Sugar in My Bowl (17 page)

Based in Paris and working for a major news magazine, her job took her to the Middle East where the reality of love was quick and impersonal, death lurking at every bedpost, bombs flashing in the distance through shattered windows. It was essential to be dressed at all times as militias attacked the hotel in Beirut where the foreign press stayed. Evacuation could be imminent. The guys who covered the wars were expert at in-and-out. She was expert at running for the story. She had no time or desire for furtive moments. She lived with her boots on, her notepad and pen handy (no outlets on the battlefield), ready to rock and roll to a safe place behind the Green Line, after the usual television questions about how it feels to be the sole survivor of a massacre. In Beirut, where war raged and the bouquet of terror armies was as varied as petals thrown on a funeral pyre at a Hindu cremation, Miss Honeypot lost her sense of fantasy. Those same male colleagues, who wore trench coats and safari jackets, smoked unfiltered cigarettes, and expertly handled a Swiss Army knife, were considered the real thing. They were the war correspondents, the swaggering macho men who, backdropped by the ravaged scenery of devastation and destruction, did their five-minute stand-ups in all the horrific corners of the Middle East. She was the only woman. Sex under fire was an unimaginable fantasy. Bombs crashing, grenades exploding, sporadic gunfire surrounding tangled bodies in fields where land mines were suspected, pushed the mercury up on the thermometer from passable to good to great to nothing after the moment ended.

What did she know that they had not yet learned? What had she forgotten that they would never know?

One thing Miss Honeypot knew for certain about her male colleagues was that beneath the belted trench coats, waiting for Moses to hand them the Ten Commandments at the foot of Mount Sinai, the smaller the penis, the more they bragged and boasted and described in detail what they had done in the mine fields.

One thing she learned was that men like that didn’t have scales from worst to best. It was sex—yes or no—and they moved in like a one-man army, exterminating villages before careening onto the next helpless civilian enclave, a notch in their belts or on the butts of their Uzis that counted the number of bodies—dead or alive.

For the first ten years while Miss Honeypot lived and worked in Paris, she embraced celibacy with a vow as fierce as a nun’s. In her forties, time had been kind enough to make her vocal position on abstinence a challenge to the new crop of macho journalists, insipid French intellectuals, the up-and-coming new generation of moguls, and those same impoverished students who had since become destitute artists and writers. Days after her fiftieth birthday, she met the perfect man—an impotent and powerful French politician who offered a respectable base as she traveled around Europe and the Middle East covering the same old internecine struggles and terror attacks.

Ten years into their relationship and beginning her second decade in Paris, Miss Honeypot happened to be in New York, finishing a book and refurbishing her parents’ apartment while they were in Palm Beach. Life had changed. They were old. Her mother was ill. Her father was desperate to make her well. An e-mail arrived from her agent. He had forwarded a message from the only man in her life that she had loved, along with a cynical remark at the end that read, “Another one has come out of the woodwork.”

The man had not exactly “come out of the woodwork.” They had been in touch on and off throughout the years, though she hadn’t talked to him for a while. On that occasion, she replied immediately. He called. She answered. He told her he had a dream on the eve of his sixty-fifth birthday. He had to find her. He invited her for lunch. Miss Honeypot said she didn’t eat lunch. What about dinner? He said it was difficult, as he had recently married. Why call? Why now? Why me? He was the age his father was when he died. He wanted a real life with the love of his life.

They met for dinner and the years disappeared. She knew then what she had never known or never dared to believe. Somehow she had entered his psyche and owned his soul, and for twenty-something years he had harbored a hope that would not go away. When he kissed her on the street after dinner, she was surprised by her words. “You awakened me.” They saw each other every day while she was in New York. Approaching sixty, it was unthinkable to take off her clothes and make love with a stranger. But he was no stranger. She knew his body as well as her own. To him, her body hadn’t changed since they had first met when she was somewhere in her midthirties. He still had her number but, by then, she had her number too, as well as his. They went slowly, considering the passion and intensity of their feelings, aware that there was no room to turn heaven into hell this time around.

When she returned to Paris, they spoke four or five times a day, e-mailed constantly and made plans to do what had to be done to pick up where they had left off. Four months later, she was living with him in New York. He was in the throes of divorce and she had packed up her life in Paris.

In the beginning, back then, they made love constantly to calm the anxiety and guilt and pain of what they knew was a trail of bruised and battered bodies they had left behind. They struggled to find their place with each other. They laughed at their sheer insanity to think they could pull this off after middle age. They sparred. They fought. They laughed. They cried. Sex wasn’t even an issue. It was the least of their struggles. It was amazing, surprising, unpredictable, never the same, always new, and doing things that they never dared to do with anyone before. Sex was suddenly more than doing “it.” It was trust. It was nurturing and caring love. It was the fact that a woman of sixty had a man who still saw her as she was when she was young. It was the fact that a man in his mid-sixties had a woman who saw the only man she had ever loved evolve into a grown-up who had conquered the demons that had haunted him the last time around.

They got married. Miss Honeypot married Mr. Intensity. Miss Celibate married Mr. Promiscuous.

Best Sex Ever

A Systematic Review with Meta-Analysis

Jessica Winter

O
BJECTIVE

The aim of this longitudinal case study was a qualitative determination of best practice in sexual intercourse and affiliated activities (referred to hereafter as “relations”) for a thirty-two-year-old female (hereafter the “primary subject”). The study reviewed both uncontrolled data (collected over a seven-year period) and controlled data (collected over a thirty-day period) to assess methods for maximum optimization of physical and emotional affect during relations.

