Lettitor

Dear Reader, 

Here at Cipher, we know good sex. We definitely know how to pick someone up, to make it happen, and then certainly we know what to do when it is happening. But we thought we’d reach out to our writers just to make sure they know too. 

Here’s what we found. No matter what Carrie Bradshaw says, there is no such thing as universally “good sex,” or even a solid definition of what sex is. Our writers find themselves turned on by everything from reading Sally Rooney in the Apple store to something as simple as sitting still under their own bedsheets. And we couldn’t help but wonder…why is everyone writing about bruises and referencing Sex and the City?

There’s more to sex than “good sex” too. Our relationships to our bodies (how they look, what they like and don’t like) are filled with shame and reverence. Our writers for this issue have generously opened themselves up to us — their mouths, legs, minds — in a way that makes us feel that talking about sex doesn’t seem so scary after all. 

Everyone has a secret; something about themselves sexually that they dread telling their friends and partners. But when we tell each other our secrets, when we speak them into the air around us, their looming importance deflates in our minds. The more we confess, the more people know how to care for us, the more they say “wait, me too.” 

One of our writers told us “I don’t have qualms about holding this back from people,” a sentiment echoed in many of the pieces in this issue. There is a pervading sense that these pieces are talking to one another in secret, perhaps stealing a kiss between the pages. We hope Tease inspires you to talk frankly and openly about sex with your partners, friends, and maybe even your mom. 

Happy teasing!

Cipher <3

Transitory Love

A list of undulations 

Article by Raychel Stark Art by Perry Davis

PREFACE: 

In another life, I crave meaningless sex. I am in a transient search for quick intimacy. I like the rush and enjoy the struggle. I watch as the waves crash, leaving only room for a short breath until the next. The sea tiptoes up slowly, quietly, timidly. Opposing undulations, the sea falls dramatically, with speed and thunder. The noise excites me until it doesn’t. The tide eventually calms, revealing the sad ocean floor. Every seashell, fish, and weed that lies beneath. 

UNNAMED I: 

I enter your room and am flashed with a bright blue light. It takes a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to yours. The smell of pot, moldy towels, and pencil marks drifts through the air. I want to ask you what you’ve been drawing and if I could smoke some of your weed. But you talk, and I listen. We sit on your couch, the stiff nylon particles of the cushion poking into each of my goosebumps. Already, I begin to morph into your belongings. You decide to put on a TV show I don’t care to watch because I know my eyes will only dart toward yours. And suddenly, our shoulders touch. There’s a quick, charged static that only happens when you're young and in constant need of lust. 

You imagine that I have done this before, that I know what I’m doing, and that I will be good at what I’m doing. But I’m only sixteen. This excites you. I’m untouched, waiting for you. I know little, and what I do know, I don’t believe. 

Your breath is suddenly on my neck, causing a chill down my spine. I lay my head against your heart; each beat lasts a lifetime. Little beads of sweat fill your palms, jumping out of your pores like sudden trails from tiny snails.  

As you strip and show me the vulnerability of your skin, I rage with jealousy. With each layer you shed, you become more and more confident. And there, your naked body lies — the tiny curls on your legs like fine gold shells. Your body is a thin coat of skin covering your sharp muscles. I wonder where your organs are kept. Mine protrude loudly. 

Your finger grazes my neck, and my body feels cramped as if stuck by your single touch. 

UNNAMED II: 

I’m high out of my mind. So young and so immature. I’ve never felt this feeling before. Emerald surrounds my vision. Or at least that is what my friends repeat: “You’re just greening out. Everyone goes through this.” I’m with men I’ve never met in a dark room lit by LED lights. They are laughing, entertained by my rambling in the process of finding a horror movie to amuse their average boredom. I stare at the ghosts leaving the screen, finding me, and searching through my body. 

My friend approaches me slowly as if she senses the ghosts, scared they may escape me in screams. She’s leaving and tells me to come with her. We walk toward the ominous outdoors, the cool breeze brushing against my cheeks, creating marks of red on my chalky skin. 

And, suddenly, you appear. As if I’m dreaming, in a haze of fog and demons, my own sort of devil arrives. You hold me up as I fall from the weight of being too young for drugs and alcohol. I trip to and from your arms as we stumble towards an unknown destination. 

Without warning, a pool emerges. I’m plunging in; my toes skim the concrete ever so slightly; a squeal of thrill exalts into the air. 

All at once, I’m free from the burden of chlorine smells and other people, the constant, agonizing splashes that sting my eyes. And I’m alone with you. Under the shower, I finally ask you your name. Maybe I already know. Something about the place of a cleansing ritual with another body incites sensation. No longer is soot brought to the surface, but rather arousal. I am content in drowning. My hands glide over your slimy body and grip your wet hair. 

UNNAMED III: 

I’ve been eyeing you all night, unaware of the prospect of something and someone new — a whole new landscape in front of me — valleys of confusion cloud my vision. Crowds of people separate us; it feels like a maze hinders our meeting. 

Finally, the labyrinth unwinds, and our hands ever so slightly graze one another in our meeting. While we talk, you slightly nudge my shoulders. I’m embarrassed and curious. I don’t want to be seen in my small hometown as an outsider; women are my competition, not my lovers. 

Her voice is sweet as honeyed dews that drip from the budding lotus flower. Her slow words fill the air, causing me to evade any other sound. All I can do is behold and stare. I spent so much time concealing, unfeeling those tingles and bursts of curiosity. And, then, I just don’t. Maybe it’s the alcohol. Maybe it’s the rich desire to be wanted that I crave from everyone that swarms the room. 

I let you in, and I let myself out. Suddenly, I’m standing there exposed in front of all my female enemies, and I know now I can’t ever return. 

UNNAMED IV: 

I’m surprised to enter your room with its fluorescent lighting. I saw you in the library and immediately sent you a message. 

“Let’s hang out.” My confidence gleamed through the single text. 

Now, I approach your bed slowly, hesitant that it’s the wrong move; should I sit in the chair facing your bed that you ostensibly placed? 

I looked at myself for longer than needed before coming. I practiced my orgasm face, knowing the fate of our meet-up. 

You seem surprised by how I look. I regret my smudged eyeliner. I frighten you with my wide eyes, which glare ever so slightly when you start to speak. Yet, once I jump onto your bed, I watch the crease between your eyebrows unfasten from its fixed position, locked in constant agony and disgust. I pay close attention to your body language and attempt to mimic it so we are in sync. Our mannerisms naturally fall into rhythm. Instinctively, I jump onto your body mid-sentence, and we kiss. 

I’ve realized, by now, at the ripe age of eighteen, that I’m not intimidated to make the first move. I don’t prefer it when you, her, him, or they touch me first. I’m never embarrassed to be the teaser. I have a strong sense of confidence that only stays in bed. 

I like to interrupt our pasted lips with commentary, and you like to respond with a joke. We long to continue this pattern, so we sleep at mine. And, while you sleep, I comb your hair with loving affection, even though I already know on this first day that it’s all transitory. To you, it’s transactional. Your inch-closed eyes belong to others, lavished and lost, and I can never hold you hard enough to make you stay. I can’t continue praising your skin and your hair in hopes that our mouths will blend once again. 

You tell me when all is gone that you feel I have “objectified” you once or twice. You tell me I invited you over to just have sex. I tell you my intentions were always to please and tease you. Yet a woman must never be in the place of asserting herself. My confidence shattered. Without warning, I’m a wilted, fragile flower. And, as your words poison my petals, my sporadic self-assured sexual vivacity fades. 

Despite all I said, I never liked you very much. 

Yet it’s 2 a.m. and I want to know why my hands are still twisting knots in my hair, trying to busy themselves from writing, “Let’s hang out.”  

UNNAMED V: 

I don’t know how we met. We just clicked. I’m writing this crying. It might be messy. I miss you. Maybe I fall in love too easily. 

Our texts about sex were fleeting, hormone-driven, and reminded me of being too young to know. I still don’t know. But when I see you for the first time, we both erupt in smiles. We transcend flashes of lightning as our thunder and spark ignite together. 

We rush to your bed once we enter your room. I’m aroused by your sweet smile with its one missing tooth and your quiet nervousness. Smoothly, the skins of our bodies attach to one another. I caress the bump on your nose and the cut on your lip, amazed at your silence as you watch me fiddle with your face. Like a psychic running their fingers along the lines of palms, I long to read your mind with each exchange of touch. 

I realize, with you, that I don’t know what my relationship with sex was and is. I read out loud the stories of my past “lovers” to you, and you listen intently, transfixed by my words. You might notice I am sick of rushed intimacy. 

We enter a house party linked at the hip. We go downstairs and request the DJ play “212.” The basement is crowded with motionless people. They stare at us while we dance. 

I fall in love with you to Azelia Banks. 

I fall in love at your name or our songs, at your whispering glance or your unrushed come-ons, at your fidgeting fingers when your patience is gone.

I fall in love with your slightest of smiles, to the opening of your pupils and the twinkle of your eye, to your shape and your form. 

I fall in love in my room in Bemis when there’s no one around, when the night is at its darkest and there isn’t a sound, when I feel all alone and can think of you.  

