Unfortunately, our exes don’t disappear from the earth after a breakup. They keep existing, seemingly for the sole purpose of appearing when you’re horribly hungover, buying Advil and coconut water in your sweatpants, and then—boom, there they are, still alive. I’ve never understood those couples who stay friends after a breakup. It just seems impossible to form something truly platonic with a person who I’ve been in love with, who knows exactly how to make me cum, and who’s seen me smell my underwear to check if they’re clean. Many claim that being friends with your ex is the “mature” thing to do, but I always feel like those people are confusing maturity with masochism. But if you do choose to keep your ex in your life, it’s important that the friendship is genuine, without ulterior motives.

Now, there’s a difference between being friends and being friendly. Friends means we watch Netflix at your apartment and I complain to you about my new relationship. Friendly means that if we pass on the street, I’ll smile and say hi, rather than try to fashion a weapon out of the objects in my handbag. Generally speaking, friendly is a good option, for the sake of social harmony. You don’t want to be one of those people who can’t be in the same room as your ex, and causes a major scene if ever it happens. That’s annoying for your friends, and makes you look like an adultbaby. (Hence where that whole “maturity” thing comes into play.) And even though it would be convenient if we could ask our friends to “choose sides,” that’s unfortunately not really acceptable after the age of 21.

I am not an exemplary case, in that I’m not on speaking terms with any of my serious, long-term exes. Cheating and jealousy spoiled my first relationship, and the ex after that resents me (I might have blogged about the problems in our sex life without his permission one too many times). With my most recent ex, our breakup involved so many nasty fights that it would be ridiculous to try to rebuild after all the horrible things we said to one another. Despite this, we stupidly made a brief attempt at friendship last year. Not surprisingly, literally every hangout resulted in a fight, me crying, or us having sex. Old habits are hard to break.

Tellingly, how a relationship ends has an effect on what happens afterward. If it ended badly—cheating, disrespect, trauma, etcetera—then attempting to form a subsequent friendship can be difficult, or worse, unhealthy. However, if your relationship just naturally runs its course and then ends mutually (which, let’s be honest, is not the way most relationships end), then a post-breakup friendship seems more feasible. Personally, I believe the only way to truly be friends with a serious ex is if you had already entered the friendzone before the breakup. Because when you end a relationship that’s still sexually charged, or that one person isn’t ready to give up, it’s impossible to hang out afterward without wanting to fuck, marry, or kill each other. But it’s not just about the sex. Being in a relationship is about so many other things—it’s about family, support, codependency, and being intimate in a way that transcends the sexual—and that’s what makes it hard to transition into friendship.

For a lot of people, breakups are about winning. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—some healthy competition with your exes is natural, right? I’m not saying I want my exes to suffer a major tragedy, but I definitely want them to be far less happy and successful than I am. Duh. But you have to keep it classy. Clearly, it’s always good news when your ex gets fat, but enjoy this hardship privately, with a celebratory glass of wine in the bath, rather than making a big deal about it in front of your mutual friends. Constantly talking about how your ex’s new girlfriend is a budget version of you just makes you seem like you’re still emotionally invested in his life, when really you should be too over it to know or care who he’s dating.

In my experience, when exes stay friends, there’s usually another dynamic at play. For example, one partner secretly hopes to get back together, or is feigning closeness to keep dibs on the other. Or you agree to spend time with your ex out of pity, because they still like you, and the attention feels good. Or, you could be using the facade of friendship simply to hurt the other person—e.g. making them jealous by rubbing new romances in their face. (We’ve all been to that awkward holiday party with an ex-couple—“Isn’t it great we’ve stayed friends!”—where one ex is so obviously enjoying parading around their new partner while the other silently dies inside by the hors d’oeuvres.) And lastly, a classic case, is the type who keep their exes around as a backup plan, in case no one better comes along. Not only is this unfair to your ex, but this dynamic is probably holding you back as well.

You might not realize it, but keeping your ex around “as a friend” after a breakup can keep you from moving on. You think you’re being morally superior, when actually your ex is sucking up so much of your emotional bandwidth that you have zero energy left for Tinder.

Moving on is hard, and the impulse to keep your ex in your life can be really strong—we all get it. And yeah, maybe you can have your ex back in your life in some capacity down the line, but you first need to give yourself a window to move on physically and emotionally. It’s not weak or dramatic to stop following your ex on social media—it’s strategic. If you don’t, you’ll just end up staring at your phone all day, waiting to find clues in each new Instagram they post. You might have to sacrifice some parties, restaurants, movie theaters, and even countries to avoid running into them for a while. But if you do end up in a place where you might run into your ex, be sure to look casually fabulous.

Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.

Hair and Makeup: Ingeborg

The post Breathless: Should You Be Friends with Your Ex? appeared first on Vogue.

Sexting is an important life skill. If the ability to pen a beautiful love letter got our grandparents the girl, today, having a baller sexting game can be the difference between a Tinder match that goes nowhere and being able to actually touch a person in real life. High stakes, people. But sexting is not only for new lovers, sixteen-year-olds, and politicians and their mistresses. It can also improve your long-term relationship. And it’s no simple task. In order to compete in today’s sexting world, you have to be the right combination of witty and dirty; you have to get the pacing right; and, most importantly, you have to master the sexy selfie.

After last year’s massive celebrity iCloud hack, many opted for the victim-blaming routine: “They shouldn’t have taken nude photos in the first place!” This is ridiculous, of course. Newsflash: Naked pics did not originate with the release of the iPhone. They’ve been around for a very long time, because nude photos are great, and we’re not going to stop taking or sharing them anytime soon. But there is a way to be smart(ish) about it.

To state the obvious: When sending a nude, don’t include your face, or any distinguishing features like birthmarks and tattoos (unless you’re covered in tattoos, then I guess fuck it). Of course, once you’re in a serious relationship, it’s sort of inevitable that you and your partner are going to have incriminating pics of each other on your phones. That’s just an unavoidable risk of modern dating, along with HPV, paparazzi sex drones, and your boyfriend dumping you for a robot.

As a ground rule, everyone should understand that if you send someone a sexy pic, there’s a 99.99 percent chance they will show it to at least one other person, and may even text or email it to others. So what does that mean? It means you need to look good in the photo, obviously. Know your angles! Make an S-curve! Only one chin per photo. And make sure there’s nothing embarrassing in the frame behind you—the used condoms on your nightstand, for example. Still, be careful not to make too much effort, to the point that your nudes seems overworked. E.g., no DIY photoshopping yourself thinner, and don’t make that face where you scrunch your mouth to the side, like a duck who’s had a stroke. (For more on this topic, I suggest you watch Amy Schumer’s “Sext Photographer” sketch.)

For your sexts to stand out, you must be creative. I once dated a guy who would text me after he jerked off, saying that he was thinking about me. Who knows if it was actually true, but it was effective. The sexts were short and sweet: “Just came imagining you bouncing on top of me,” or whatever. But his hottest sext ever was the time he sent me a voice memo of him cumming, and, after the moaning, said, “Thinking of you.”

Sexting can get pretty intense, and in the heat of the moment, it’s easy to lose composure. So please, proofread your texts! A bad autocorrect can really kill the mood. No one wants to hear about how bad you want to “duck” them, or how you’re in bed touching your “clot.” I also personally feel like a bit of humor helps. It’s cringe-y when someone gets too self-serious or goes all Shakespeare and starts using words like “pulsing” and “member” or talking about their internal fire. Casualness and subtlety go a long way in the sextual realm.

The first time I got a phone with photo capabilities, when I was 23, I sent photos of my boobs to everyone I wanted to sleep with, with mixed to negative IRL results. This is an example of poor subtlety on my part. But this was a pre-Weiner, pre-hack time, when we were not yet versed in the risks and etiquette of naked selfies. Since then I’ve learned that it’s usually best not to send nudes to someone who hasn’t already seen you naked. And try to keep it classy. This isn’t a gyno exam—no one needs to see your cervix. A seductive underwear shot will be far more effective at stimulating the recipient’s fantasies than a shot that leaves nothing to the imagination.