B
ACKGROUND

Though there is no clinically accepted definition of sexual best practice, criteria generally incorporate permutations of location (and novelty thereof
¹
), posture (and novelty thereof
²
), overall novelty
³
, chronology, and quantitative data (measuring duration of action, outcome, and postcoital drop in IQ). Even anecdotally derived definitions are understood to be fluid, due to an evolving marketplace of instructional and/or performance-enhancing videos, books, articles, fitness regimens, grooming techniques, surgical interventions, visualization exercises, supportive footwear, dental modifications, aromatherapeutic houseplants, pedagogical séances, rain dances, ritual feasts, and other goods and services designed to facilitate best practice.

M
ETHODS AND
D
ESIGN

With the input of her long-term research collaborator, a forty-year-old male (hereafter the “secondary subject”), the primary subject accessed a range of performance-enhancing goods and services in three categories during the thirty-day experimental period: (1) audiovisual aids, in which compensated performers demonstrate techniques for best practice; (2) instructional literature, which provides textual and pictorial recommendations for best practice; and (3) “coregasm” exercises, which target muscles engaged in optimal completion of relations.

O
UTCOMES

1. Audiovisual aids

Subjects reviewed audiovisual aids recommended for sustained clinical efficacy by the staff at Babeland, a retailer of technology-driven solutions for optimizing relations. Preliminary findings suggest that the subjects’ association of best practice with criteria such as privacy
⁴
, seclusion
⁵
, and being-in-time contra-indicates spectatorship of relations that are mediated by the cinematographic apparatus. Researchers hypothesized that excessive exposure to audiovisual aids may create an alienation effect
⁶
whereby each partner becomes a critical (or “outside”) observer and/or consumer of an intimate (or “inside”) experience.
⁷
This critical distancing was evident in the subjects’ improvised nomenclature for a noteworthy female performer’s range of vocalizations, including “Sheep on Horseback,” “Goat with Hernia,” “Cow in Massage Chair,” and “Liza Minnelli Gets a Bikini Wax.”

However, between five and twenty minutes’ exposure to audiovisual aids did nonetheless catalyze subjects’ desire for relations, even if this exposure did not necessarily catalyze desire for further audiovisual aids. Thus, research indicates that an audiovisual aid
per se,
even or especially when abandoned before its conclusion, can prompt broadly imitative behavior and therefore effect optimized relations.

2. Instructional literature

Subjects reviewed a range of recently published instructional literature recommended for sustained clinical efficacy via Amazon.com rankings and algorithms. Preliminary findings suggest that the subjects’ association of best practice with criteria such as spontaneity and improvisation
⁸
contraindicates the arguably overdetermined nature of the selected prescriptive texts, which included role-playing simulations (“Basically, one of you is a virgin/alien and has no idea what sex is. The other person has to explain what they should do”
⁹
), directives for inventory management (“Make a list of ten things you want more of in bed, ten things you want less of, and ten new things you’d like to try”
¹⁰
), and elaborate taxonomy (“G-Spot Jiggy,” “Rainbow Arch,” “Lock and Load”
¹¹
).

Pictorial recommendations were marginally more practicable. Of the two sampled positions not yet enacted by the subjects over the aforementioned seven-year period of uncontrolled data collection, the first position was clinically determined to have inhibitory associations with exigencies occasioned by hiking and/or camping trips lacking in lavatorial facilities. The second position was clinically determined to be extremely awesome.

Overall, subjects’ response to instructional literature largely operated according to a transitive property: Reading the texts inspired attempts at best practice, but these attempts did not necessarily accommodate the instructions contained in the texts (
viz.,
paranormal ideations, produce- and condiment-focused shopping lists, construction of Rainbow Arches). Thus, research indicates that an instructional book
per se,
even or especially when abandoned before its conclusion, can prompt broadly imitative behavior and therefore effect optimized relations.

3. “Coregasm” exercises

Primary subject reviewed and followed a range of online instructions for exercises recommended for sustained clinical efficacy via Google search. Exercises largely consisted of leg lifts (performed from a lying or suspended position) intended to strengthen and excite the lower-abdominal and pelvic-floor muscles, and also comprised “suspension yoga” positions performed in coordination with a sling-and-pulley system that retails online for $195 plus shipping and handling. Whilst these exercises did provoke the pleasurable tension and quasi-frustration associated with progression toward climax, the primary subject failed to experience an actual “coregasm” in the clinical research setting, unlike previous investigators.
¹²

It should be noted, however, that this section of the study presented unique methodological challenges, as the primary subject would often feel overwhelmingly compelled to return to her place of residence before exercises were well under way, citing “personal matters” that required immediate resolution with the secondary subject. Thus, research indicates that a coregasm workout
per se,
even or especially when abandoned before its conclusion, can prompt broadly imitative behavior and therefore effect optimized relations.

DISCUSSION

In formulating this project, the subject unwittingly placed herself and the secondary subject within a consumerist-managerial context: “consumerist” in that goods and services were accessed for the purposes of optimizing relations; and “managerial” in that relations were submitted to goal-setting and performance review. After extensive further inquiry, including a close reading of the “commodity fetish” entry on Wikipedia, it was determined that conflation of libidinous consumerism with the libido itself is inadvisable because it beckons market forces and affiliated hazards such as status anxiety and hyper-acquisitiveness into a nonprofit inner sanctum. Subjects risk casting relations in terms roughly equivalent to a PowerPoint presentation on the Kama Sutra featuring anatomical flowcharts and live accompaniment by Paris Hilton and Donald Trump atop a faux-marble conference table, with the lights on.

Subjects’ brief and incomplete foray into the sexual-optimization marketplace was valuable, however, in reaffirming their commitment to a vigorous frontier spirit of inquiry and experimentation in pursuing best practice. This highly variable approach privileges the anticipation of the act as much as the act itself, and is especially vital as a complement to the devotional exclusivity of an optimized long-term collaboration.
¹³