never “date” a writer, because eventually, they will write about you. and if it’s good, it will remind you how good the beginning was, and how destructive they were when it ended. and if they write bad things about you, you’ll be very hurt and angry and then have to wonder if they’re true, if you are the way they see you…

so don’t date a writer. really. even if they tell you they’re not like that. we’re all like that.

except, of course, me.

That seemed like a fair warning to the world back in October of 2004, when I wrote that in my online journal.

I was only being a little bit arch—I don’t generally write about my lovers. Not directly, anyway. I will write poems for people I’m smitten with; sometimes for the whole world, sometimes never to be published or shown to another living, breathing creature. But I don’t write stories about closet sex or train sex or coatroom sex or this person whose fishnets I ripped open when we were sitting at a bar, or how that guy whispered to me in bed in a throaty, urgent way, “Force me to do something.” I never tell a soul. Not directly. I change details, I use metaphor, I write about fire and a field of tulips and if it’s meant for you, you know it.

Maybe there are still singed petals in your bed from when I felt… inspired.

But just because I’m the kind of writer who protects the innocent (and the not-so-innocent, and the downright depraved), doesn’t mean that other people don’t—or that they shouldn’t. As long as the person who is being written about is down with it and we’re all consenting adults, well, why not?

Being a writer, I meet a lot of writers. Being a human, I have sex. What I’m saying is, I have fucked a lot of writers. Or, a lot of people I’ve fucked write. Or, I’ve had sex with a lot of people who have the urge to talk about it on paper.

I was used to receiving love notes at the time, but I was completely unprepared when, at an open mic one night more than a decade ago, a perpetually drunk writer I had a one-night stand with a number of years before across the country took the mic and proceeded to read a poem about us having sex. My girlfriend at the time pretended not to watch me squirm and wince (see that consent thing above). But it was over quickly, and I thought that was that.

And it was.

Until a couple of years ago, when a bar bathroom sex story about a girl who resembled me appeared in an anthology. Close on its heels came a story a friend wrote on a dare: I was the bondage bunny at the Love Parade. And then an email came from an ex-lover who was writing about us in his zine. It was okay, wasn’t it? Well, of course it was. It was, wasn’t it?

It was, although it was pretty unsettling.

In reading these stories, which are all somewhere on a continuum between “absolutely god’s honest truth” and “a pack of lies”, I became aware of a few things: (1) There was apparently something about me that made some people want to make me a character on the page. (2) in a sexual position. Strangely, in each of these pieces, despite featuring me front-and-center, they were always about the writer.

And ironically, that’s what excited me (albeit not sexually). If I could see that these writers were talking about themselves, wouldn’t anyone? Was I the bitchy drunk, the swooning spread-legged dreamgirl, the good-sport kinky playmate? Could I be all of them? Did it make a difference in a story if a writer fucked me on my back (s/he wanted us to be as close as possible) or on my belly (like a bitch in heat)? Did it make a difference who they put on top? Would they remember it as it happened (if it had) or would they make it up completely?

I emailed a couple of friends of mine. I call them friends, and they are, but I know them only through the magic of the internet. Emails. Online journals. Will you write a story about having sex with me?

Next were exes of mine. A historical novelist, a sportswriter, a visual artist and musician. Then writers I knew and admired. Then writers I didn’t know.

Some said yes. Some said no. I think that some are still laughing.

But in the next few weeks, a story flashed into my email box. A story that made my toes curl, it was so sexy. My face got hot as I read my name over and over in it. What happens when a story about you gets you…you know, hot? Is that narcissism? A well-written story? Both? Putting it down, I realized I was sucked in as a reader, but also as myself, and I wondered what was real—no matter what had or “happened” between us, was this what she thought about me? Did it even matter? I was hot and I wanted to share.

And I’ll be able to, soon. About a year from now, good lord willing and the creek don’t rise, 22 stories about having sex with me will be on bookshelves everywhere, for your reading pleasure. When I began working on the book a year ago, my then-girlfriend said that it was certainly an interesting time to be my girlfriend. I guess for her, it was a little odd to be dating someone who was sending out requests for, and receiving, stories about having sex with her. But for me, nothing was really different than the way it had ever been.