Which leads me to what might be the most important rule of all: Guys, no one wants an unsolicited dick pic! This should go without saying, but a lot of guys still haven’t gotten the memo. As a general rule, when something becomes so widely disliked that society as a whole bands together in hatred of it—fedoras, Nazis, unsolicited dick pics—that’s when you should probably stop associating with that thing, even if your heart is telling you otherwise.

That said, if someone asks for a dick pic, send away! But please, we need context. Sending a pic of just the shaft is the equivalent to a girl sending you a zoomed-in image of just her clit. Not hot. Include at least one other part of your body in the frame, preferably your torso, rather than the unfortunate classic: the dick and feet. If this means you need to get a selfie stick for your dick pics, so be it.

I don’t want to hate on dick pics too much, because they can be a useful tool for the modern businesswoman, according to my friend, who I’ll call Molly, a 31-year-old director. “In the context of a hook up, I usually ask for a dick pic first,” Molly told me. “If it’s just going to be sex, seeing their cock lets you know if it’s worth your time. But if you’re in the beginning of something real, an unwanted dick pic is a turn off.” Molly also upholds a careful separation of sext and work. “I generally hold back from sexting with anyone I have a professional overlap with, and in New York, when you work in a creative field, that encompasses a lot of people. I just don’t trust anyone, and the last thing I need is a screenshot of my texts about how much I squirted being passed around to people I work with.”

Sexting is also a good way to test someone’s sexual boundaries, according to my friend, who I’ll call Nick, a 31-year-old artist. Twice he’s used this technique to introduce the idea of a threesome. Nick told me, “For instance, I might text, ‘It would be so hot to see you with another girl,’” and then see if that turns her on or not.” Another time he wanted to invite his guy friend in for group sex. “Bringing it up in the midst of a heated sext session felt casual and safe,” Nick said, “rather than asking randomly over lunch, like ‘Hey, how’s the pizza? By the way, do you want to get double-teamed by me and my coworker?’” After they fantasized about it over text a couple times, it ended up really happening.

Sexting is generally something that’s rampant at the beginning of a relationship, but eventually loses steam. In a long-term relationship, it’s easy to neglect the small, everyday erotic gestures—flowers, random make-outs at the movies—that make a world of difference in maintaining your erotic dialogue. Psychotherapist Esther Perel discusses this in her insightful TED Talk, “The secret to desire in a long-term relationship.” Perel says, “Foreplay is not something you do five minutes before the real thing. Foreplay pretty much starts at the end of the previous orgasm.” In other words, make the times when you’re not in bed count, too. Whether you’re newly matched or married for years, your sexting game makes more of a difference than you think.

Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.

Hair and Makeup: Ingeborg

The post Breathless: Mastering the Art of Sexting appeared first on Vogue.

Last summer, I was casually dating a 32-year-old magazine editor. (I’ll call him Steve.) He was healthy, in shape, and his dick worked fine. For the most part. When we were alone, there were never any issues, but then once, during a foursome with another couple, it just wasn’t happening. He said the presence of another guy was “distracting,” and he spent most of the evening watching idly from the sidelines. I took it as a one-off, until a couple months later, when the same thing happened. We were at a sex party, and a hot blonde was about to give him a blow job, when (allegedly) some guy across the room gave him a thumbs-up, triggering a literal boner-kill. In the cab home, annoyed, I yelled, “Ugh, sort your life out and get some Viagra!” He looked at me, heartbroken, like he’d just been offered a senior-citizen discount. Little did I know, I created a monster.

Last week, out of the blue, I got a text from Steve, who is now my ex. “Hey babe, I took your advice,” he said. “Why don’t you come over and help me test out my Viagra.” How romantic. Steve later explained that it actually wasn’t me, but rather his young, studly mechanic who convinced him to start taking erective dysfunction drugs. The whole thing sounds very homoerotic. “My mechanic swears by Viagra,” Steve said. “He’s in his late 20s, drives a Ferrari, and is on Tinder and all that. He told me he takes just a little bit every time he has sex. There’s nothing wrong with him, and everything down there works, but he just likes the reassurance.” Steve now emulates his Ferrari-driving mechanic and takes a small dose before every sexual encounter, explaining that he feels “like Superman.”

This is not uncommon, it turns out. Erectile dysfunction drugs—Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra, namely—are now among the most commonly prescribed, and abused, drugs in America. For years, Viagra and its competitors were associated mostly with the smiling silver foxes in those creepy TV commercials full of unsubtle innuendo (a man chopping wood, etc.), and, for the most part, erectile dysfunction was a taboo subject, one that men, who pride themselves on virility, preferred not to discuss. But in recent years, studies show, it’s become a thing for young men to take these drugs recreationally—without a prescription, and without any real symptoms of chronic ED. They’re not using the drugs to get an erection, but to supercharge their erection—to get harder for longer—or to combat the unfortunate effects a night of partying is known to have on one’s boner.

The stigma is waning, too. Just ask your local street pharmacologist for his deal on the Klonopin-Adderall-Viagra variety pack. I’ve personally watched two guys pop an ED pill in bed over the past few years, one in his twenties, the other in his early thirties, and both after long nights of drinking. Steve gets his Viagra through some sketchy online pharmacy, but this is just one of many illicit ways people get erective dysfunction drugs these days. Another is to purchase counterfeit, unregulated pills online.

What has caused this shift? And what are the long term sexual effects of taking ED drugs recreationally, before you really need them? I recently discussed this development with a 40-year-old male writer friend of mine, who was immediately critical. “Young guys today grew up watching porn, so they think their dick has to be rock hard from the moment they start fooling around, until the moment they cum,” he said. “If they go soft for even a couple minutes, it’s devastating. They don’t think of it as an opportunity to give head, or even to just stop and kiss for a minute.” Realistically, he said, it’s normal to waver between being hard, semi-hard, and temporarily soft over the course of a sex session. “It’s natural to go a bit soft sometimes, especially if you’re taking your time and enjoying the experience. No one has ever taught these guys that, and you never seen someone even semi-hard in porn.”

I found this explanation plausible. It’s common knowledge that porn has become a ubiquitous source of sex education for young people today. Porn is the most commonly cited culprit when it comes to the misrepresentation of female pleasure—you know, those theatrical, for-the-benefit-of-the-guy orgasms that female pornstars have onscreen. But porn may also set an unrealistic standard for men, in terms of penis size and performance: No softies make the final edit. And in recent years, as the porn superstar James Deen has explained to Salon, Viagra has become a staple on porn sets. “Nowadays it’s completely standard for guys to show up with their pills and say, ‘Gimme a 30-minute warning for the scene,’” he said. “When I first started, guys were like, ‘If you can’t do it without it, you shouldn’t be doing it at all.’”

“What I don’t like about a lot of the performers who are pharmaceutically assisted is that a lot of the passion is missing,” Deen went on. “They kind of have sex like robots. Their scenes will be emotionless, and I just don’t like emotionless sex.”

A young female friend of mine agrees strongly with this last sentiment. This friend, a 26-year-old photographer I’ll call Claire, is sleeping with a guy in his mid-thirties who’s a bit too obsessed with Viagra, in her opinion. “I was surprised he takes Viagra,” she told me, “because he’s in really good shape, he bikes daily and goes sailing, and he’s just really boyish looking. But the first time we had sex, he had a huge sheet of pills. He was constantly hard for three hours, and every time we had sex, thirty seconds after he came, he’d want to go again.”

Claire said he was popping the pills like candy, almost every half hour. “Eventually I was like, ‘Can I have some?’” she said. “So he gave me half a pill. I thought, because Viagra increases blood flow to the genitals, that I’d at least be pulsing down, but I just felt flushed and dizzy, and my sinuses really stuffed up. I felt like I was getting a cold, which he told me sometimes happens to him, too.”

Claire also felt that her fuck-buddy being so “up” on ED meds interrupted the natural flow of sex, similar to what James Deen described. “Sure, it’s good if he can stay hard, but there’s no momentum,” she said. “It never ends, and it’s not real. It’s like riding a statue.”