I fall in love so easily. 

EPILOGUE: 

I strangle myself with my scarf, adjust the zipper of my jacket, take off one sock, then the next, throw my shoes, and walk toward the menacing expanse. My hand shakes with frostbite running up my fingers. I reach out for something, someone, and am only met with the cold grasp of the wind. Seeking a thrill, one that I can’t name, one that holds no object, I walk into the water. My feet sink into the unveiled sand, filled with its withheld secrets. 

In this life, I watch the steam rise from our bodies and wonder how they do it — the ones who make love without love. Do they know that underneath the flashes of ecstasy lies the ocean floor? 

Like a beautiful swimmer glides, strokes of butterflies enter my body as your fingers are hooked inside me. Faces red as steak, wet as we escape the water, we are children playfully searching through the sand for a shell to gift one another. 

My vision clears from the beach fog, and I realize I walk alone. I’m isolated with the cold and the wind with soaked clothes that stick to my skin. The prunes on my hands mock me, indicating I’ve spent too much time lingering here, reminiscing on my past. Those that have touched only my skin. Those who moaned in my ear, and the cry that always escapes, the low, humiliating premise of union. And those that have touched my heart, stirring something deep inside me. 

In this life, anything at all is painful, a graze upon my shoulder, a lip brushing my forehead. I hear the questions and the answers in one sound that climbs and climbs and then is split into two selves, the tired antagonisms. And the scent of the salty sea drifts through the air. How can I be content when there is still that odor in the world?

And I Couldn’t Help But Wonder…

an interlude of questions from a woman who knows good sex. (And isn’t afraid to ask!)

Article by Anonymous Art by Eden Miller

Martinis are back, cosmopolitans are out, and a whole new tableau of sexual fads has taken single women on the dating market by storm. Double texting, Hinge roses, and tasteful nudes abound. In a world gone digital, can pleasure still be analog?

He hasn’t asked me a single question.

And I couldn’t help but wonder, is the tease better than the real thing? Were single women so deprived in the dating scene on this campus that absence was hotter than presence, or was it always this way? 

Will he actually make me cum this time?

Is what’s “out” the new “in”?

When I feel like I’m in control, am I really in control? 

Night-time shapeshifting, fake numbers, fake names. Your limbs bristle with each new form. Under the lights of a dive bar, shielded, you lean in. “Text me.” You laugh. You walk away, call a ride, join the dancefloor, “help a friend.”  

When it comes to shoes, cities, and relationships, is it only the foundation that counts? Or do we need more? 

Is this exciting or the bare minimum?

When should you x out your ex? 

When is the questioning good and when is the questioning shame? 

More and more people these days are becoming more comfortable and open about their preferences. The wider preferences get, how do you know you’re good in bed? 

What do I need to be?

Window shopping is fun, but we all buy things online. Do first impressions still matter? 

Why do I need to be it? 

Some people sage their apartments to clean out the demons. Should we be saging our new relationships? 

Does partnering with a man always take a piece of me away? 

People online do seven-step skincare routines and go on “journeys” to improve their hair, nails, and fitness. Is it possible to form a dating routine? 

Make them feel smart and stupid at the same time. Bare your teeth and flick something shiny in front of them — a ring, a finger on a straw. “Flattery will get you nowhere.” You sink in pincers, pull, and look up. 

I still can’t tell if he sees me as a person.

This city is chock-full of the old, the new, and constant change. Besides good vintage, what do we take from the old? 

Has anything actually changed about this? 

When should you wait, and when should you chase? 

What do I deserve? 

Does good head make or break a relationship? 

Will I ever stop performing, no matter how comfortable I get? 

In the new millennium people are primped, preened, waxed, well traveled, and can have something instantly delivered to their door at the drop of a hat. Is there any value in the wait anymore? 

Is it good that I like that? 

What does this mean for the girls, who know their Jimmy Choos and not their men, who know their Barney’s, their Park Avenue uptown-downtown-Middle-America-girly-girls who work but never worked, who are clean but have never cleaned, who hire out their self-making? 

Am I good?

Madonna or whore?

Should I be bad?

Anti-aging. 

Why does he keep talking about DJing. 

“It’s really fine.” Turn the other cheek.You flash your blushing acquiescence, so that it engulfs your face, stretching over its contours and tightly sealed. What a plump and youthful cheek! 

What should they read from you? 

Does this feel good because it feels good, or because I get rewarded for it?

Should us single girls wear fast fashion when we synthesize every image that we’ve been bombarded with and project it onto our bodies? 

How long do I listen to this for? 

Hostessing is an art, and your 20s is the time to perfect it. Devouring hors d'oeuvres and guzzling girl dinner and chopping and arranging and filming and filming and framing and selling is your right, and we love to stand in our power so powerfully.

Is this really my choice? 

And just like that, could it be that the goofy boyfriend she asked for was really looking for…a mommy? 

Wait, what? 

When it’s time to treat yourself, what insecurity should you viciously attempt to fix? 

Left with the hue of tan that clouds memories from a boy house. A bong on a coffee table, blank walls, and the residue of repetitive conversation. Examine it, but you know you really can’t. Too dull to even romanticize. 

And I couldn’t help but wonder, when do we know when something has run its course? 

i distrust the nectarine

Article by Eliza Broan Art by Jennifer Martinez

i’d learned to hold you carefully. 

there are so many reasons

to expect hidden rot or an

unforgiving tightness in your skin. 

even so, i dared to dislodge you 

from the bananas and avocados. 

your ambered lust jumped at me 

from a field of hard green, 

a golden lush wafted to my greedy nose; 

a readiness too complete to fathom. 

i took the greatest care 

rinsing this purity in cold water. 

i was terrified to sink my teeth, 

panicked that your soft skin might suggest

a sour mush of excess time, 

betrayed as a ripe facade. 

in all fairness,

how could i have known? 

but a punctured breach of fear 

surrendered a cascading nectared cataclysm. 

me, in turn, washed by you.

this generosity only deepened my distrust; 

i thought your bountiful integrity would waiver. 

i scrutinized your skin, 

your flesh 

for marks — bruises, stains, hidden mealiness — all 

to avoid the bite that would 

ruin the perfect nectarine; ruin me.

it didn’t come.

every bite was better than before. 

running down the same palm that esteemed it,

the un-reservedness of your fruit 

poured over me.

each pore of my being 

converged with your sweetness.

i gave you my cautious adoration, knowing that 

a covert contusion could come as an assault. 

finally, i conceded to a trust 

i had never known, accepting that soon, 

the pit would be all i had left. 

cored experience in hand, dripping, 

the moment nearly extinct. 

with gluey fingers, 

i sat silently, astonished in your 

intoxicating evanescence,

only left wishing i trusted your perfection 

from the first bite.

Sheet Music

Article & Art by Anonymous

I want it to feel like dancing 

Like the freedom of dimly lit spaces 

Full of frantic feet and limbs 

When my body and the movement of the music synchronize 

Intuitive, creative, free 

Holding my breath in an ocean of sensation 

Body drawn in, as if pulled by the swell of a wave before it crashes 

I want it to be playful like dancing

I want to be messy 

Curls falling wildly onto my face

Bodies pressed together, wrapped up in sloppy kisses

Heavy breathing, whispers of pleasure escaping lips

Show me my body inspires you — with your tongue and with your hands

Like tasting a song 

Eyes closed, present and elsewhere at the same time 

I want it to hurt like dancing

I want to gasp for breath and never want it to stop 

Face adorned with pearls of sweat 

Indent of my spine traced gently by a shimmer of exertion 

Make me wait on the precipice before the drop, the crescendo 

Anticipation, almost painful, perfectly agonizing 

I want it to end like dancing 

Ecstatic delirium held, caressed, celebrated 

Unraveled and weightless, sinking into my beating heart. 

A Tulip for Every Exit

Letters with bruises 

Article by Emma Langas Art by Jill Coleman

Dear Mom,

Last weekend I climbed over a fence in what I thought was a Great Escape. The gate was waist high and just too tall to step over. I like to think the experience involved an incredible feat of acrobatics, because, in my addled state, my legs seemed to stretch infinitely. Anyways, I was proud to have stayed upright, but I guess I wasn’t as agile as I thought because I have a deep bruise on my butt that hurts every time I sit. 

I have other bruises, too, and they are just as embarrassing, but for a different reason. I’ve never been one to have marks from the night before, and I can only believe it's punishment for the way I exited this guy’s house. It’s really too humiliating to say. Times like this, I’m glad I live far enough away from you in a place where hiding is just moving.

I’m not really sure if he saw my circus audition, but the possibility is very real considering the fact he caught me at the door and helped me figure out the locks. Clearly, this is my fatal flaw, because if I could have just attempted the gate lock I wouldn’t be here writing this with a sore butt. I hate to say this, to ruin this picture of me you have in your head, but this isn’t one of my worst moments. Maybe top five, but definitely not number one. 

You asked me in Copenhagen if I was a slut. I laughed at the time, in shock mostly, and said no, but I guess I kind of am. It’s not that I invite this into my life, I kind of just find myself thrust with opportunities that I don’t remember encouraging. In Athens, a guy told me it was my fault, that I was akin to a succubus or siren, and he was at least five years older than me so he must have been right. 