After all, for my entire adult life, I’ve been writing and having sex. I’ve just found a way to do both at once for a while.

This was not my first kidnapping. The first occurring years and years earlier; I showed up with a friend at a lover’s house and demanded at water-Uzi point that he and his roommate come drinking with us. We restrained them in the car, but allowed them the use of their hands at the bar. We put them back in the car, blindfolded and drove to a secret location. It was a grand success — one that spurred future forays, some gentle, some, er, ambitious.

Just a month in on dating, my lover, an avowed top, had no idea what was in store for her. Or, only a little idea — we had carefully negotiated parameters a few weeks earlier. That night we were laughing at a bar, celebrating our friend *John’s birthday. Sam, my girlfriend, had just commented on the black hanky Molly was sporting in her back left pocket, flagging that she was a heavy BDSM top.

“Yeah,” I said. I arched my eyebrow back; someone was obviously going to get it tonight. Sam thought I meant Molly’s boyfriend was in trouble. I meant Sam. You see, I wasn’t kidnapping alone: I had a good friend aiding and abetting me.

Molly handed me a gift-wrapped package from under the table. Sam’s eyes lit up as I handed her the present.

“Go to the bathroom and open it, but read the card first,” I whispered in her ear, grinning. I kept grinning as she hustled all the way to the bathroom. I was wondering what she’d do when she opened it, read the card that told her she’d better do everything she was told or else, when she found the pair of tighty whitey briefs that Molly had prepared for her by scrawling LUCKY across the ass. The second “present” had a pair of handcuffs inside. The note told her to go out front of the bar, put them on, and wait. She walked towards the exit, a smile lighting up her face; the word “LUCKY” almost radiated from under the denim ass of her jeans. She didn’t know that Molly’s black hanky was about to blindfold her and would stay over her eyes until we had driven up and down some of San Francisco’s finest hills, until she was released in front of a strip joint for a lap dance.

There is, and probably always has been, something alluring about kidnapping. Even when we can’t call a real-life criminal kidnapping “sexy”, (there is nothing sexy in the commission of a brutal, violent crime), somehow the fantasies of the consensual seduction-by-force are downright titillating.

Let’s put it this way: getting jumped by a stranger on your way home on a dark street is a nice hefty jail sentence, if you’re lucky. Being jumped by (or, conversely, overpowering) your lover when they know it could happen but don’t expect it? Priceless. It’s the sex life equivalent of a horror movie, sort of — you know everything’s really okay (and you know you’re not really evil — or they’re not), but it’s a nice place to visit under well-negotiated, well-planned circumstances.

Apparently, a number of people around me feel this way. For some of us, kidnapping made an early impression — in fact, my ex-wife’s first crush was on Patricia Hearst. And the other day, a friend pointed me to an executive service in Detroit that’s been operating since 2002, where for a few hundred dollars, you can be kidnapped, complete with force-feeding of spaghetti they say is worms, and girls in vinyl fetishwear. And this service is apparently modeled after the work of an artist, Brock Enright, whose art happening featuring kidnappings were so successful, that he went for hire offering the service. And even before Enright, British group Blast Theory launched a nationwide lottery in which ten finalists were put under surveillance and the final two were (you guessed it) kidnapped.

So, if it’s in our art galleries and our news headlines, you know it’s got to have been in our bedrooms (so to speak) for far longer. I used to hear about a kidnapping a year or so, usually a special present for a lucky guy or girl pretty entrenched in the BDSM community. But recently, I’ve heard of at least four, just in my immediate social circle. One recent one involved a Uhaul truck and at least three kidnappers; one farther in memory was a Valentine’s day present and involved no fewer than five kidnappers and an after-hours restaurant.

So, why kidnapping? Why now?

I can’t pretend to be a sociologist, but it seems to me that endurance has become an overt fascination in our current culture. Just the name of the most successful reality show currently running, Survivor, speaks to making it through an ordeal. Add to this the gradual kinking of the mainstream via television and the internet, and a new familiarity with role-play (whether in games or online screen names or even just the childhood memories of cops-and-robbers), and there’s a demographic that’s ready to play at kidnappings. Inescapably, too, the contemporary interest in kidnappings has much to tell us about transgression, gender, power, and their shifting enactments in our day-to-day life. Such has always been the case.