While it’s great that ED meds are gradually being destigmatized for the people who really need them—there’s a lot of pressure on men to be virile and sexually competent, and taking ED meds should never feel emasculating—the magical blue pill is not without its downsides, especially when abused. Young men taking these drugs to supercharge their boners, beware: studies show that recreational use of ED meds can lead to dependency issues, and may increase the risk of erectile dysfunction for psychological reasons. Basically, you can become physically dependant on Viagra, and then, if and when you don’t have access to the drug, you get nervous that you won’t be able to perform as well, psych yourself out, and potentially don’t get hard at all. Bummer. So if you’re tempted to fuck like Superman, think about the long game. And remember that sex isn’t as appealing when it’s mechanical. Having sex with a robot may hold appeal to some, but when you’re with a person, you want the experience to be genuinely passionate. Vulnerability is what makes sex powerful.

Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.

Hair and Makeup: Ingeborg

The post Breathless: Has Anyone Else Noticed That Viagra Is Everywhere? appeared first on Vogue.

The stupidest thing a guy ever said to me in bed was this: “I don’t need to use condoms, because I only sleep with girls from wealthy families.”

Right.

As will come as no shock to anyone, guys will say literally anything to sleep with you without a condom. I considered explaining to this guy that, unfortunately, even if his insane logic actually held truth, my parents’ tax bracket still wouldn’t protect me from disease. However, by that point my vagina was already closed for business, so we just called it a night.

Condoms kinda suck, but STIs and abortions suck way more, so condoms it is! I’m not going to use this article to rant about the reasons why everyone should use protection. We already know why: because STIs are annoying, expensive, and could negatively affect your life forever, and because getting an abortion is a really inconvenient way to spend a Saturday afternoon. However, according to statistics, most of us are idiots and have unprotected sex on the regular, even with STIs on the rise in this country. I find it bizarre that so many people still talk about condoms being a turn-off, when really, the biggest turn-off is having to argue with a guy about why he should put one on.

Proper condom etiquette can be really sexy. The bar isn’t very high—all a girl wants is for you to stop whining, put it on, and control your delusions of grandeur, because when you wear a Magnum unnecessarily, it feels like we’re having sex with an empty bag.

My friend, a 25-year-old editor I’ll call Karen, is uniquely passionate about condom dexterity. “The most attractive thing is when the guy can do it all with one hand,” she said with great admiration, sort of the way my dad talks about LeBron James. “He grabs the package and rips it open with his teeth, all while keeping one hand on me—that’s literally such a skill!” Karen often talks fondly of one ex who was particularly agile with a condom. “The process was so fluid, I wouldn’t even notice it happened,” she said. “It’s funny, because it had the opposite effect the first time. I was like, ‘Wow, you put that condom on so well. You must have sex with three different girls a day.’ He had the finesse of a serial cheater. It was unbelievable. But realistically he was a nerd, so he’d probably just practiced on his own. I mean, he did used to be fat.”

The biggest faux pas? According to Karen, it’s when a guy tries to persuade you not to use one. “If I have to leave my sexual headspace to be like ‘Hello, Protection!’ then he’s already made a mistake. If we carry out a conversation longer than ‘Put on a condom,’ I’m too pissed off to care about sex, because I ultimately feel like the guy was trying to manipulate me into being unsafe.”

It’s confusing that this has become an established dynamic: apparently, the girl is the one who cares about condoms, and the guy is just doing us a favor by wearing one. But like, why aren’t guys scared of me? I’m the type of girl who passes out at sex parties. It’s like Amy Schumer tells guys in bed: “Trust me, you’re gonna want to wear this, I’ve had a busy month.”

Statistics have shown that straight, young people are more concerned about pregnancy than STIs. (Which is so weird because, hello, there’s actually a cure for pregnancy.) In the past, when a partner of mine has been resistant to condoms, my most effective retort has been to lie and say, “I’m not on birth control.” Say you’re anti-abortion and dudes will straight-up double-bag it. But we shouldn’t have to trick our partners into being safe. And I’m sick of hearing guys complain about lack of sensation, as if it feels better without a condom only for them. Contrary to popular belief, women are not just sex-bot-cum-dumpsters—we also experience sexual sensitivity.

In my personal experience, there are four main condom camps. First, there are the normal nice guys who automatically put on a condom because they’re not stupid and don’t want to get my hypothetical STIs. Then there are the heroic-gesture guys, who put on a condom but are way too self-congratulatory about it, like Matthew McConaughey at an awards ceremony. In the third camp are the guys who try to argue you out of using protection and kill the moment. (The worst camp.) And in the fourth, you’ve got the guys who are condom incompetent: they spend fifteen minutes frantically running around the apartment trying to find one. Or they put the condom on inside out and act confused as to why it’s not rolling down. (Come on. You at least have to know the basics, don’t you? I don’t get confused and accidentally squirt the lube into my mouth. Watch a YouTube tutorial.) Or they don’t know how to buy condoms that fit them properly. (It bears repeating here: Guys, if you wear a Magnum even though your dick is a normal size, the condom is baggy. So awkward.)

But in all fairness, it’s not always the guy who’s being the idiot. My friend, who I’ll call Ken, a 33-year-old filmmaker, always uses protection, and over the years he has encountered women who put up a fight. “I was recently about to have sex with a girl that I really liked for the first time, but when I reached for the condom she literally rolled her eyes at me,” he told me. “As if I was the world’s biggest loser. I think there’s a false notion that sex can’t feel good with a condom. It’s certainly not that much better without one that I’d risk fucking up my sex life forever.”

It’s true. Sex is supposed to be a fun, stress-reducing experience; it’s not supposed to leave you with crippling anxiety that you’re pregnant or have a disease. I’m not one for thrill-seeking activities—I feel alive enough without having to jump out of a plane or swim with sharks or fuck without a condom.

It’s 2015. You don’t have to leave your safety in the hands of other people. It’s not “slutty” for girls to carry condoms. Carrying condoms is cool, because it means you’re a bad bitch who’s in control of her life. And don’t feel like you have to ask permission to use one. Assume it’s a given: Grab one from the nightstand, or your bag (or your bra? . . . casual), and just put it on. And remember that, ultimately, you make the rules. If you tell a guy you’re going to leave unless he puts on a condom, he’s always going to put one on.

Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.

Hair and Makeup: Ingeborg

The post Breathless: Proper Condom Etiquette Is Sexy appeared first on Vogue.

Last Thursday marked the release of Grey, the latest in the Fifty Shades series. Grey is literally the exact same story as Fifty Shades of Grey, except this time it’s told from Christian’s perspective. Admittedly, I was curious to get inside Christian’s head, mainly because his connection with Ana never made any sense to me. Why, I wondered, would a hot, S&M-obsessed billionaire want to date an insecure, badly dressed college student who drunkenly vomits on herself in public and can’t even open a door without falling on her face? Oh, and she’s clueless about almost everything—including her own body—and thinks S&M sounds awful. Seems like an unlikely romance, right?

From Ana’s perspective, Christian is a god. Fifty Shades was full of Ana saying embarrassing stuff, like “I am the moth, and he is the light” and “How could someone like him want someone like me?” And I was like, yeah, that does seem unlikely. Can someone please explain?

One would assume that getting inside Christian’s head would teach us something about Ana’s ostensibly hidden charms. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen—Ana actually seems more incompetent in Grey. (At one point she literally almost electrocutes herself to death because she doesn’t understand that she can’t bathe with her iPod.) Instead, Grey just reveals that Christian, too, is awful and dumb. Suddenly it all makes sense! Literally all he talks about is his boner, working out, wanting to bend Ana over stuff, and Kings of Leon. All I could think was: Wait, is Christian Grey a bro?