We are so similar because when we are drunk, we spill questions, and we spill our guts. Remember this summer? One too many High Noons and you started your interrogation, stumbling over questions about my ex-girlfriend before getting to what you really wanted to know: Have you ever had a boyfriend? I let you read between the lines, because you did not want to know the dirty details. You thought you did, but you definitely did not. 

I have a confession: I read your diary once in high school. The one that has different prompts for each day of the year. I don’t like to repeat your bad habits, but I think snooping must be genetic. There was a lot about your parents, a lot about Mary, but nothing particularly new. That was, until I stumbled on the age-old question: When did you lose your virginity? Your response: “I will never put it into writing, but it was at a very respectable age.” 

If it will assuage your worries, I was a late bloomer. I think the issue is I jumped right into making up for lost time. You know me well enough to understand. Sometimes I’m scared to take the leap, but once I do, I can’t stop. I need to work on my form, though. If I could have gone a little higher off the ground maybe I’d minimize the bruises. 

Dear Mom,

I lost my virginity on a Wednesday night. At that point, I had lost all romanticization of the act; the desire for love and candles and sweet nothings. I had spent the previous two summers driving around the Chicago suburbs, kissing girls in the trunk of my car and backing out at the edge of relationships. I read romance novels voraciously and yet the only moment I could sit in was the liminal space between friend and partner. 

It's so strange, to be so enamored with the idea of love and yet so afraid of anything beyond attraction. Dad buys tulips for you every week. Yellow, orange, pink, a reminder he is always around. That seems to be the crux of your relationship. You teased him at bars until one summer, when he stayed, and he kept staying. The idea of this is terrifying to me. Is this what love is? A commitment to give a half of yourself forever? Some sick antidote to loneliness? I’m not good at sharing myself the way romance requires. And yet, I yearn. 

That Wednesday night, despite swearing virginity was nothing but a social construct, I couldn’t help but be disappointed. He made me listen to him mediocrely play guitar before taking me up to his room, and we had a mid-sex intermission to walk to 7/11 to buy condoms. It’s not that I expected romance from a guy I met that night, but it seemed so incredibly in-between. Nothing began and there was nothing to end. I left to sleep in my own bed. I felt gross. 

I can’t quite tell if I am ashamed. I don’t know if that’s the right word. Maybe embarrassed? Maybe a little proud? After that first night, it became a thrill. How fast could I leave, how much of myself could I keep in the process. And fuck, it feels good. To be touched and heard. To know I can leave. The walk home in the dead of night has become sacred to me. I race the stars and the moon and try not to be consumed by the things I leave behind, but the bruises linger. 

But if I really think about it, I am a little bit ashamed. It’s why I don’t talk to you about any of this. How do I explain this festering need to be alone to someone who fears it more than anything? I’m scared of you thinking I’m dirty, but beyond just the religious sense. I’m afraid you will see me as defective. So all I can do is make myself as filthy as possible when you are nowhere to see it.  

I don’t want to bother you. I hope you never read this. What color tulips did Dad buy you this week? Have you taken a moment for yourself? 

Dear Mom,

You would be happy to know I found myself in a bit of a rut. I always thought I was bad at leaving, but I think I am just bad at endings. I flee and I hide, and I sit with guilt and loss from all the places I have occupied and all the people I have met, but I cannot ever seem to feel settled in my own body. So I give it to someone else to hold for a while. 

I seem to come alive in Europe. In Prague, I met a man in a bar, and we spent a night together. He was German and Italian, working in cars or something. I barely slept to catch my flight the next day. For the first time, I left and didn’t look back, besides reminiscing about the way he pronounced Mercedes and BMW. My fingerprints remained my own. And still, I wanted more of the same. Not from him, just chasing these few good experiences in general. I don’t think this is flawed. I wish I didn’t feel gluttonous for wanting respectful experiences. The problem is I don’t have expectations — I have hopes that turn into worries, and I seek out experiences to confirm my deepest fears because I don’t know how to do anything else. 

I honestly don’t know if I can ever have a real relationship. I don’t know how to stay in one place and have that feel comfortable. I don’t know how to voice my thoughts about myself without considering how someone will respond. There are a million different versions of me, curated for a million different people, and yet it’s like I am putting together puzzle pieces that do not fit. The problem is, I know I can’t operate romantically by molding myself into a caricature to satisfy someone’s desires. I know this is why I leave so often, that this triggers an itch to come into myself once more in the only way I know how: alone. The sadder part of this is that even when I feel I made myself perfect for someone, it never quite fits. I am left with all these pieces of myself that I am gripping through my fingers and watching slip through the cracks. 

I want you to understand the parts of me that are unclean. I want you to know who I am beyond an extension of you. I want to exist beyond brief moments of pleasure, abruptly ending before becoming something more. You know Homeric similes? Instead of a one-sentence comparison, they are paragraphs long, so lyrical and descriptive they almost become tangible. And yet the true power of the simile is not in the comparison at all, but the contingency of “like” and “as.” The object of the sentence is doomed to a Sisyphus-like fate of never reaching what they are compared to. I am stuck in this space, in the like and as. Yearning to become. 

These Are Not Invitations

Mourning the Loss of Comprehensive Sex-Ed

Article and Art by Claudia Garcia

These Are Not Invitations

Nipple piercings to feel pretty, 

speaking with human decency in my tone, 

not wearing my bra.

These are not invitations to disrespect me.

It is not teasing. 

I want to be comfortable, nice, and safe. 

Having to mean mug, to move your gaze, 

sharpening my tone, stiffening my muscles and movements, 

to ward off the possibilities of lingering fingers, pictures, a shadow, further violations. 

Yet still you persist, 

I have to flash a fake engagement ring to chase you away, 

you respect a fictional man more than the very real woman in obvious discomfort in front of you, 

occasionally not even that is a solution to the problem trailing me. Just leave me alone; your absence is preferred. 

I would rather remain restful, present, and at peace. 

Mourning the Loss of Comprehensive Sex-Ed

Little pisses me off more than a public school dress code in the Bible Belt. I was four when a boy pulled up my dress on top of the slide at recess for everyone to see. I always wore shorts after that. Spaghetti straps got you slut shamed in front of your peers. My jeans with knee holes were abhorrent, but the guy with shorts smaller than anything I own gets to learn in class while I sit in the office to wait for my parents. I have needed bras since I was ten and when a male classmate would snap my bra strap, it was I who was at fault for having it showing. In the first class I had freshman year of high school, I was called “jailbait” by a group of upperclassmen, I was the only girl in the room. It’s a reference to the jail time they would serve because pursuing me sexually would constitute statutory rape. I got asked to raise both my arms above my head while walking to class to see if an authority figure could look at my midriff. Creep behavior if you ask me. I sped away in the other direction, scoffing. I never exactly jump for joy here. There is nothing inherently sexual about the stomach or shoulders as sex is not their primary function. If you are getting sexually teased or aroused by children at a school, maybe you should consider a different line of work instead of demonizing them. These kinds of things are the breeding grounds of victim blaming and body shaming that fuck with your self esteem as one transitions from adolescence to early adulthood. This problem is perpetuated in Texas through the sex-ed curriculum, or lack thereof. The only option available is an extracurricular “baby” class with a plastic doll to carry around as a representation of the hardships of being a parent. You can see the raging success of the program as we have some of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the nation. Saying abstinence is the best birth control is akin to the advice of staying at home to avoid being in a car crash, when you could’ve just said seatbelts save lives. Abstinence education leads to an increased need for abortion, when this could be easily mitigated with comprehensive sex education in public schools. The current system allows for predators to easily take advantage of children because those who live in ignorance can be more easily manipulated. If I had comprehensive sex ed as part of my public school education, maybe I would have realized I was being groomed sooner rather than later.

In the Americas, it began with colonizer ideologies of Catholicism and other Christianities, all tied with women’s sexual liberty being seen as sinful. This is clearly illustrated in the blaming of women for all the suffering that exists through a sexual connotation in the story of Adam and Eve. Every Indigenous person they would come across near the equator was seen as less civilized because more skin was showing. Forcing others into what they considered modest, while stripping pieces of culture apart. Mind you, it is fucking hot across the equator. But this innovative, cultural, breathable clothing became prohibited, and it continues to be discouraged today while global temperatures keep rising. 

One way to change the way we as a society think about sex to better help our youth, is by de-stigmatizing it. For example, there exists discrimination against sex workers like women strippers, while nude male models in fine art are more respected. This is something that should be examined, especially since the latter wears far less for much longer. Everyone involved deeply respects each other, while most patrons of strip clubs don’t see stripping as a feat of strength, acrobatics, and intense performance. For me it was a right of passage to study and draw the nude body because there was a time in art history and in most history, where women were not allowed to do so and were thus deemed unfit to be considered masters of their craft. We as a society so deeply entrenched in Christianity, to the point where it appears on our currency, should stop seeing the naked body as inherently sexual, a tease, or something to be disrespected; instead we should prioritize spaces where bodies can be celebrated. 

