not perfect. The first day, it was worry, protect, hold. We had sex almost the whole time. But when I got the call about Ann Marie's death it all changed. Clearly, my girlfriend considered this death a hassle. On Thursday night I went to her house, partly because she has cable, partly because I needed to be close with someone. I was utterly exhausted. I would react negatively to something on the news and she would respond with "What do you expect?" Well, Ms. know-it-all, nobody expected this. She was getting ready to go out to the bar, and expected me to accompany her. The next day I had to go to Ann Marie's funeral. I was so angry at her I couldn't see. I want to burn every one of those American flags.
Pauline Ann Wolstencroft
New York
I didn't feel like having sex, though I did have one of the most vivid sex dreams I've ever had. It involved sex in a car in Italy with a stranger that picked me up hitchhiking. We did it three times in the car and then went to a hotel for more.
I felt very grateful for my love relationship, though a little estranged due to our different methods of grieving. With the parks filled with memorials and pictures of missing family members their eyes everywhere, watching us go on with our lives I wanted to go to church. Daniel wanted to sleep. It was one of the only times I have ever seen him appear lethargic, and it was disconcerting. I wouldn't do anything without the news on, Daniel wanted to tune out the outside world. I realized that I was seeking out stimuli that would strengthen and reaffirm the tragedy of everything, partly because I felt a little numb to it all, and I wanted a sense of community. While Daniel mourned on his own terms, I wanted to wail and shout and cleanse myself of this feeling of uselessness. Finally I dragged Daniel to church, a very waspy congregationalist church in Brooklyn Heights. It was pretty disappointing, kind of sterile except for the music, which was powerful and spirit-filled. Daniel and I belted out all the words louder than any other WASP in the place. While singing out our frustrations we were able to grieve together, finally.
Gina Langston Covarrubias
California
I'll tell ya, Lisa, ever since this happened I've been having twice as much sex as usual, and I was having quite a bit to begin with. I work at a newspaper, and every day I have to look at article after article about people whose husbands, wives, fiancés, etc. are gone, and how much they wish they had had the chance to tell them this and that before it was too late. I was already pretty affectionate with my husband to begin with, and I always do let him know how much I love him, but I'm telling him twice as much now. He is a New Yorker, we were just in Manhattan last year. I've flown out of every airport involved, and I've been to the Pentagon. That could have been me. It could have been him. It could have been any of us. I'm just so fucking happy to still have him that I can't help myself from taking him to bed.
Friday night I got his name tattooed on my arm (his name is Ivan, and the tattoo depicts a bottle of poison with "Poison Ivan" written across it), and last night I had nine orgasms in thirty minutes! I could not possibly be more in love with this man, and the events of last Tuesday really reinforced it.
Bill Wrigley
New York
I met a woman and fell for her hard and fast. We are both living on friends' couches and she is moving across the country in a few days. It's been like a high school romance, full of borrowed time and urgency.
On Monday night we shared a couch. Tuesday morning we got up to begin our separate days . . . and then saw the World Trade Center burning on the horizon. We walked around downtown Brooklyn in shock for most of the afternoon, and somehow worrying about the next thing that would happen a bomb? drew us even closer. Sort of like those awful TV shows where six people are trapped in an elevator/avalanche and learn a little bit about each other (" . . . and themselves").
We had sex that evening (hiding away in the last hour before my next host returned home), but it felt more like an extension of the comfort we could give through hugging, crying together and talking. It's been a bit odd since because she wants sex more than I do, perhaps illustrating a difference in coping mechanisms (I pace when nervous, she sleeps). By the time she moves to California, two thirds of our time together will have been spent with the World Trade Center a pile of smoking rubble, two thirds of our conversations will have revolved around world politics, rescue efforts, fundamentalist moral codes.
I certainly would not be able to look for sex right now. Mourning has made me antisocial. But providing comfort and release for this woman has intensified the love I have for her and given us an incredible bond.
Terry McGaughey
Great Britain
My friend Eric who lives in New York was supposed to come here this week, but obviously couldn't. Instead we tried to have phone-sex well, Eric insisted really and I felt so uncomfortable and weird about it. We just talked about vanilla stuff, and I pretended to jerk off (first time ever) because I could not get a boner. Then it was over, and I had to go into work and read more awful stuff about New York City. I had a dream that night in which I was being fist-fucked by a car-mechanic who liked to blow things up.
Don Ross
Germany
I definitely was not in the mood for sex the first few days. I usually masturbate every day, and didn't even do that. By the weekend, I think both my wife and I needed the physical closeness and the chance to forget about the horror visions CNN, FOX, etc., had been pumping into us around the clock for four days. I felt a little bit like Alex from Clockwork Orange . . . I needed a break. It definitely wasn't gonzo sex.