In order to properly answer this incredibly important question, we first need to identify what a “bro” is. What’s probably the most commonly cited species of a bro is the fratty white guy who wears frayed-brim baseball hats, polo shirts, and cargo shorts, and who’s passionate about cheap beer, sports, and pointing out when other dudes are acting “gay.” This doesn’t perfectly describe Christian Grey, obviously, but there are multiple subspecies of bro. There are the stoner-surfer bros, the steroid-loving bros, the tech bros, and also the suit bros, who consist of bro-y Wall Street types and L.A. talent-agent bros, i.e., Ari Gold from Entourage.

One of Christian’s chief bro qualities is his profound un-self-awareness. In bro-dom, there is zero room to be self-critical; rather, you have to be unself-conscious and unapologetic about your bro-ness. (In essence, bros are the anti-hipster.) In Grey, Christian is self-serious to the point of painful monotony. He literally never makes a single self-deprecating joke about the fact that his only passion in life is hitting women with sticks. He also says things like, “I’m going to make you come like a freight train, baby,” with complete sincerity. Ana, at least, makes occasional jokes, but Christian usually doesn’t understand them. For instance, when Christian worriedly asks Ana if he hurt her while taking her virginity:

Ana beams with incredulity. “You are asking me if you hurt me?”
And for a moment I don’t know why she’s grinning.
Oh. My playroom.

Idiot.

Generally, bros have a lot of bro-ssumption about the way that men should be, and being alt, arty, or indie are defined as either unmanly and therefore weak, or “gay,” signifying a general homophobia. Christian, while he’s not an outward gay-basher, definitely seems somewhat homophobic. For instance, during the interview when he first meets Ana, he’s incredibly offended when she asks him if he’s gay.

“Are you gay, Mr Grey?”
What the hell!
I cannot believe she said that out loud!  . . . . How dare she! I have the sudden urge to drag her out of her seat, bend her over my knee, spank her, and then fuck her over my desk . . . . That would answer her ridiculous question.

Being gay, you see, would be the worst thing ever! He even brings her question up again later to reiterate how un-gay he is and how dumb she is for having asked.

Bros are generally very vain. The only thing they love more than working out is talking about how they love working out. Christian lives for his ripped bod, and sometimes even takes breaks from his broductive mystery job to do a second daily workout. He also loves finding opportunities to refer to his own muscular physique. For example, that time the ever-clumsy Ana almost died walking in front of a cyclist.

“Shit, Ana!” I shout, tugging her toward me to stop her from falling in the path of an idiot cyclist . . . . All of a sudden she’s in my arms clutching my biceps.

However, it’s his large package that Christian grants the status of his favorite body part. Throughout the book he continually refers to his dick as if it has its own personality. (To be fair, throughout Grey, Christian’s cock does express more opinions than Ana.) E.g., “She looks radiant. My cock agrees and stiffens in greeting.” And, “She will be a joy to train. My cock twitches in agreement.”

While bros can be smart, they are neither intellectual or deep. More proof of Christian’s bro-ness is his complete lack of critical thinking. The whole point of Grey is to gain Christian’s insights. (Why the fuck else would you rewrite your book from his perspective, scene for scene, literally copy-and-pasting entire conversations?) We want to know why he likes Ana, what fuels his desire to be dominant, and why he doesn’t like to be touched. But we get no answers.

Christian clearly doesn’t understand why he likes Ana either, except that she’s pretty. He just keeps repeating things like, “What the hell has gotten into you, Grey?” He also spends a lot of time imagining her naked, and talking about how he wants to put his dick between her lips. It’s literally like being inside the mind of a lobotomized male model. As for his own issues, whenever the occasional memories from his abusive childhood arise, and it feels like we’re going to gain insight into his psyche, Christian immediately dismisses the thought from his mind, not wanting to self-analyze.

Bros are hella mainstream, and therefore have zero tolerance for alt-cultures. In terms of music, Christian can’t stand “indie crap.” Instead, he prefers jogging in sweatpants to the Foo Fighters, or blasting The Boss at home. (“Gotta love Bruce.”) To clear his head of all of his non-thoughts, Christian plays Bach on his piano. This admittedly seems un-bro-y, but when you think about it, if a bro were to get bromotional over some classical music, it makes sense that he would choose the most obvious, mainstream composer of all, Bach.

There are a couple of things that are distinctly un-bro about Christian. Primarily, he doesn’t have a single friend. A fundamental attribute of bros is that they travel in bro-packs and form bromances with their fellows bros, with whom they get brorotic over games of flip cup. Despite being generally homophobic, bros jerk each other off metaphorically 24/7. Christian also has a really forced, thesaurus-y way of talking that’s very un-bro. He loves shoving words like maladroitness and concupiscent into sentences unnecessarily, which a more bro-y bro would never do.

At its core, being a bro is about using self-defined masculinity to overcompensate for some personal inadequacy or insecurity. Whether it’s a short dude who needs a big truck to feel powerful, or a guy who uses misogyny to combat sexual self-doubt, or, in Christian’s case, a guy whose mom had addiction issues and now needs to have a “red room of pain” in order to feel like a man. Ultimately, Christian has a bro, unintellectual understanding of BDSM. (As does E. L. James, clearly.) True power-play relationships are about love, trust, respect, and mutual enjoyment. They are not about the desire to hit unreceptive women. Christian Grey isn’t a “dom,” he’s abusive. (Brobusive, if you will.)

Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.

Hair and Makeup: Ingeborg
On Sciortino: Edith A. Miller polka dot turtleneck, $63; shoplesnouvelles.com

The post Breathless: Is Christian Grey a Bro? appeared first on Vogue.

Last month, I flew from New York to L.A. to attend the bachelorette party of a close childhood friend. I’m at that age when suddenly everyone I know is getting married at once—seemingly with zero regard for my bank account—so I’ve been attending a lot of these festivities lately. In my experience, most bachelorettes follow a similar narrative: They begin with good intentions—dinner at a trendy new restaurant; a hike to the Griffith Observatory; rooftop cocktails with bonding!—but then somehow, inevitably, you end up wasted at 2:00 p.m. on a wine-tasting safari, wearing a shirt that says “The Bride’s Bitches,” shouting obscenities at a giraffe. It’s in these moments that I try to remind myself: at their core, bachelorette parties should be about celebrating your gender equality by objectifying male strippers and drinking Vodka Red Bull through a penis straw. And then I feel better.

Bachelorette parties are a phenomenon that society has come to both detest and embrace with equal enthusiasm. The prevailing aesthetic of the modern bachelorette—princess sashes, genitalia-centric novelty items, fluffy cat ears, etc.—is a look that transcends social boundaries, welcomed by everyone from your high school class president, who still terrorizes your Facebook feed, to millionheiress Nicky Hilton, whose all-out bachelorette party in Miami last month could have easily been mistaken for a Toddlers & Tiaras 30-year reunion. The increasing indulgence of the ritual was perfectly summed up by Amy Schumer in her sketch “Bachelorette Party Disaster,” in which a bachelorette party bus crashes into a bachelorette booze cruise. The result is described as a “rat king situation,” with women “bound together in a wet tangle of hair extensions and feather boas.” Most of the fatalities in this disaster were bystander suicides.

But as bachelorette parties become increasingly debauched, bachelor parties seem to be taking a different course. Of my last three weddings, while the bridal parties terrorized Vegas, Los Angeles, and Provincetown, Massachusetts, the groom’s crews opted for chill camping weekends or hiking trips, and one groom skipped the ritual all together. In April, The New York Times published an article about wholesome, “mostly hangover-free” bachelor party ideas for this year’s wedding season. When did women start beating men at their own gross game?

The bachelorette party is a pretty recent phenomenon. For centuries, men had premarital parties while women just chilled at home, knitting or whatever—typical. According to the history books (read: Wikipedia), the ritual of celebrating the groom’s last night as a single man is believed to have started back in the fifth century B.C., with the ancient Spartans. The practice has obviously evolved over the years, but for at least the last century, bachelor parties have commonly consisted of men drinking a ton, ogling strippers, getting bromotional, and making decisions they later regret. (See: the 1984 Tom Hanks comedy Bachelor Party and The Hangover trilogy). The idea was that men were commemorating the death of their freedom with one final hurrah. Women, on the other hand, weren’t seen to be giving up anything for marriage, because they had no sexual freedom or independence to begin with; women were only gaining something—an owner, yay! So instead of raging, women had bridal showers, where they wore heinous Empire-waist dresses and opened toasters and anti-wrinkle creams in front of their grandmothers, while sipping tea. It was a riot.