The Feminism in Dick Sucking

or how I studied sloppy top 

Article by Anonymous Art by Riley Diehl

“The Gluck Gluck 9000” is no ordinary podcast episode. Alex Cooper motivates you to attack the dick like you’re alone in a desert and it’s the only water for 100 miles. She gives you step by step directions of where every moving part should go, and it feels like you’re training for the Olympics or studying for your final, and any information you retain will bring you closer to success. 

I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t been curious about the idea of a penis, the intimacy of sucking a dick, the confusion of putting it in your mouth, since maybe 8th grade. Girls talk about it all the time, with their eyes, with the length they create between their hands after they first see a dick. I mean, as fucked up as it sounds, with the details provided to me by my friends, it was almost like I had experienced it already. 

I was going to hangout with my Priddy crush for the first time, and I needed to have an arsenal for where the night could take us. Scared of intimacy, sex, even kissing, for my entire life but always wishing I could just do it, I realized this was finally my chance. I had never put in the work to actually know what to do. I mean, you put it in your mouth? And make sure your teeth don’t scrape it? Definitely do not bite it. Surely it has to be more complex than this.

There was only one person for this job: my esteemed dick sucking friend. Face down ass up on my Loomis floor freshman year was the vibe for this Friday afternoon. Laid out on the floor with cylindrical bottles of perfume and Call Her Daddy serenading us with tips and inspiration in the background, I was destined for greatness.

Then the doubt kicked in. Of course I had learned the way to swirl the tongue, practiced and continuously asked questions about the correctness of my technique. But if I didn’t do it right, I could never live down the shame — women are just expected to know how to do these things. I mean, look at the great lengths I went to know this particular thing. Screw my chemistry lab preparation due on Monday, I needed to know the life skill of giving dome for this Friday night. And it was about to all come crashing down. There were so many expectations I was choking on that I couldn’t even conceptualize the choking down I was intending to do.

These expectations always feel obstructing. Not just for dick sucking, but for sex in general. Constantly wondering about the pleasure I can award to a man, questioning the likeability of myself if the sex fails. Because when you’re first getting to know someone, if the sex fails, your relationship fails. I mean, at least that’s what I’ve been taught and would assume. How could it not? If someone doesn’t really know you and you’re just being invited over for pleasure and that doesn’t get delivered, you no longer have a purpose (and yeah basically all of this was going through my head as Alex Cooper continued to explain the placement of the hands and mouth at the same time). My meticulous memorization had faltered and I was just sprawled out on the rug looking at the popcorn ceiling and puking out my fears. What if I gag? What if my jaw locks? What if I look stupid? What if he’s unimpressed and loses all interest in me? How do I even get in the position for this to happen?

I couldn’t keep stuffing my mouth with the perfume bottle anymore. I couldn’t pay attention to Alex Cooper. I was going to fail and my first-week fling would hate me. We were just staring up at the ceiling, trying to make ourselves feel better about it all, and in the process, it kind of worked. It helps to know that you’re not alone in wondering how much attention you should be giving the tip. Or more seriously, know that you’re not alone in your fear of being vulnerable, of being judged, of not meeting men’s expectations. My previous inquiries of panic came to a point of irrelevance when the fear I felt transitioned into joy and comfort. The women surrounding me would never care if I knew how to fondle balls. The women surrounding me didn’t judge my worth based on my retention of Alex Cooper’s “Gluck Gluck 9000.” The women around me were there to laugh with me and be there whether I was a dome demon or not. 

That dick was never sucked. By the end of my lesson, I forgot what it was even for. 

So if Call Her Daddy can’t provide you all the life skills for success, take some of mine. Lay out on your shitty dorm floor, queue up a sensual and explicit podcast, and start deep throating a perfume bottle. That’s when you’ll feel supported. That’s when you'll experience the true orgasm of life, laughing and being absurdly stupid and vulnerable with your female friends. 

Divulging a Butterfly

A venture in exposition 

Article and Art by Gemma Marx

I am not a prude. If anything, the opposite! I’m super sex-positive and experimental, ask any of my friends or ex-lovers (but please don’t actually, that would be very uncomfortable). Not to overshare, but there are few things I wouldn’t try, and many things I like that would make you blush (don’t get excited, I won’t be sharing). The thought of exposing myself in a space as public as a school magazine, though, makes me more squeamish than a rope around my wrists ever has.

I mean, fuck, maybe older people are right, maybe we shouldn’t air out our dirty laundry. Maybe some things should be kept private. Maybe we should stop talking about periods and bodily fluids and mental health. Let’s just bottle it all up, the way our parents were taught, have a glass of wine and cry alone in the bathroom.

I saw my therapist for about three years before I dared tell her about my sexual or romantic life. From 15 to 18, she must have thought I was a total virgin, not an impure thought to be found. It wasn’t until I was 20 that I said anything about women being a part of my sex life. 

What if my mom saw this? I’ve always told her (almost) everything, all about my sordid drug use and enthusiastic drinking habits, but God forbid she knows about any groping or stroking or moaning. It’s amazing the stuff that happens right under people's noses that they ignore. Like when Greta stayed with us; my mom walked into my room while we were panting, fumbling to throw my blanket over our naked bodies in my childhood bed, but happily accepted that we were “just watching a movie.”

I’m still surprised when I’m called sexy. Cute, I expect; pretty, I know; but sexy catches me off guard. The disconnect is striking. I’ve had sex with many people (I do, shamefully, keep a list, but I will not divulge the number or the names because I am a lady, which I hope you are starting to realize), yet I feel silly before I feel sexy.

I blame my mom first and foremost. She taught me that being sexy was trashy. She scoffed at girls wearing skinny jeans and tight crop tops in the Atlantic Center, their soft bellies showing. She talked shit about the dresses with plunging necklines that my older brothers’ girlfriends wore at their graduations. The magazines, subway ads, and shows I grew up on showed me that “sexy” is reserved for cool, aloof girls with sultry faces, high cheekbones, pouty lips, and coy laughs. 

As a child I was told that if I were an animal I'd be a hyena because I don’t laugh, I giggle; my chubby cheeks and an ever present smile on my round face were constantly pointed out. 

Hyenas are not coy and round faces with big smiles cannot be sultry. That didn’t stop me from trying, though. 

For our eighth grade trip to some upstate NY resort there were no bikinis allowed in the pool. If you had one you had to wear a t-shirt over it. My friend and I were smarter than our middle school admin; after saving up our lunch money for a few weeks, we went to SoHo before our trip and bought the skimpiest, most cleavage enhancing, butt baring one pieces we could find. No one could fuck with us, we were in one pieces. 

I remember feeling queasy walking down to the pool, hyper aware of my still pale early spring stomach revealed by side cuts, and my thighs emerging from the ridiculously high cut material. I was so much bigger than my tiny friend.

I’ve learned that I am sexiest in the summer, in a bikini, running on sand, almost naked but not quite. I have come to believe that I am sexiest when the sun's magic powers have tanned my skin, making me appear toned (I am embarrassed and ashamed to admit this, but the point is to free myself from the embarrassment). 

I’d like to say it was just to rebel against my mother’s repulsion towards Bratz dolls and promiscuous lifestyles that made me run towards them, but it was much deeper, much more insidious.   

I can’t absolve society of its role in my upbringing (not to be that person, but no one is safe from the male gaze under the patriarchy). Supermodels walking down the catwalk at male fashion designers’ shows, the Teen Vogue and Seventeen magazines I begged my mom to buy me at airports as a child, and the outdated fashion magazines I carefully studied at the hairdresser and in doctors’ waiting rooms, all that shit. I loved the “Who Wore it Best” sections. I figured out what makes women attractive early, probably at seven, without ever thinking about what attracted me to things. 

That’s not entirely true, though — that I feel most sexy in bathing suits in the summer. 

As I’ve gotten older, felt comfortable in sexual situations, had sex with people I care about and who care about me, I’ve discovered that I feel wildly sexy the morning after. My hair sculpted into a rat’s nest of gnarls and frizz, my mouth smelling thickly, nestled under many blankets or draped by a ratty sweatshirt. Dried crust around my lips, sleepies in the corner of my eyes blurring my vision, my body stinky and sweet as I roll over to see a warm face looking at me in all my glory.

Sorry for lying before. 

My morning self is my sexiest. It’s also my favorite time to have sex, which makes me feel mature. I like to be in bed early; I don’t often have the inspiration to stay up rolling around until the sun starts to rise these days. I blame my sobriety and middle-aged lifestyle habits. But after a night of cozy cuddly sleep, I want nothing more than to waste hours in bed making two into one. Disappearing into each other; utterly ensconced and enrapt and terribly hungry.

A boy I once thought I loved teased me constantly, making fun of me for enjoying “boring missionary sex.”

He had a problem with getting hard and he blamed me, said I wasn’t exciting enough. He said he would find me sexy if he put a ball gag on me and pulled my hair and stuff (I won’t get into the “and stuff,” it’s probably too depressingly familiar for a lot of you anyway). I thought that would make me feel better, more desirable and sexy so I let him. He got hard, and I didn’t say no. I was 19. I realize now that it wasn’t about the kind of sex we were having. I was never going to feel sexy with him.