Robert Flanagan
Italy
From Tuesday until Saturday I felt like doing nothing. I may have masturbated halfheartedly a few times, wiped off in the sheets and rolled over into it and slept. I didn't want to go to restaurants anymore because the Italians would whisper and look at me sadly and even though I appreciated their sympathy it made me feel worse. So I started eating canned food. Dishes, laundry and ashtrays piled up. I started burning candles on CD covers because I ran out of plates. I watched a lot of TV. Saturday I started drinking and yelling and playing loud music and throwing up. Some time later, I woke up feeling like I was made out of glass and called my friend Vanessa who is from Romania and she came over. She was ten when the Romanians deposed Ceausescu and the army was fighting the Securitati in Bucharest. She told me about her brother who was a college student and was just handed a gun by some soldiers driving by in a truck and told to guard the building he was walking in front of. He spent all night standing out there, scared like hell, not even sure how to shoot the gun.
We mostly sat in bed all day Sunday drinking wine and slowly taking off each other's clothes and putting them back on, kissing and stopping, starting to have sex and pausing to tell more stories. When we had sex she pulled the pillow over her head because she says she is shy but likes to yell. I was hungover and half-drunk when I or it came on slowly and started by electrifying all the spun glass in my body. It was like it was coming from a long way off or up from the bottom of a lake and I could see it approaching way off in the distance, over her shoulder. It is not normally like this. And it didn't hit with a shudder, it kept up that slow, long approach all the way through.
We slept for a while and kissed a lot and stayed naked and just looked at each other the rest of the day. Then she went to see Planet of the Apes with her sister and her niece.
There was no epiphany or sudden removal of the shitty feeling of the past week, more like everything we did Sunday just inched all that stuff further and further away. Monday I started cleaning the house.
Ann Miller
California
The very first thing I did after hearing about the tragedy was to go over to the home of the guy I'd been dating for nearly a week, hoping for some solace. I'd been holding out on him because the wait was so sweet, but after the world fell apart I said to myself, "If the city is destroyed, at least you'll have gotten laid." Besides, I was looking for an excuse to fuck him. Needless to say, it sucked. We both weren't in the mood really and it seemed forced and possessed all the awkwardness of a first time with the added weight of thousands just dead and foundations literally and figuratively crumbling. Still, at least for a brief moment, there was a tiny bit of sweetness.
Rob Rowsey
California
I did find myself attracted to one woman this week who lives in New York City and who I met online. You could say that the World Trade Center tragedy was responsible for us meeting since we started talking about it that night when she said that she was still covered with the dust from the collapse. One thing led to another and I got her phone number, we talked, and I found myself aroused by this shaken person who was recently out of a relationship and was all alone and in need of company. The thing is, if we ever did get together, it would be like having sex atop the bodies of all the victims in the Twin Towers. It would feel like we were doing an injustice to their memory.
Beth Jackson California
Ah, "peace sex." Someone on livejournal said that everyone should get together with the people they love and have "peace sex" in order to create a positivism in light of the attacks. Made sense to me. So when Dave came over the day after the attack, we had sex. This, even though he has a new girlfriend. He went off to do his radio show and then we did it again. I didn't feel guilty about it, except for the girlfriend part, because I know how that must suck, but that was Dave's decision.
Vicky Wheeler
Rhode Island
I had amazing couch sex solo the whole week of the terrorist attack. Each night, starting September 11, I fell asleep watching the news. Turning the TV off felt like abandoning dear friends in trouble. I'd wake in the middle of the night, fumble for the remote control, flip the off switch, and lie there half-asleep in the silence, urgeful as hell, and I'd clank my clit to beat the band, mind completely blank, just waiting for orgasm to crush me back into slumber. I have never felt so desperate for orgasm in my life.
On Saturday, with Dean, things were still sort of masturbatory. He was slouchily seated and I was on top of him, but facing away, grinding and writhing while he and I exchanged filthy thoughts, my fingers still clitting. He says he felt no guilt. I felt a sort of ill-defined desperation that could have sparked guilt if I'd let it. The sex was very uninhibited, and mutually private in a very connected way, if that makes any sense.
Miguel Calbillo
Texas
All I want to do is fuck; indiscriminately, anyone, anywhere, anytime. I've had some close-to-anonymous sex here and there since last Tuesday. Being this close to death and the endless waving of bloodstained banners as nationalist kites makes me horny. Dr. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Nobel Laureate in Medicine and Physiology, asked: "Is there any point in studying and work? Fornication at least that is something good. Fornicate and take drugs against this terrible strain of idiots who govern the world." I fuck against death.
Debbi Shane
California
I don't have a boyfriend right now but I did do it to myself right after the attack. I wondered for the first time in my life if it was wrong. But I only did it because I'm at the tale-end of kicking heroin and when all the senses come back you get extremely horny. That's what used to frustrate me sooooo much I'd end up using again. Where am I? My entire belief system is in a landslide. People do need people even though I like to think that I don't.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Lisa Carver is the author of the books Dancing Queen, Rollerderby, The Lisa Diaries and Drugs Are Nice. She's written for Hustler,Index, Icon, Feed,Newsday and Playboy, among others. She lives in New Hampshire.