Then around the late sixties, amidst the sexual revolution and a diminishing sexual double standard, the bachelorette party was born. Still, it was by no means common; it was more radical. Throughout the seventies, bachelorette parties were something some feminists did as an antithesis of the torturous bridal shower. But the bachelorette as we know it today wasn’t common until the mid-eighties. It was during this time that a new school of pro-sex feminism emerged, led by women like Madonna, which professed that sexual freedom is an essential component of women’s liberation. Women were entering the workforce and appropriating men’s styles of dress, wearing tailored skirt suits with huge shoulder pads, aka “power dressing.” The general idea was that women could be “like men”—could work like men, dress like men, fuck like men, and, essentially, ogle strippers while pounding shots like men. Sexual freedom means that women, too, are free to act like lecherous monsters and make decisions they’ll later regret. It’s only fair.

To get the inside scoop on modern bachelorette trends from an expert, I called up my lifelong friend Ashton, a 28-year-old who works at a Hollywood production company and for the last two years has been living a real-life 27 Dresses. She planned this recent L.A. celebration (complete with strip clubs, drag brunches, etc.), as well as most of the other bachelorette parties I’ve been to. I’m now accustomed to receiving 2,000-word emails from her that include things like, “If anyone Instagrams anything without the bachelorette hashtag I will literally waterboard you, you whores!”

Ashton told me that bachelorette parties aren’t just getting more depraved, they’re also getting far more extravagant, demanding, and expensive. It’s becoming increasingly common to do destination parties, some that last up to a week. Ashton said, “I literally have ten weddings in 2015, five of which involve bachelorettes. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to take any personal time off work until my early thirties because all my vacations for the foreseeable future are for bachelorette parties.” And then there’s the money issue. “One of the parties involves traveling around the islands in Greece, and you really feel guilty if you don’t go, because the bride puts a lot of pressure on you.” Add that to the cost of an engagement present, a wedding present, and traveling to the wedding, and you might as well shoot yourself now.

“I just went to Vegas for a bachelorette,” Ashton recalled. “There were 20 of us onstage at a strip club wearing sashes that said ‘Cheers bitches,’ getting individual lap dances while a stripper sprayed champagne into our faces. That was the funniest part of the weekend to me. We were staying in this huge suite that was decorated in glitter, which is where we’d pregame and play Pin the Dick on the Man. It was a mess. I’m surprised I didn’t come home with a tattoo on my face.”

I asked Ashton if the point of bachelorettes is to get crunk and throw up on yourself. She said, “Um, I don’t know if the point is to throw up on yourself specifically. But I do think what’s the point of having a bachelorette party if you’re not going to go all-out with with a six-foot blow-up dick and penis straws? Without those, it’s just a regular night out with your friends.”

I kind of agree with her. Really, why buy into any mainstream convention unless you’re just going to go for it? Acknowledge that having a bachelorette party is kind of a basic bitch thing to do to begin with and embrace the cheesy stereotypes. And sure, the performance of bachelorette parties are usually partly ironic, and a bit parody, but the reality is, even if you’re wearing a dick on your head at a restaurant “as a joke,” you’re still wearing a dick on your head at a restaurant. People can see you.

Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.

Hair and Makeup: Ingeborg

The post Breathless: Bachelorette Parties Are the New Bachelor Parties appeared first on Vogue.

“How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?” a guy friend of mine recently asked me.

Me: “I don’t know. How many?”

Him: “That’s not funny!”

While I did laugh at the joke, I probably incriminated myself by following up that laugh with an argument about why, in fact, feminists can take a joke. OK?! Of course, my primary defense was the god that is Amy Schumer, whose Emmy-nominated Comedy Central show Inside Amy Schumer and new movie Trainwreck have made her the radical frontrunner of feminist comedy.

Amy is the feminist the world needs right now. With people clamoring for equality in seemingly all arenas, Schumer’s smart, hilarious satire takes aim at issues like equal pay, gender inequality, sexual double standards, reproductive rights, and sexist stereotypes. Basically, the same issues that smart women have been screaming about for ages—except that Amy’s words actually manage to echo beyond the choir.

It was her now-infamous “Last F**kable Day” sketch, in the beginning of Season 3, that really changed the game. Starring Tina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Patricia Arquette, the skit mocks the Hollywood double standard by commemorating Louis-Dreyfus’s last date of sexual viability. It went viral—it now has more than 3.5 million hits on YouTube—and suddenly everyone was watching, men and women both.

Basically, Amy’s made “women’s issues” something that dudes want to tune in for, which is sort of a miracle, considering that most of the guys I know would rather amputate a limb than read Jezebel. Say “rape culture” at a dinner party and legit every dude’s eyes immediately glaze over. But Amy has a sneaky power for tricking men into paying attention by presenting her agenda as hilarious comedy. It’s sort of like when moms hide vegetables inside of meatballs so their kids don’t know what they’re eating.

Amy is 34, grew up in Manhattan and Long Island, and was a stand-up comedian for about nine years before launching her show on Comedy Central. She found success at the height of the female comedy wave, a movement that began with women like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Kristen Wiig, and continued with Melissa McCarthy, Mindy Kaling, Lena Dunham, and Broad City’s Abbi and Ilana. (Let’s all hope Christopher Hitchens, who famously argued that women aren’t funny, is eating crow in his grave.) Her show ops for sketch comedy at a time when our four-minute attention spans prefer entertainment in the short form, and her brand of comedy feels perfectly of-the-moment.

Amy’s not the first political comic, obviously, or the first to point out that women get the short end of the stick. But she has differentiated herself—and perhaps risked her career—by making it her main gag. She’s pushed everything one step further than her predecessors: She’s more political, more self-deprecating, and more unapologetically sexual in a way that young women today really respond to, and need.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always thought there was something inherently feminist about being a slut and not being ashamed about it. The sexual double standard seems to be fading (in liberal, educated circles, anyway), but an unapologetic, sexually hedonistic woman is still taboo. I’ve been ranting for years about how we need more slutty female role models—intelligent, successful, sex-positive women, acting as living proof that having a lot of sex does not mean you’re a bad person, or doomed. And then Amy came along, and I literally praised the slut gods! In her comedy, Amy (and her characters alike) are proudly promiscuous. She doesn’t subscribe to the idea that wearing a micro-dress and being taken seriously are mutually exclusive. In a way, Amy is to millennials what Madonna was to women in the eighties—proof that you can be smart, political, funny, and aggressively sexual, all at the same time.

Which means she gets a lot of criticism, of course, often for her looks. This isn’t surprising, given the Internet’s deep-seeded, misogynous troll culture, full of sad bros for whom successful, confident women inspire infinite amounts of rage. But their barrage of shallow insults has become amazing fodder for Schumer’s comedy, as in the “12 Angry Men” sketch, an episode-long parody of the classic film in which twelve jurors deliberate over whether Amy is hot enough to be on TV. It stars the likes of John Hawkes, Paul Giamatti, and Jeff Goldblum, and it’s a hysterical comment on the absurd hypocrisy by which men evaluate women.

But Amy’s comedy is in no way man-hating. (She’s clearly DTF.) It’s more complex than that. She doesn’t praise all women or villainize men. One of her common schticks is the mockery of the Basic Bitch, a self-obsessed yet insecure white girl with a passion for white wine, selfies, and blacking out. Another major target is the women’s magazines that feed us bizarre “tips” on how to be a man-pleasing sex-bot: “Take a 5-hour Energy and pour it inside your vagina right before you have sex!” Or: “Be Asian!”