What’s the difference between sexy teasing and mean teasing? That line has often been fuzzy for me.

I used to keep a list of all the cool places I’d had sex at like awards, a testament to my adventurousness, to my fearlessness (again, I won’t say anything more, but know it’s an impressive list). My friends and I used to compare, I always wanted to shock and outdo them (sad, I know).

This is all to say, I am not a prude, I am unashamed and super sex-positive, comfortable and confident in my sensuality. I swear! (And if you don’t believe me yet, I hope it’s enough that I’m trying really hard).

I can admit that my favorite place to have sex is in a big comfy bed, and my favorite position, while not quite missionary (eat worms Noah), is the butterfly. I know what I like. 

It’s poetic that I prefer the butterfly. What creature is more sexy (think tramp stamps) than a butterfly? (I’d like to acknowledge that butterflies are more than sex icons, they are also beautiful and brave).

Get Your Head in the Game

Quotes from an Ethnographic Survey

Article by Mariana Martin Art by Jake Greenblatt

Dicks*

• Actually seem like you’re enjoying yourself

• This is very important — it’s hard to enjoy head when the person going down on you seems disgusted

• Dicks have feelings too!- 

• Balls are slept on

• Provide ball support — cupping, squeezing, some mouth action

• If you choke on it, don’t fret; it's not embarrassing, its an ego boost and feels good on the dick

• Don’t use your damn teeth, that shit hurts

• Unhinging your jaw, whatever that means, makes things better for all parties

• Most of the nerve endings are at the tip, and also where the tip meets the shaft is pretty sensitive

• HOWEVER, some dicks prefer the tip, others prefer the whole thing in your mouth

• For some penises, the urethra is an excellent idea

• Some tongue action is nice

• Spit on that thing

• You don’t want to give them rug burn

• Put your hand at the base of your mouth

• This way you can provide pleasure to more of the dick and you won’t have to put as much of it in your mouth

• Make sure that hand has some lubrication

• Your time down there: should not be 100% dick, kiss around and shit

• Tasteful eye contact — don’t be creepy

• You want consistency in your rhythm, but also periodically change it up

• Giving head is a bit of a breath exercise

• If they are responding positively to what you are doing, don’t switch it up

• Have fun with it

• BE A TEASE

• Build-up is really important

• Give them a show

• Make it seem like you’re gonna give them the best head and if you don’t, they’ll still fuck you really good

Pussies*

• First things first, you wanna be going down on that pussy

• There is some stamina required

• Prepare yourself for the time commitment

• Get into a comfortable position

• Set yourself up for success

• If you’re not at all familiar, there’s a taste — prepare yourself for that

• It can get you the first time!

• A large percentage is building up and teasing, you want them so aroused they’re begging for it

• Like 70% is the build-up or some shit

• ^ before even making it to the pussy

• When you finally make it to the pussy, start slow and then think about building on speed and intensity and variation in motion

• Up and down, side to side, etc.

• Give it some air

• The push and pull, the in-between

• Treat it like a Bruno song

• A nation is not limited to just the capital

• The surrounding areas are highly pleasurable, give them special attention

• Kiss the inner thighs

• A bikini line hickey is hot

• Lick the whole thing and then find your way to the clit

• Flat tongue is definitely better

• Don’t be jabbing that shit

• The clitoris is shaped like a wishbone

• Goes down further and takes up a larger surface area than you might think

• There are pleasure areas other than the clitoris

• The labias deserve attention (especially if they’re outies)

• The area between the clit and the vagina hole (so like the urethra area) is a well-kept secret that shouldn’t be a secret

• Moaning, the vibrations down there are pleasurable

• Suck more!!!!

• Sucking is hardly ever spoken about, but more people need to be doing it

• Don’t eat ass then go to the vagina

• PEMDAS, there’s an order to be followed

• No teeth, please.

• Make sure you get consent before adding fingers to the mix

• If they are responding positively to what you are doing, don’t switch it up

*This goes for everyone: it’s sexy to verbalize what you like and don’t like AND it’s sexy to ask and listen. Do as you’re told. Communication is sexy, think about it.*

Peel

A sleepless daze of non-information

Article by Anonymous Art by Avy Diamond

I wake up at 5am in the dark. I flick my light on, off, then on again, staggering my vision in winks until my eyes adjust. I crack open my book, read to the end, and watch the soft colors of the sunrise. 

Sometimes when I’m alone on my bed I get turned on by the feeling of my body against the covers. My palms stretch over the blankets, and I fight the urge to move. I see how long I can last, just lying there.

We should touch ourselves more often, I think. But this time I will fight it. My body relaxes into the small impression of my mattress and I feel the mild sun on my face, its warm indifference. 

Maybe I’ll always exist in this space. Maybe this will be the room I return to in my mind when I need to be alone, with books and papers and earplugs on my nightstand, a splintered wood floor, a Maurice Sendak tapestry of Max in a wolf costume, the sweet yeast odor of my tired body, the languid temperature of my thoughts as they form like dew, my dried lips and fingers; an acute heaviness behind my eyes that takes the shape of my optic nerves; oval vessels coagulated with signals, overworked until slow. A ripple effect of purple eyebags and exhaustion. 

To jerk off is to picture nothing but darkness and the curved shape of a body, its slow lurching movements, building and massaging my head, then leaning back as my nerves quicken to extremes until I’m released and in my room again, here with my nightstand, floor, tapestry, and smell. 

String some words together in a sinew of banana fruit. Hold them together in their nakedness and unwind them to show they’re ready for eating. Trace a finger over their discarded tissues. Why do you find their dampness lonely? You should be more imaginative in your tracing. 

A dust mote falls in silence in the corner of my room, untraceable, untenable. Car reflections drive across my wall in distant lapses. A tiny pebble trickles down oceans of shimmering light. 

Discard your phloem bundles; old banana tissues are useless. Once peeled, they cannot hold things together. Find new fruit and store it in the cold so it lasts longer. Put your bananas side by side in a refrigerator box and watch them sleep. 

My comforter is papery and keeps me half awake. My neck aches, stiff from weeks of stress.

Time ossifies. A giant pineapple grows in the corner of my room. I kick the wall out of desperation, hoping to wake myself. Then from my bed, I dive head first onto the wooden floor. 

Take a banana out and peel. Peel your bananas slowly. You only have so many. Put the open peel on your eyebags. Does that make them feel better? Banana eye boogers mean you slept long. Does it feel that way? 

I feel calmer, laid out on this floor. I imagine someone here with me, adding a comfortable pressure to my chest with my shoulder blades firm against the floorboards. I grab my chair’s legs and stand them on my chest. 

Write how you feel on the skin.

I hug their legs down, deeper. I want to see their quarter sized marks when I get back from class. 

Trace your finger over your banana spots and remember their formations. Store your bananas in the freezer for a while, a month. When you take them out their bruises will be cold and sweet. 

Balancing the chair on my chest, I kick my notebook over to my free hand. I open to the middle where a pencil saves my mark between blank pages. 

Read and write until you’re so tired that words lose meaning. Then, push through to find new meaning. Drive your tugboat out of the bay. Skim the coast of the red triangle and flirt with its seal colonies. Stop trying so hard. Peel. Try. Draw new letters. Peel. Place them down in your desired formation and stand back to admire your accidental genius. Your letters click like units of truth. How does that feel? They’d make for great floor tiles. 

Placing the chair aside, I turn onto my chest and rub my face on the floor, feeling myself blush. I get on all fours and then kneel back to sit back on my heels. The sun warms my mane of hair. From the bottom sights of my window lie snow capped mountains.

Touch yourself with your whole being. Rip off the stalk to delight upon earth's naked fiber. Why are you hesitating? It’s just fiber. 

I press my face against yellowing dream periodicals and then press my banana peel inside their pages, preserving its drying fibers among Sonoran desert poppies.

Tuck yourself under the covers and beneath your orange reading lights. 

The smell of wind floods my curtains. A knock sounds at my door. A small crack opens and a plate slides through, an outline of white ceramic and food, followed by a pause and a strained click at the threshold. The tap tap tap of rain falls from my gutter. Car tires slosh over shiny asphalt. A fuzzy yellow light blinks at the intersection. Traffic slows. My window curtain flattens in stillness, and a dime-sized circle of sunlight fixates upon my wall. Car engines quiet. Steps recede down my staircase. My bed creaks. 

Fossils of Us

I thought I was a loose thing too

Article by Esbella George Art by Teddy Doggett

 I don’t get along very well with other people's dogs. Until I practically lived at someone else’s house, with a dog who wasn’t mine. The hosts exposed this guest’s un-adorable traits and my un-cuddleable tendencies. This dog was practically human, big, an orange-ish brown, and on the leash extending to the most contagious boyish curls I have ever seen. The dog was Soil he had dumped all over me. I organically composed myself, complimenting the dog's beauty and then energy. I liked this one in a way that wasn’t “I like your dog because you like it and what kind of loser doesn’t like most dogs?” I’d grown fond of something I was not initially provoked by. I liked something that jumped on me initially.