Sometimes, sexual kidnappings themselves are what’s visible — and not always safely so — for anyone. Obviously, they take a lot of preparation and care — there are a lot of good sources on the internet for information; no one should go into this type of situation unprepared and uninformed.

Sondra and her boyfriend, Rex, negotiated their kidnapping scene in advance. They were extremely excited and spent a lot of time on the kinds of activities (beating, sex, threats, pain) that they wanted to include. Well in advance of their date, Sondra received instructions on how to dress (a junior high school girl) and where to show up: the parking lot of a major chain store at twilight. In her purse, she had a consent form in case they were stopped by police anywhere during their scene; it explained the situation and had a Xerox of her driver’s license, and was signed.

In the parking lot, Rex was drinking a soda when she arrived. He handed her one and she sipped gratefully until the sudden smash of glass: He had broken the bottleneck off and held it by her throat, the other hand on her hair, shoved her into the front seat, and climbed on top of her. He was slapping her in the face with one hand as she struggled, other when he exclaimed “SHIT!” Standing behind the car, taking down the license plate number, was a security guard. Rex climbed out of the front seat and handcuffed her to the glovebox.

He drove quickly, swearing.

“What are you going to tell them if they stop us? What are you going to do when the coppers come?” Rex was terse, stressed, but in character, Sondra said. They both looked over their shoulders for a few blocks, expecting company; until he blindfolded her.

“The thing that was scary wasn’t the kidnapping,” Sondra said. “Or, I mean, parts of it were — running through a park in the dark, being tied to a tree in the middle of the night — but I knew Rex was taking care of me and watching out for me. The thing that was scary,” she pauses, “is that afterwards, I was thinking, ‘Hey, a security guard saw some woman pulled into a car with a broken bottle at her throat and nothing happened. I realized how easy it is to just… disappear. That one night, I could be walking to the corner store, and get pulled into a car and… nothing.”

I ask her if there’s a chance the security guard thought they were playing a game that night — that it wasn’t a serious incident. Her face wrinkles in concentration, calculation. She sighs, shaking her head.

“Yeah,” she says, “maybe. That’s sort of what I tell myself, anyway.”

*Names in this essay have been changed to protect the… folks represented herein from being recognized by their parents, children, or others who might have options about what they do with their sex life as a consenting adult.

Without being unkind, I think it’s safe to say that this man’s penis was medically anomalous.

One of the women standing around (and if I remember correctly, it was all women) went to fetch another friend with the excited, “It happened to her, too!”

The second woman came over and proceeded to talk animatedly about her surprise at the much-less-than-anticipated size of the penis of a paramour. I had a game face on, but my heart was in my mouth. It sank to my stomach when this woman trilled something to the effect of, “What do you even DO with something that size?”

I looked at my friend who was standing next to me, and said, less-than-compassionately something to the effect of, “What would you even DO with something BIGGER than that?”

She grimaced and nodded. We stayed quiet. The writer/sex worker began to talk about another penis that she’d seen — one that was shockingly large. Two-liter soda bottle large.

She said, with true compassion, “I don’t think he’ll ever have penetrative sex with another human.”

I’ve seen some porn that makes me believe he has hope still.

My friend and I adjourned to the bar. We didn’t talk about it, but we both were bothered. The conversation about penis size bothered us. The part making fun of small dicks? Really bothered us.

See, my friend and I are dykes. Queers. Queer-identified dykes. And nothing matters less to us than cock size. Or, rather, penis size. Or, rather, to say it a different way, the size of anything that might have organically grown on your body, doesn’t matter. There are, after all, lots of ways to find pleasure. And lots of things of various sizes that to accessorize with — regardless of your anatomy or orientation, even.

Amen.

In fact, no one in that conversation knew that better than the writer/sex worker who was matter-of-factly cataloging the anomalous penises she’d seen. And, in fact, she too identifies as queer. None of this upset me. It was the reaction of the other two women. The conversation felt like some guy’s worst nightmare: a bunch of chicks hanging out, laughing at how small some guy’s cock was. It’s like the first half of that feminist phrase — that men’s biggest fear is that women will laugh at them.