She’s also not afraid to take on heavy subjects, as with her sketch slaying Bill Cosby supporters. She’s also managed to make a successful rape joke—not an easy task—many times over, most hilariously in the Friday Night Lights parody, in which a football coach (Josh Charles) implements a “no raping” rule for his players, igniting outrage in town. The baffled players retaliate with a slew of objections, i.e. ,“What if my mom is the D.A. and won’t prosecute. Can I rape?”

Potentially her most hard-hitting sketch, “A Very Realistic Military Game,” addresses sexual abuse in the military. In it, Amy and her boyfriend are about to play an combat video game. Before the “action” begins, Amy’s player, who’s female, gets raped. Amy’s increasingly confused when the game asks her if she wants to report the rape—“Of course!”—after which her character is sent to the Pentagon, where she has to fill out tons of boring paperwork. She ends up under character assassination, and the whole game just becomes red tape and lawyers, which causes her boyfriend to lose interest and leave the room, until the case is ultimately dismissed. The scene ends with Amy shouting a simple but powerful statement: “This game sucks!”

There has been one slight bump in the road for me, though. Last week saw the release of Amy’s first feature film, Trainwreck. The format is a pretty standard rom-com, except the typical gender roles are reversed—Amy plays the emotionally stunted party girl who won’t let her lovers sleep over, hates cuddling, and can’t be tied down, while her love interest (Bill Hader) is the sweet, together, monogamy-minded costar who wants Amy to commit.

There are a lot of great things about the movie—it’s definitely funny, and it starts off following an unapologetic, sexually adventurous girl with an ostensibly good writing job. But in the third act, things get a bit puritanical in a disappointing, confusingly un-Amy way. During a major fight, Amy’s boyfriend tells her: “It does bother me that you smoke pot and drink a lot and sleep with a lot of guys. It doesn’t make me feel safe.” This ultimately leads Amy to admit to her sister that she’s “broken” and doesn’t feel that she deserves love, hence her destructive lifestyle. The lifestyle entails drinking and smoking a lot of weed, but also includes her sexual behavior—her sex life is lumped in with the negative. Then there was this awful montage in which she throws out all the alcohol in her house. (Do people really do that?) Basically, the film reverted to the standard Hollywood “reformed slut narrative.” In the end, Amy simply needs to assimilate and be more like her normal, married sister in order to be happy and lead a fulfilling life.

It’s probably my stalker-grade fanaticism for Amy that makes me want to blame Hollywood for pushing her hand in this more conventional direction. The slut-shaming element just felt like the antithesis of the message of her show. Why couldn’t Trainwreck Amy simply have fallen in love and started a monogamous relationship? No one’s against love and dating! Why did she have to denounce her sexually adventurous past as destructive (and throw out a lot of expensive alcohol)?

But these are small quibbles. What’s truly spectacular about Amy is that her comedy appeals to everyone, which is what modern feminism is truly about—bringing men and women together. It’s like what Emma Watson urged in her inspirational HeForShe speech at the UN: In order to redefine gender roles for both women and men, we have to invite men into the conversation and make gender equality a social issue, rather than a “female issue.” Amy Schumer is doing more to spread the feminist message than anybody has in a long time.

Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.

Hair and Makeup: Ingeborg

The post Breathless: Why Amy Schumer Is an Amazing Feminist appeared first on Vogue.

At a recent dinner party, a guy friend of mine mentioned that he wanted to start a podcast about sex. He’s been hitting Tinder hard, and felt that he and his guy friends had enough hookup stories—ranging from sexy to awkward to horrendous—to sustain a funny and enlightening radio show. However, the immediate response at the table was, “Eww, no. You’re a creep.” The consensus was that two straight dudes can’t have a podcast about sex and dating without the whole thing coming across as a sleazy humblebrag.

Our increasingly liberal society has created a space to talk about sexuality and relationships in an open, honest way. But who’s doing the talking? From Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer, who chronicle their personal sexual experiences with comedic transparency, to more educational authorities like Esther Perel, Helen Fisher, and Cindy Gallop, the voices leading the modern discourse around sex and pleasure are almost unanimously women. The straight male “sexpert” or magazine sex columnist is basically a unicorn. So, why can’t straight men talk about sex?

Well, first there’s the issue of empowerment. Today, for a woman to talk about sex with any frankness is still transgressive, because it goes against the dominant social values—this is obvious in our culture’s problem with slut-shaming, and the continuous uproar over overt displays of female sexuality (Rihanna, Lena, Nicki Minaj, Miley Cyrus, etc.). For men, however, hypersexual behavior is simply the status quo, and so talking about it just feels like an endorsement of an unfair system. It seems like you’re bragging, basically. And in a time when the structures of power and privilege in our society are increasingly being questioned, this just doesn’t fly. For instance: that period when Robin Thicke got really over-share-y about his love life and the world collectively recoiled in disgust.

Beyond just talking about sex, if a straight man tries to assume the position of a sex educator or a sexpert, he’s generally perceived as a creep who’s trying to manipulate women into having sex with him. And it doesn’t help the cause that many of the men who prevail in the dating-advice world are pickup artists. And to be honest, I admit to being suspicious of male gynecologists. (Like, really, this is your true calling?) Even though it’s more socially acceptable for men to be sexual than women, discussing sex on a meta level has become a “woman’s job.”

However, there are some loopholes. For instance, being gay. Dan Savage, by virtue of not being straight, sidesteps the issues of privilege and creepiness, and thus can give out oral sex tips to his heart’s desire. And both gay and straight men can get away with talking about sex as long as it’s objective, i.e., in terms of the science of sex. (Because men are rational and women are emotional, duh!) Alfred Kinsey is the obvious example. More recently, the psychologist Christopher Ryan became widely known for coauthoring the best-selling book Sex at Dawn, which argues that monogamy goes against human nature from an evolutionary standpoint. We also welcome men talking about sex in the abstract, for instance in the world of philosophy—famously, Foucault’s The History of Sexuality; more recently Alain de Botton’s How to Think More About Sex—or in the world of fiction, for instance in the films of Woody Allen, which are largely devoted to the analysis of sex and romantic relationships. But in terms of talking about one’s personal or emotional experiences, that’s just not acceptable. Basically, straight men can’t “get real” about sex.

But this is a problem, because it means that the discussion around sex is very one-sided. For a professional opinion, I called up the legendary Nina Hartley, one of the original feminist porn performers of the eighties, as well as a sex-educator and former nurse whose book Nina Hartley’s Guide to Total Sex has made her a personal hero of mine. She said that a major problem is that in our culture, to analyze one’s feelings and experience is seen as a “girl thing.”

“Men are circumcised at the heart and women at the clit,” Hartley said, only semi-jokingly. “Sex involves feelings, and in our culture men can’t be vulnerable in front of their bros. They can’t talk to their straight male friends about their erection, the strength of their orgasm, or the fact that they’re interested in butt play. Young men don’t have a place to go, and it’s really heartbreaking, because when a person cannot receive love, affection and pleasure, and can’t effectively reciprocate it to their partner, it can lead to a lot of emotional pain and suffering.”

Hartley said it’s going to be difficult for men to find a space in the sexual discourse, because men are working uphill against years of negative press about their sexual practice. “To be brave is to be honest, and it’s going to take a very brave man to talk about his personal sexual life, and to analyze his emotions in the face of all macho backlash, and all the bullshit that’s going to come his way from the antiporn and antisex feminists. It’s very discouraging, because until there’s space for this dialogue to happen without men being hated on, nothing is going to change.”

She also noted that in order for a straight man to talk effectively about sex to women, he “can’t be intimidated by a woman’s sexual experiences, her desires, or her level of skill. You still find the guys out there who get upset about what your number is. Like, where do you think I learned to suck dick so well, dude? Just enjoy the pleasure and stop thinking about where it came from.”