Outside of Mathias, he circles me. A helicopter, squinting at the contents on a sheet of paper, I’ll go and say hi to her, his size circling the width of my body too. He was once a scene partner, someone I had a great impression of. A tall blonde with unwashed curls and big glasses you could not steer away from, wondering if he gives the most intense eye contact in the world or if these glasses just widen his eyes about three times their normal size. He is looking at me, eyeing me closely. I wonder why but stop thinking about it.

I am getting back into climbing after a week spent hunched over my computer during fifth block. Ritt is not the slightest bit packed. It’s a blessing, I won’t bump into anyone. I’m climbing something on the easier side and toward the top, I hear my name. He has a silly voice, one I am dying to make an impression of for you, yet I can't with only a piece of writing. 

He is right below me, I look down, and if I’d fallen, it would have been on him, knocking those spectacles to the ground is what I imagined feeling the worst for, not for the weight nor gravity of the crush. While I climb, he is holding a conversation with me, asking if I come here often, saying he didn’t think of me as someone who’d do this. What I didn’t know is that maybe it was erotic, I can’t tell, I’ve never thought of the sport in this way. 

I guess I am also enthusiastic about a senior boy paying attention to me while I assess his awkward nature. I really did not take much of any time thinking about him and who he was. It wasn’t until he was everywhere for me during the daytime, and eventually, I would be everywhere to him, seeping into his sleep.

And then I met his roommate. 

It’s not the physical tease, because we got to do that on the first night after watching a film from 1911. There is an inferno of reasons to tread carefully around the well of giving myself to someone. I’ve never questioned the impulse, to be fair. 

We told dirty jokes about the film, your arm was around me before it was around anything else. My feelings were the negative space. My laughter was what I was pronouncing. Reddit told us afterward that this was the first film to show a man’s penis. 

We traveled through the circles of hell quickly enough to become fully undone in front of each other. I found it funny that after sitting in class for nearly three weeks, the first thing I loved about you may have been the beanie you wore. Now where was it, I asked myself, grinning. I may have laughed at the thought audibly. Something you always asked me about, no matter where your hands were on my body.

What’s so funny?

I’m the one known to be too embarrassed to request that we should just keep kissing for a while. Right?

Am I taking too long to let things escalate? Does he also want to kiss for this long? I guess I’d never known an answer before.

Delightfully compliant. So am I calling myself easy? When we made plans to watch the movie together for class, I wasn’t aware of our sexual chemistry, which you were soon to make clear. I wanted it to be you for the first time in so long. And I still want it to be only you if I could make all my wishes come true.

Do you see what I mean? I need someone to point it out to me. I need to know that I am worthy enough to be desired. There is no tease, no build-up when I am considering the physicality of attraction. I need to know about it or else I won’t believe it. Things are real when they’re spoken, identified, or finally grabbed after a while for that exact reason.

I still haven’t learned better, that what is erotic to me is what other people want from me. When he called me hot during our first time together, I didn’t know when to stop saying thank you. You feel housed in your body for the first time, greeted by the guest inside. A friend spending the night. Making use of the blankets that were merely decorations days ago. Is this what it means then, to be turned on?

I had my body, but it wasn’t made mine until this. I never thought things belonged to me until someone tried to take them away. 

Was I a conversation during lunch the following day, saying we already did it and she was cool with it and didn’t even mind staying overnight?

“We drank coffee in the morning and I think I’ve just about figured her out.” 

These are hypotheticals yet things I fear you have certainly said.

“She left later than I would have wished, but I still wanted to try something with her in the morning.” It would be okay with me if you told anyone, it’d probably make it feel more real. I have no secrets, only the ones I keep from you now.

Two years ago, what you wanted from me was what I’d wanted to be known for. There was no such thing as “my business.”

The tease to me was the dreams you allude to. The hope everyone has given me since meeting their eyes. The security I was enticed with, a claw machine of candy teeth, a lollipop with a scorpion in it. You dried me up and tried to make something beautiful of the exterior, leaving everything else dried and buried inside. Plastic flowers on a grave, vandalizing the gorgeous mural. A fountain of euphemisms for dying young. A delight for people to relish in now. I perform and am approached by people with things to gain from loser's luck. 

April 23, 2023

you had a dream where I stopped talking to you

my reasoning: 

the brevity of what we had

in that same morning (only 20 minutes apart)

you mention we’d make a great old couple

I ask for you to repeat the thing I heard

(I can almost never hear your mumble)

I like to imagine your mumble

usually, I'm spot-on

brevity 

time

it doesn’t seem to matter 

but we do allude to never being together again

And that’s why your confessions only exist in a mumble which I am much too afraid to have you repeat, for the podium this time. 

I experienced luck and lost it. You are teasing me now, just by existing…existing without me, parallel to me. A maze that was just a parking lot, I’d passed my car minutes ago thinking there was a catch. 

You exist without me and I am reminded of it in conversations. Shooting pool. Sitting in an audience. 

You still take off your shirt every day. 

Making coffee for yourself first. Sharing your toothbrush with nobody. Finding new words. Having new socks. Purchasing trinkets without another opinion.

 Running out of things to say, I was reading the menu in an angry tone. Trying on accents for only yourself this time, or the new friends. 

I buy minced garlic now, to avoid mincing it myself, which you once taught me.

The tease is how I never got to finish my sentences on the other side of the phone. Making faces at it. Sticking to speakerphone, rising and pacing, coming back to the phone when I’ve calmed myself down. I guess you could say our relationship was between myself and the meaning of calm and security. Those concepts exist to restrict us and mimic us. Much like your existence to me now.

I was teasing myself thinking you’d change. You were playing along. I was participating in sex that I thought meant absolving each other’s inclination to disappearance. The longer you panted, the longer I’d thought the memories would have remained for you.

What’s a tease is being preoccupied by something that timelines are unwilling to address: the human spirit. 

My body doesn’t recognize hope, but my nervous system recognizes the feeling of wanting someone to stay.

I miss who I fell for

Kinder eyes

Hidden behind wisps on twig

It didn’t bother me

Scruff 

Your tumbleweed tower mounts my lips

And it’s shielding me

I miss the tickle

An indivisible tapestry sewn

Between the quaint rubble

Of your sheets, my clothes, oh, there’s my gold card!

I like how bound I was

Amongst your loose things 

(I was a loose thing too)

You could have kept me pinned there practically 

Though I grew so nauseous in your shower

Each time I turned my back

I looked back

And you were too, I almost always caught you

And now we don’t call each other back like taking you all in for one last glance

I walk you to the water

you freeze and you’re cold

I can’t stand your blue lips

your face is so brittle

Without its manly layers. 

I could crack your smile a little more like a chestnut then

But we’re not as messy, our deep autumnal drifts

A summer plunge. 

When we meet now

Your scruff is somehow softer

Than the memory of our first touch

Everything is a meadow, draped over your wrinkling baggage eyes

I used to reach my hand to prevent it like a bandage

Your relentless scratching

now you scratch at the only surface I ever thought I’d maintain autonomy over. 

My future and dignity 

My relationship with my body. Who on Earth does it belong to if not myself?

I’m alone in deciding where I want to go from here

I have no advocate, no sides to grief

But that’s too easy

A friend of mine spoke wisdom into me

When I said you’re always somehow right in the end about how things with you are destined to go

He said

Maybe it’s because he knows his patterns

You’re not an exemplary intuitive 

Nor a relationship expert

Tragically, you know all too well your fatal faltering

And pathological deception 

My boyfriend tells me one day — we’re not dating yet but we are dating. We were in love before I realized there was a word for it, that kind of standing — his roommate with the boyish curls had a series of sexual dreams about me before I had even known my boyfriend. 

He immediately regrets telling me, having not wanted to “let it get to my head.” I did what anyone would do, I acted as if something like that was disgusting and vulgar — I didn’t want to hear it. But I did. I cared to hear something like that. I hope I hear those things more, from someone I hadn’t ever considered before.

The way I responded to the comment from the guy I was having sleepovers with every night, who was letting me choose which pillow first, who didn’t mind my request for a soft t-shirt to wear to bed, even after my shirt had been taken off by him moments before, was actual curiosity and pleasure. 

I know, pleasure is an awkward word to apply to this situation. But I was disarmed, even charmed as well. I thought about someone people wanted, wanting me in their subconscious, and how I had never returned the favor consciously nor the opposite. I had sat opposite him many nights over a movie or a bowl of cereal in the morning; he even drove me to class. But I did not know the tension on my end had gone unanswered. 

Burt's Bees

Article by Anonymous Art by Liz White

K–

There is no in-between with you, gentle nudges serve as reminders of your presence, ones that turn rowdy in parking lots and near bushes, grumpy faces that soften at the starts of sentences, an invitation to keep going, timers that beg relentlessly for our silence, delayed truths, a string of mumbles, whacks anytime the sleeves of our sweatshirts are too long, indie music laying in dead grass, Expo markers that terrorize me, and your big-ass water bottle, swinging, a certified weapon, take care of the intruders next year, yeah?