Perhaps the two women who were laughing were straight and only having retrograde peniscentric sex with cisgendered men? Not likely. From what I know of them, they are sophisticated, smart and adventurous women, in charge of their own sexuality. The finger-pointing (as it were) wasn’t from a place of ignorance or even, I think, plain meanness. There was something else going on.

And that something meant that (with apologies to Freud’s cigar) sometimes a penis is not just a penis. This was a conversation in which there was bonding happening. A salesperson shared a story about odd things that had happened on the job. Two listeners chimed in with their own stories about things they’d seen that were like that; from their own lives. It’s possible that the second woman’s story about the man with the very small cock was one from a professional arena — it’s possible it was and I missed part of the conversation. But let’s assume that’s not the case. The distance between the arenas in which these events occurred — the difference between on-the-job and in-the-bed — is what makes the difference in tone. It’s the difference between a customer and a lover. Making fun of the guy you make coffee for is expected. Making fun of the guy in your bed is…

So why do we make fun of the customers? Because they have the money. Because they have the power. This part of the story knows no gender.

But this part does: That feminist saw that begins, “Men’s worst fear about women is that women laugh at them”, ends, “Women’s worst fear about men is that men will kill them.” It seems like there’s still enough power differential between the genders that men are still the “customers” on some symbolic level, holding the power and money; there’s the thrill of defiance in making fun of the penis — it’s where we can still hit where it hurts.

There’s a less tedious explanation here, too; one that’s simpler and has nothing to do with feminist rage. The woman with the second penis story was simply bonding. She was illustrating that she was like her and not like them. Inadvertently, friendship was made over the agreement of the unacceptableness of certain male bodies. Us and them. But any dismissal implies judgment.

For me, in the us and thems, there’s no them there. I do not know if there is for any of the women involved. I don’t think there was any real malice, just an easy target.

I tell my writer/sex worker pal that I’m writing this piece and show it to her. She tells me that actually, what was funny to her wasn’t his anatomy — it was that while he was jacking off, he was talking all about his big, big dick. Not his sexual inadequacy, but his limited imagination. That’s likely fair, but how do you eroticize the compact in a culture that fetishizes the SUV?

For however many dollars he slipped to her, for a few minutes, he was driving his stretch limo. It may be the only place he gets to ride. It’s what he’s supposed to ride in. It’s our entire language of sex in our culture: size matters. In fact, it’s the same language the girls in the bar were speaking.

It may be a long time — if ever — before we can endow all genitals with equal cultural symbolic status, but until then, I think I’ll know what I’ll do the next time a conversation turns to penis size. I’ll smile, say, “Mine’s smaller,” and get another drink.

I could have written the above, but I didn’t. It was Amber Hollibaugh, high-femme dyke, activist and sex radical/former sex worker in an essay she wrote for the New York Native. Those were her sentiments in the early eighties; she was thirty-seven. They could be mine now.

I’m not the only feminist, activist, or academic to feel this way. In “The Leech Woman’s Revenge: On the Dread of Aging in a Low-Budget Horror Movie,” Vivian Sobchack wrote:

“Objectively viewed, [the aging woman] is ludicrous, grotesque. Subjectively felt, she is. . . desperately afraid of invisibility, uselessness, lovelessness, sexual and social isolation and abandonment, but also deeply furious at both the double standard of aging in a patriarchal culture and her acquiescence to male heterosexist values and the self-contempt they engender.”

And that’s just on getting up in the morning. What happens if this aging woman tries to bring someone to bed? And what happens if that aging woman is me?

Whatever I have thought about what I look like, in my almost-fourth decade, I’ve made called a sort of truce with how I look. At 5’11”, I will never be a small woman, nor, given my genetics, a petite one. I have the face of a Jew. I have always had a belly which I have alternately bittersweetly cherished and raged against. I have enjoyed my body, depended on it, and have spent my life gathering sexual pleasure, knowledge, and adventures as pleased me—an amount surely excessive to some and modest to others.

I am trying to adjust myself to the idea that that era, day by day, droop by droop, is waning. That propositions and adventurous romance, not to mention plain old hot sex, belong to the young. That it is inappropriate to expect more, or to even desire. That more sedate, but measured pleasures await: that there is accrued, stately intimacy that will blossom in my golden years.