Admittedly, I often find myself believing the double standard: Female sexuality is complicated, whereas men are Neanderthals who could have sex with a hole in the ground. But then you come across a sensitive guy, with complex desires, and you remember that navigating the labyrinth of sexuality is a hellish nightmare—for women and men both. Solidarity! For instance, last summer I was seeing this really sweet 24-year-old guy, and the first few times we got into bed he had trouble getting hard. It was sort of awkward because I could tell there was something he wanted from me that he couldn’t bring himself to articulate. It took multiple dates and extensive interrogation on my part for him to finally say that he wanted to be tied up and hit repeatedly in the face. I was like, “Dude, it would be my pleasure! I wish you’d felt comfortable enough to tell me earlier!”

When I talked to Hartley about this, she told me, “The other side of slut-shaming is man-shaming. We think, ‘Men only want one thing, they’ll fuck anything.’ Women think all we have to do is show up and he’ll get hard, so when he can’t, we say ‘What’s wrong with you?!’ rather than saying, ‘Hey sweetie, are you uncomfortable? Is it too hot? Are you worried about the test tomorrow?’ In reality, many men prefer or require intimate connection with their partner. We forget that the penis is a very reliable emotional barometer.”

I was curious to know the challenges faced by a male sexpert, so I called up Reid Mihalko. Mihalko regularly lectures at colleges about sex, dating and intimacy, has appeared in publications like Details and GQ, as well as on NPR and Oprah’s OWN network. Yet there have been a number of times during his career when he’s been denied positions in favor of a woman, specifically for positions that involve appearing on TV. “People just feel safer when a woman is talking about sex,” he said sympathetically. (While Mihalko acknowledges that he appears to most as a straight white male, and primarily sleeps with women, he occasionally sleeps with men and therefore identifies as bisexual.)

Mihalko told me, “The reason a lot of men come across as being creepy when talking about sex is because there’s never been much motivation for straight men to examine their privilege, and so they end up being sloppy around issues of sexism, rape culture, and privilege, and some men unintentionally veer toward the ‘pickup artist’ community as a way of marketing to a male audience.” Mihalko has avoided these faux pas by being, as he says, a “geek about feminism.” “The advice I give has very little to do with gender, because I’m trying not to reinforce the gender binary and the patriarchal bullshit that wasn’t working to begin with.”

“Most men are still in the paradigm of ‘a real man knows what to do,’ which is essentially the John Wayne school of being a man,” he said. But he believes this is beginning to change, and that in the next ten to fifteen years our culture’s idea of manliness will be focused less on machismo and “mansplaining know-how,” and more on decent human behavior. “Now that gender and sexual orientation are being deconstructed, there is a new, more nuanced way of talking about being a man. The classic models of man and woman are being torn down and we are moving into the era of self-expression, where we can ask: ‘Are you being the “man” that makes you happiest?’”

Basically, when the discussion around sex and pleasure is one-sided, it can lead to the over-simplification of the male sexual experience. (For instance, we allow for bisexuality for women but don’t take it seriously for men.) But this isn’t cool, because stunted communication means worse sex for everyone (except maybe lesbians). Part of our cultural baggage is that women are supposed to be innocent while men are supposed to know everything about sex, but where are they supposed to get this knowledge from if no one’s talking about it openly? We have to stop gendering the emotional experience and start teaching boys that “real men” talk about their feelings too.

Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.

Hair and Makeup: Ingeborg

The post Breathless: Why Can’t Straight Men Talk About Sex? appeared first on Vogue.

When I imagine an affair, a few things come to mind: steamy sex, clandestine hotel rooms, raunchy texts, scandal, the population of France—it’s all very cinematic. But betrayal can be far less impressive than all that. In our increasingly connected world, defining what is and isn’t cheating is getting complicated. Is it cheating to secretly keep Tinder on your phone, just for the thrill of the swipe? What about masturbating to a live-cam girl? Or obsessively crushing on the Instagram of a friend of a friend you’ve never met? Life is full of big questions.

But then, what about simply having a friend you sometimes drink alone with, with whom there’s sexual tension—and you like it. Is that, in and of itself, crossing a line?

You don’t have to fuck someone to cheat. But how does one define an emotional affair when the boundaries are so ambiguous? With sex, the line is clear: Don’t enter anyone else. But in the emotional realm, our behavior is far easier to rationalize, even to ourselves: “Oh, he’s just a friend,” or, “Those five-paragraph emails I spend 45 minutes composing are totally innocent.” Sure. When it comes to feelings, how how far is too far? And can an affair of the heart actually be more damaging than a one-night stand?

In her 2015 TED Talk, “Rethinking Infidelity,” relationship therapist and cheating expert Esther Perel defines an affair in the broadest terms: “It brings together the three key elements: a secretive relationship, which is the core structure of an affair; an emotional connection to one degree or another; and a sexual alchemy. And alchemy is the key word here, because the erotic frisson is such that the kiss that you only imagine giving can be as powerful and as enchanting as hours of actual lovemaking. As Marcel Proust said, it’s our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.”

If you’re unsure if you’re having an emotional affair, here are some red flags: You begin confiding in your crush instead of your partner. You dress up for them. You lie to your partner about the time you spend together. When they text you, you smile so stupidly hard that everyone around is like, “Who just texted you?” You delete their texts and emails. You complain to them about your partner, or you never bring up your partner, essentially pretending they don’t exist. You sit around having teenage-style fantasies about a future together that read like a cheesy montage from The Notebook. Busted!

A friend of mine, who I’ll call Jake, is somewhat of a recovering emotional-affair addict. Jake is a 35-year-old writer and serial monogamist. For the first few years I knew him, Jake had a rotating cast of “muses”—aka boys he’d become infatuated with, who’d begin appearing in his short stories and screenplays, and who had a way of generally become his new “best friend” for a period. Unsurprisingly, this caused issues in Jake’s relationships. When called out by his boyfriends, Jake would say, “It’s for my work,” or, “He’s just a friend”—things that at first Jake also convinced himself were true, when in reality there was incredible romantic tension.

Jake told me, “The big thing is that these ‘crushes’ are actually a fantasy of a relationship, or a fantasy of a connection, rather than a reality, and that’s what makes them so intoxicating. You get to show the best side of yourself and to see the best side of someone else, but you’re essentially just performing for an idea of each other. It’s a safe place to be emotionally, because it doesn’t involve any real commitment, compromise, or hard work. There’s no washing dishes or looking after someone when they’re throwing up.”

Of course, these extracurricular desires could be our subconscious sabotaging us out of fear of total intimacy with our partner. And tellingly, the object of our wandering affection is often arbitrary and irrational. When I look back on the people I’ve obsessed over while in relationships, I literally feel embarrassed for myself. Like, “I know he’s technically homeless and has a slight cocaine addiction, but he’s just so passionate about his slam poetry.” Eww, what was I smoking? And Jake has had the same experience. “When I think about my previous crushes now,” he said, “the idea of being in a relationship with them is like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ It just makes no sense.”

I asked Jake how far was too far. He said he didn’t feel he was crossing a line until “the moment I actively considered acting on my feelings.” Basically, in his mind, everything until the pursuit of sex was fair game. But that’s a lot of leeway. One could argue that as soon as you start focusing your energy and intrigue on a third party, it’s totally disturbing and destructive to the relationship you’re in.

A the same time, fantasies and emotional affairs are not the same thing. Ultra conservatives would say that just masturbating to the idea of another person is cheating. That’s insane. An active sexual imagination is normal and healthy, and, to me, fantasies are natural. Say I masturbate to the thought of Jesse Eisenberg a few times a week for six months (totally hypothetical). How could that be cheating if he doesn’t even know I exist? But then, what if you begin regularly fantasizing about your coworker during sex with your partner? That feels not so cool. I for one hate the thought of my partner doing that.

The truth is we’re hypocrites. We all have a line for ourselves, and a line for our partners, and usually those lines are not the same. As Jake put it, “I know that I love my boyfriend, so my emotional flings don’t feel as wrong. But the idea of my boyfriend doing something similar, or even something not as bad, is so threatening to the point that, well, I don’t even want to conceive of where the line would be.”