Reminders of you come in waves: the “yeahs” that pepper the ends of your sentences with upturned inflections, an addition that makes you sound Canadian, bright pink Benadryls hoarded in my desk drawers, sun-burn skin rashes, allergic reactions at three a.m. and emergency trips to 7/11, that one goofy hyena from The Lion King, you shrieking, baseball caps, beanies despite the weather, “Liability” by Lorde, “we should live far far away,” “I’ve tried to kick you out five times now,” “being on the verge of saying fuck it and asking for everything,” me shrieking, drunk statements, traditions born from accidental all-nighters, once a year, minty Burt’s Bees chapsticks lost in cup holders, coat pockets, squirrel in flight, my little flint, rocking back and forth, keychains laced, falling from your back pocket, my Lego still looped, little cricket feet, sitting stationed on my floor, between us, a foot, some feet, Milkshake the pillow pet, oversized pink fluffy slippers, grape jelly Uncrustables, and only a wee bit of commitment issues…

We both struggle with beginnings and find each other somewhere at the end. Here’s to not missing the middle again, yeah?

From someone who’s hopefully not a stranger next year, 

M

P.S. Let’s make up for lost time.

It Has Horns

Confessions, sexual awakenings, weird dreams, DFMOs, and practical advice.

Content warning: allusions to sexual assault  

Article & Art by Mira and Tasha

I like to dig myself into the horniest hole.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if all of us just started fucking. Taking turns maybe, or getting in one big pile of undulating bodies until no one knows whose limbs are whose. Would the freedom of letting loose make up for the loss of precision? Would we be able to look at each other the same the next day? Maybe it would be great fun and then we’d laugh about it and everything would be fine.

Sexual awakening #108: Dream about my friend who is mean to everyone else but nice to me. We’re lying on the turf of the pier where we’d play soccer and she’s sitting on top of me, hitting me in the face but it doesn’t feel violent. All of the sudden she’s kissing me and I’m kissing her, we’re kissing. 

A text at 2 a.m., sent hot and wet under the covers, I am quite shaky to begin with but I think your fingers had special effects on me. Oh I used to wake up so early with the birds, watching his fingers rise and fall on mine. 

Sexual Awakening #7: I play an imaginary game with my friend where she is this magical elf woman who has long pink hair, so long that she can wrap it all the way around her whole body. Underneath, she’s naked. I don’t remember who my character was supposed to be. We put on Blistex fruit smoothie chapstick and kiss. The pink hair, the nakedness, the imagining stays with me much longer than the kiss itself, which I think was chaste and awkward.

I can’t tell if I like reading Sally Rooney outside of the sex scenes. 

Tasha saw a man with a gray ponytail watching porn on the plane. I keep sitting next to middle-aged women who are reading large-print smut on their Kindles.

Dance floor as a playground. Most of the time you have fun. But every now and then you get hurt, and the next morning you see the hickeys on your neck and you want to erase being choked on the dancefloor and fingered in the bathroom, but the evidence is written all over you, and it’ll take a few weeks for it to go away and you’re surprised because you thought girls played fair and gentle; you thought there were different rules to this kind of thing. 

I bruise easily and then I need everyone to know. The way it changes color.

Dance floor makeout (DFMO) as confirmation of your dancing kissing skills. 

Sexual awakening #22: Dream about lying in bed kissing my tutor. Can’t look him in the eye the next time he tries to teach me pre-algebra. 

I read something once about how almost a third of people experience some form of “sexual dysfunction.” The article said that, if it’s so many people, maybe it isn’t sexual dysfunction at all, but a dysfunction with the way we think about sex. I feel certain that people mis-imagine the way I have sex. Maybe if I stopped talking about it, joking about it, or writing about it – if I ever shut up for once in my life –  they wouldn’t imagine it at all. 

When I miss how he felt, I become the worst version of myself and look up something gross on the internet. I am trying to find the points of pleasure here. 

Instead of writing about the ways I can’t have sex, can I write about the ways I do?

Sexual Awakening #54: Everything we did instead of sex, in my childhood bed. Starting on accident, on top of each other in our sweatpants, moving until he said he had to stop. Dressing up and kissing in character. Bandanas in mouths, bandanas tying hands to the headboard. The red bandana I kept until I lost it on Halloween freshman year of college and then cried even though it had been four years. He just followed me on Instagram with his new account, although I know we won’t speak. He looks like a man now. Do I look like a woman? 

The night I lost my virginity, he asked if we could try it and then took off my fuzzy PJ shorts. Light pink with monkeys all over, eating bananas. They’re in my drawer somewhere still, except now the fabric is starting to pill so I can barely make out the monkeys’ faces. 

Sexual Awakening #199: Realizing my gag reflex is stronger than I thought it was. Almost throwing up on his penis, that pale little creature, but making it to the toilet just in time. Finishing him off with a handjob because he had a bottle of lotion and it seemed like the right thing to do.

Hot and a little wrong until it’s no longer hot.

I think there’s something fucked up about my interpretation of type two fun. It’s like I want to prove to myself there’s nothing to be scared of, that I’m strong and tough. I’ll smoke a cigarette, drink a beer, recite the “Cool Girl” monologue from Gone Girl, my version of armor. But by the time I finally remember there’s always something to be scared of, it’s way too late. Too dark to walk home alone, I’ll have to listen to his breathing till morning. By the time I remember there’s always something to be scared of, I’ve already forgotten what that thing was. I’ll have to memorize the whole damn monologue again. 

If you push too hard at the beginning, my nerve endings get worn out and want to go home. There’s nothing for them to look forward to anymore. 

Two times I have woken up in a bed that wasn’t mine not knowing how I got there. The first time I woke up with all my clothes off and just my underwear on. The second time all my clothes were on and just my underwear was off. I know the not-remembering part of these moments is a Big Deal, and the amount of clothing that was on me is less important, but I can’t stop thinking about how weird that part is, the complete inverse operation. I know that these moments should be a Big Deal to me all on their own, but really I have no idea how to separate what I consider a Big Deal from what other people tell me is a Big Deal. And the bigger deal other people make of my not-remembering, the smaller I feel my body become. I wonder how small I’d have to become before the not-remembering becomes forgetting, before all my clothes slip off for good. I guess I just wonder how big other people’s deals are. 

I hate Sally Roooney’s sex scenes but I can’t stop. Why does she act like wanting someone is synonymous with wanting them inside of you? Still, I feel myself getting wet in the Apple store. At the table next to me, someone wearing a headset microphone is giving a workshop to old ladies about how to use their Apple Watches.

Sexual Awakening #988: It’s literary, religious, almost biblical. I don’t bruise my knees because his carpet is soft (although when I lay down on the floor under him, I realize the room is cold). In the morning, he puts a trash bag over the window so that the light won’t wake me up. In the morning, we do something slower, softer, sleepier. 

Sexual awakening #1072: The joy of taking nudes that no one else will ever see. Hidden Folder. I don’t know if mine are “tasteful” or closer to the classic porn variety. It’s nice to not know, to have the only voyeur be myself. 

My favorite part of sex: talking about it. Before, after, during.

Why don’t you start by asking me what I do when I touch myself? I’ve done it a million more times than you have or, let’s face it, ever will. Why don’t you ask me what I think about? Watch? Read? Where on my body I start, as a litmus test for how badly I want it? I’ll show you, walking backwards like a college tour guide. Someone will shout happy birthday at me, but it isn’t my birthday. I’ll make a witty quip about how one labia is longer than the other, in a sort of square-shaped way, and nobody knows why. Ask me about pressure, speed, surface area. Specificity is not the enemy of pleasure.

Dance floor as a way into the Afters. If I time my moves correctly to the music, I’ll get the address of the next location without the kiss. I don’t have to feel bad about it then. 

Sexual Awakening #840: Leather top, leather skirt, platform leather boots making them taller than me. Sparkly eyeshadow. DFMO and then saying “do you want to get out of here?” and the next morning, telling my friends I was definitely not gaslighting myself about being bisexual. 

“Was that something you were concerned about?”

Dance floor as a 30-year-old accountant at a gay club who reminded you of your middle school English teacher. Women who looked older than they were, with deep-set eyes and smile lines around their mouths. The one you kissed, the accountant, she had a tongue piercing. 

Sexual Awakening #417: Drunkenly tripping over each other in the snow. I kiss her as a joke on a dorm mattress in the middle of the quad in our coats and boots. We pick up the mattress and keep moving.

My legs were limp and I didn’t say anything except make little noises to confirm I was still alive if not to him maybe just to me just to me a little whisper of something anything even if that anything is you’re so sexy you’re so sexy I whisper to myself a hint of something left behind I used to know before I threw it all up woke up lazy eyed and foul breathed wondering if my legs were still mine. 

Sexual Awakening #1: Winnie the Pooh goes to the doctor. 

A room I don’t recognize. I wonder if the answer “we slept together” means the same thing in Spanish. I wonder if the addition of the word “here” after “slept” makes his answer any different. 

The Panama canal. Valuable because it’s the absence of land, an open, cavernous space— a slot for a boat to move through. From the observation deck, we stare at the people on the cruise ship, which is barely moving. The people on the cruise ship stare back. What if, in my body, you have to go all the way around the bottom of South America? Would you do that?