Well, swell. I’m so glad that there are soft-focus porch swings out there for me to sedately swing away my dotage in amidst a cloud of intimacy. The only thing is, I’m not done with my peeling-paint-off-the-wall years, the bodice-ripping years, the please-airlift-supplies-into-my-bedroom-because-we-ain’t-leaving years.

The problem is, like it or not, those years may be done with me. At least in this culture. As our population ages, with longer life spans and sexual-performance-enhancing drugs (at least for men), can’t our tastes gray, too? Can’t older women be sexy?

I started looking around for evidence of older women and sex appeal. It exists, but it’s not pretty. There’s lots and lots of current media about older women/younger men in relationships. Demi and Ashton, anyone? Have older women/younger men relationships have come of age.

That’s what Heidi Oringer of ABC News thinks, anyway. In July 2006, she happily chirped, “Be it wisdom, sex appeal, desired tabloid scandal or Social Security benefits, there’s a trend happening here, and the middle-aged ladies of yesterday are reeling in the freshest catches of today.

Only one thing to say to that: You go, girls!”

I’m going, I’m going. I’m gone, in fact, but not to Hollywood, land of these couples she cites. All her examples are celebrities, some with extensive plastic surgery. And all her older women are only being seen as sexy by virtue of their younger, virile counterparts. But still—isn’t being half of a sexy couple better than not being sexy at all?

Could it be that middle-age women are finally being seen as sexy?

In a recent New York Times article, it’s touted that one of the fastest-growing areas of porn is mature woman porn. So far, so good, right?

Sure, until in that Times article, director Urbano Martin tells us that:

“The market for beautiful, airbrushed young women ‘is oversaturated,’ he says. “This is more normal people, more meat on the bone, like what you have at home.”

Apparently, if we have (or are) a woman over 30 in our home, she ain’t pretty but you can fuck her. I’ll pass, thanks. Once again, too, the men with whom these women (who are somewhere over 30) are coupled with are (you guessed it) young men. As you might guess, these “MILF” porns (the acronym standing for Mother I’d Like To Fuck) are targeted to (wait for it) young men. Is it possible that women over 30 could find these movies appealing? Probably, and she’s probably easier to find than a depiction of desiring, desirable queer women over 40. The desire to see that, to be her, will likely outlive me.

Though I was born a year after The Graduate was released, apparently the only person I can be, as a woman over 35, is a “Mrs. Robinson” in the Suicide Girls era. This recycled identity seems to meet this generation’s needs to address the fears of women’s aging and sexuality; fears likely intensified as the culture has grown more media-driven and youth-centric than ever before. And, I believe that aging offers new insecurities and despair to women of this generation, despite feminist practices and lip service to self-love and acceptance.

There’s this specter, this warning beacon in the form of a middle-aged woman, that haunts every woman over 30: she’s the one in the too-tight, too-short dress who had too much to drink and she’s hitting on someone’s teenage son.

As of 2002, she even had a name: she’s a cougar.

Among a number of similarly-themed definitions on urbandictionary.com, a cougar is a “ 35+ year old female who is on the ‘hunt’ for a much younger, energetic, willing-to-do-anything male.”

I’ve always been more of a gatherer, myself, but when I’m ready to prowl, if that ever happens, there are websites that cater to cougars and the men who seek them because cougars “have their shit together” and “take care of their own birth control”. Perhaps, in my middle age, I will turn straight. Stranger things have happened, including real words of wisdom from Valerie Gibson, author of Cougar: A Guide For Older Women Dating Younger Men, from an interview in January magazine:

“When you get into a relationship with someone and you adore them or the sex is fabulous or whatever it is, you’re not looking and saying: Oh, but look at the damn wrinkles! It’s not how it works. Sex doesn’t work like that. Good sex and great relationships are not anything to do with looks in the end.”

Now over 60, Gibson probably has a pretty good idea what it’s like; far better than I do. And whether or not one has control over what the rest of the world sees when looking at you if you’re a woman over 30, we have control over our own delight. Like Sobchack:

“I would rather inappropriately, transgressively, gleefully tap dance…wear makeup and a bow in my hair, and spite the world around me when I am really old—particularly if it remains the world it is. This would be the real revenge: to insist that I am alive and in the world and ever full of desire.”