I want to be good but I have been fucked in some number of ways and now there is something inside of me I don’t know what but at least my test results are clean even if my earrings are crooked and wouldn’t it be cool to be exorcised or at least receive a lobotomy.

I feel like Lucy from Dracula sometimes. I feel like Dracula from Dracula other times.

My mom had small boobs until college. I am terrified that mine are growing, directly disobeying my wishes to spite me.

Sexual awakening #329: The British camp counselor 10 years my senior who bought me Cadbury chocolate when I was voted color war captain. Once, when we were assigned the same table in the dining hall, he took my hand and compared our hand sizes. 

Sexual Awakening #1,114: One week, I start to wonder if somehow I’ve never ovulated before and now it’s happening for the first time. Did you know you can get ovulation cramps? It’s hard to imagine that I could become hornier than I already was. I keep expecting the hormone monster from Big Mouth to show up– though I’m not sure whether it will be the Nick Kroll one or the Maya Rudolph one. On the highway, I change the way I’m sitting so I can feel the vibration of the road and I drive myself crazy until my friend calls and I have to stop. Can you get a ticket for that?

Before we kiss, she kisses all her friends first. 

Dance floor as a portal, through time and space, from a sticky rooftop to an old town?

I’m into it in the sense that I’m in a new country, and a road trip could be fun — cinematic even in the old French film type of way. I’m into it until I remember my friend said not to go on a bike ride with this man, let alone get into his car. I will write off something nice as creepy and then end up thinking something creepy is nice (it’s a constant guessing game). My other friend says creepiness only comes with exhaustion. As if someone under the age of 30 can’t be too creepy. I really just wanted a free trip to the ruins. I didn’t want it to be about sex at all. But then I think about how we met. And then, well, then I think a makeout on a dancefloor doesn’t have to be a makeout anywhere else. A dance floor should just get to be a portal. That’s it. 

Games without frontiers or pity. A public park. A man with a trumpet, backlit by the setting sun and someone playing tug of war with their dog. You can say anything you want, all of the time.

I’m talking about a dance floor literally. The part of the orchid that looks like a little mushroom, where all the flies meet to pollinate or to dance. Neither Mira nor I can remember the scientific details of this mechanism. But it’s nice to think flies have nightclubs too. 

Maybe, instead of where it ends, I should finish the story where it begins again.

We go to sleep instead. Let kissing win. I didn’t know that was an option.

To kiss a million lips and have it be expansive. To seduce your way into the world, to be seduced right back. 

Unfold me like a book. Lick your finger to turn the page. Eat a scone and spill the crumbs in my centerfold.

save your hymen

love, your future self

Article by Della Reichel Art by Perry Davis

How to break your hymen:

Riding a bike

Falling out of a tree

Doing the splits

Cartwheels in the grass

Dancing

Running

Swimming

Riding a horse

Yoga

Putting a tampon in

Sex

Sex

Sex

Sex

I don’t know my own body. I hate thinking about it. I ignore it until it’s unavoidable. I don’t even know what I want during sex. I’m so embarrassed to think about it that I’m afraid I’ll never have good sex. Are you all thinking about sex? That has to be how you know what you like and what you don’t. Was there a special sex meeting I missed?

And after sex? Sometimes I don’t even want to be held. Sometimes I want to pretend it didn’t happen at all. I want to lie in my big bed, as naked as can be, hugging my stuffed bunny and shutting my eyes so tight that I can feel — not just merely remember, but feel, actually feel — what it was like to be her. To be that young girl freely running through blueberry bushes.

The girl in that photo doesn’t care. No one said anything. She was wild, fierce, ignorant, and unaware. Running through blueberry farms in nothing but her white diaper, handfuls of blue bursting into her mouth, streaking down her face, her neck, her chest. I look at her photo, printed in black and white, plastered on the wall of my bedroom — she feels very far away. 

I miss being a girl.

It wasn’t so much that her body was hers — of course it was, whose else would it be? — but more so that she didn’t even know she had a body. It wasn’t on her radar. She could dance naked in a tiara, take her shirt off at a backyard BBQ, or keep everything on if she felt like it. She didn’t think about her body. She didn’t have to.

It was in the spring of eighth grade when I realized I wasn’t a girl anymore. I was in that in-between phase where I had boobs but didn’t know it, so I didn’t dress any differently. The first time I became aware of my body — my curves, my shape, whatever other strange, man-made words people use to describe flesh and bones. Words used to describe plastic objects, architecture, or children’s toys. My body goes from being mine to being a shape in a category. I am suddenly either a rectangle, spoon, inverted triangle, pear, or hourglass. No one told my twin brother he was an hourglass. He got to be human-shaped for much longer than I did. 

I should have known something was different that spring when all my friends stopped talking to me. I can see myself in my tiny Brandy Melville clothes surrounded by a table of popular boys. One of those boys was my best friend’s long-time — by which I mean three years long — crush. 

Charlie

Deep down in the soles of my feet, I must have known these boys weren’t suddenly hanging out with me because of my dazzling personality or witty jokes. They didn’t want to spread out under the hot California sun with me just because. I longed to be wrapped up, held tight and never let go. I needed to tear off all my clothes and expose every inch of my soft skin to feel the warmth everywhere on me. But I was at school and sitting at a table of popular boys so those tiny Brandy Melville tank tops would have to do.

I didn’t want to know or understand the disappointment of the situation. I wanted to preserve my body and keep her the same as she always was. I don’t think I was ready to give it up yet. Maybe I’m still not. But it was never in my control. 

Though they would never admit it, I knew it wasn’t the stars that aligned to make those ogling-uncontrollable-boners-just-hit-puberty boys want to be around me in my “showing too much” tank tops. It wasn’t fate or destiny or true love or any sort of love at all. It was because I was the first girl in my grade to start looking like the women they saw on the internet. 

The two mounds of fat on my chest that sprouted up without my knowledge nor my permission had cost me all my friends. At 13 years old with B cups, I felt truly alone for the first time and I didn’t know what to do or why it was happening. How did those boys, my friends, and everyone else become aware of my own body before me? They seemed to see what I never wanted to see. 

Sometimes when I think about my boobs, I think about them existing on me but not as me. It feels like a childhood friend who I've always had and will always have, but they come and go. When I want to feel especially removed from them, I imagine that they've gone to college and earned their degree. Maybe the left one in business and the right one in literature. Or something like that. Maybe they grew up, found spouses of their own, and had baby boobs that they make dinner for each night. Maybe they didn’t, and maybe they dedicated their whole life to their profession, working day and night because they love it. Maybe not. Maybe they are just part of me. 

I don’t even know what I’m supposed to feel when someone touches them. Am I supposed to like it? I think it’s nice, but then I also think about breastfeeding, and I can’t stop feeling weird.

As I write this, my boobs are falling out of my much-too-tight, cutting-off-my-circulation, can’t-really-take-a-deep-breath-bra because I don’t know my size. I think this bra is trying to kill me. 

I don’t know how to dress for them — when to let them out or when to tuck them away. I don’t have a single bra that fits me because I keep buying medium-sized bralettes from Target even though I know I am closer to a double D size. I feel somewhere between bothered and unbothered about buying a bra that fits properly. Getting a proper cage for them might give them the satisfaction of recognition. The wrong impression. I don’t want them to know I’m thinking about them — for all I care, they don’t even exist. But we all know they do. 

I used to think being a twenty-something woman would be all about chain-smoking cigarettes and wearing sexy low-rise jeans like they do in Sex and the City. And sometimes it is. But most times it isn’t.

Sometimes it’s standing in a sex shop, face burning, wondering why I feel so bad about being there. Wondering why I’ve never touched myself and if I’m the only one. My best friend from home told me on the phone that she does it ALL THE TIME and she can’t believe I haven’t yet.

I think she meant to make me feel better. She didn’t. 

Instead of feeling powerful at the sex shop, I felt like everyone (me and the one storekeeper who was listening to smut out loud on her phone) could see right through me, like they all knew I wasn’t the confident, sexy, happy woman I pretended to be. The huge monster-themed dildos and the tiny vibrators — they felt so naughty. And not in a hot way. In a disturbing, gross, and nauseating way. 

I cried on the car drive home. This is so not Samantha Jones of me. 

Should I tell my mom? Is that weird? Am I weird?

I wish I could warn the girl in the photograph. Tell her it’s not worth it to grow up. Don’t waste this beautiful freedom you don’t even know you have. I know it's not possible, but I want her to stay free and innocent forever. 

I want to grab her hard by the shoulders and scream in her face, “Stay ignorant and in love with yourself forever!” 

Maybe this is horrible and dramatic, but I want to say it anyway: I read a paper about life after the creation of the atomic bomb. It ended with the idea that there is no going back; there is only before and after. 

In the after, I hope there comes a day when we all find our way back together. Me, her, my boobs, and my orgasms. We will join and become one again. 

Sometimes when I ride my bike on a sunny day, I let my skirt float up with the wind. My upper thigh begins to peak out, asking for the sun. I will allow her to come out. For a moment, the world will slip away. The moment passes. I almost crash into the concrete trying to pull it back down. 

I wore bows in my hair today. It feels really good.