In long-term relationships, boredom is a serious issue. Pair that with the fact that we’re a contradictory combination of vain and insecure, and we end up forming these mock relationships to prove to ourselves that someone can still find us interesting, that we haven’t become invisible monogamous blobs, and that people still want to bang us. It’s totally human to need validation. Just don’t be an idiot about it. You know the difference between innocent flirting at a party and staying up all night texting with someone while your partner sleeps next to you. I personally think the former is A-OK. Breathing room is vital, because possessiveness can make people stray in search of freedom, and pulling away from your partner—be it sexually or emotionally—can cause them to become needy or desperate, which can be very unattractive. It’s basic psychology, but these things are hard to transcend.

In a way, this is why I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of open relationships, as a true believer in the age-old maxim that we want what we can’t have. When I have a crush on someone, if I can’t have sex with them, I can obsess and fantasize about them ad infinitum. But generally, the easiest way to cure my infatuation with someone is to fuck them. Sex demystifies people, and chills out our insane imaginations. Of course, sex can be a deeply loving, sacred, and transcendent experience, but it’s usually not. And yet, the number-one way we defend our transgressions is by saying, “But we didn’t have sex,” as if sex is the be-all and end-all of human connection. No sex, no foul? I just don’t buy it. I’ve had sex with multiple people who I legit would not recognize if you put them in front of me right now; I could never forget someone with whom I’ve formed a significant emotional bond.

Usually, an affair is the manifestation of something else going on in your life. You’re bored, or stuff’s not great at work, and so you stop treating your relationship with respect and dignity, because for some reason it feels like the easiest punching bag. To quote Esther Perel, “When we seek the gaze of another, it isn’t always our partner that we are turning away from, but the person that we have ourselves become. And it isn’t so much that we’re looking for another person, as much as we are looking for another self.”

It’s obviously difficult to create hard and fast rules for resolving these types of situations, because the nature of feelings and relationships are varied and subjective. When I asked Jake how he got over his crush addiction, he told me, “You have to be honest with yourself about your  intentions. Part of being in a relationship with someone you love is wanting to protect that person from pain, and that involves self-sacrifice. I believe that everybody should be free, but I also feel that everyone should take responsibility for their actions in order to preserve the happiness of others, particularly the people we love. And that can be based on the assumption that they would do the same thing for you.”

Maybe the answer is to simply to be more egalitarian about where the line is: Don’t cross an emotional boundary that you wouldn’t want your partner to cross. I believe we learned some version of this in the first grade.

Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.

Hair and Makeup: Ingeborg

The post Breathless: Are You Having an Emotional Affair? appeared first on Vogue.

It might surprise you, but for some women, the Ginuwine Pandora station and a quick vape are not enough to get in the mood. Surveys have estimated that about 10 percent of women have something called hypoactive sexual desire disorder. It was with this condition in mind that the Food and Drug Administration yesterday approved Addyi, the first prescription drug to enhance sex drive in women green-lighted by the agency. (Street names: “female Viagra,” “pink Viagra,” “girl boner in a bottle.”)

Created by Sprout Pharmaceuticals, Addyi, known generically as flibanserin, was engineered to treat women whose lack of libido is causing them distress. Sexual pleasure is a critical part of emotional health, the premise seems to be, and if you’re not able to give and receive it, your psychological and physical well-being may be at risk. And given that men have a whole host of available drugs to better their sex lives, it seems about time women got their own magic pill, right?

Interestingly, Addyi is actually the first approved drug to increase libido at all. The drugs aimed at men, Viagra and the like, are intended to help men achieve an erection, not to increase horniness. Also unlike Viagra, Addyi is not a pill one takes an hour before sex to get going, but rather must be taken daily, long term, in order to see results.

The big question is, of course, whether a lack of sexual libido in women is an actual medical condition that needs to be treated. Surely a low sex drive is just as normal and ultimately natural as a high one. (Of course the first sex drug for women is aimed to increase libido. I’m sure many men would like to “fix” this “problem” in their partners.) At the same time, sex is an important component of a healthy relationship, and if you’re not apt to do that, your relationship could suffer tremendously; for these people, the pill may offer hope.

The other big question is whether the drug actually works. Many people are saying it doesn’t, or, at least, that it doesn’t work well enough. Several pharmaceutical giants have reportedly attempted to make and sell such a drug, including Pfizer (which produces Viagra), Bayer, and Procter & Gamble, but they ultimately abandoned their efforts. The FDA previously rejected Addyi itself twice, in 2010 and again in 2013, citing marginal effectiveness and considerable side effects, including nausea, drowsiness, dizziness, and fainting, which can lead to serious injuries.

Following the rejections, campaigns like Even the Score have argued that it’s sexist to have so many drugs for men on the market but none for women. Now that the drug has been approved, critics are saying that the FDA was pressured into green-lighting the drug by a feminist lobby, and that the drug’s negative effects outweigh the potential benefits. Particularly strong opposition is coming from Leonore Tiefer, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine, who told Time: “I am very opposed to the drug and have been since it first went to the FDA in 2010 and it was rejected. Then it was rejected a second time. The drug hasn’t changed, the data hasn’t changed, and my opinion hasn’t changed. I think it’s a disaster. It’s unsafe and it doesn’t work. That is all a drug is supposed to do. Work and be safe.”

In any case, the drug will come with a label warning doctors and patients that combining the pill with alcohol can cause dangerously low blood pressure, and thus fainting. Because the pill must be taken daily, women on the medication would have to be cool with being basically sober. (To whom I would ask: Maybe the reason that you’re never horny is because you’re never drunk?)

The drug will be available starting in October. Which means that, very soon, many women may be making a tough decision: Would you rather be able to drink or be sober and nauseous in exchange for a minimally heightened sex drive?

Having more options for ways to increase desire is a positive thing. But you might try a vibrator before jumping to the meds.

Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.

The post Do Women Really Need the Newly Approved “Female Viagra”? appeared first on Vogue.

Hookup culture: The end of civilization, or the biggest NBD ever? If you’ve read a single article about dating apps lately, you are well primed to believe it’s the former.

According to a recent barrage of news stories, apps like Tinder have turned dating into a dehumanizing form of online shopping, catalyzing some sort of sexual Armageddon and the death of courtship itself. Dark times, apparently. Why are there so many sexual assaults on campus? Look no further than hookup culture. Can’t get a boyfriend? You can blame hookup culture for that, too. Oh, and if you use Tinder, you’re probably going to pick up an STD. Casual sex has become too easy, the consensus seems to be, preventing young people from making meaningful connections and turning us into sex-crazed, diseased sociopaths speeding toward a broken, lonely future. But like . . . says who?

Take the viral piece by Nancy Jo Sales, “Tinder and the Dawn of the Dating Apocalypse,” in the current issue of Vanity Fair. The entire article functions as a doomsday warning against dating apps, which Sales claims offer only romantically impoverished and ultimately damaging interactions. Sales goes so far as to compare dating apps to “a wayward meteor on the now dinosaur-like rituals of courtship.”

Reading the piece, I felt like I had traveled back in time. From start to finish, Sales drills home an outdated Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus view of the sexes. Essentially, men are fuck machines with no feelings, and women are victims who are used for casual sex when all they really want is to settle down with a nice guy. All I could think was: “Really? You want to resuscitate this stereotype?”

To make her case, Sales tells a one-sided, myopic story through interviews she conducted with a selection of highly promiscuous and unsavory 20-something men. One guy has slept with five different women from Tinder—his “Tinderellas”—over the previous eight days, another with “30 to 40 women in the last year.” They can’t remember some of the girls’ names, and they brag about how little money and effort these “dates” cost them. But is this sampling of guys really representative of the majority of young people on Tinder? And is there any actual evidence to say that having a lot of sex through apps is, in fact, “bad”?

For a second opinion, I called up Dr. Zhana Vrangalova, the renowned sex researcher who recently gave the TEDx talk “Is Casual Sex Bad for You?” “Guys like that do exist,” Vrangalova told me. “There’s a trait known as sociosexual orientation, which measures how oriented a person is toward casual sex. So if you have a very unrestricted sociosexuality—meaning you want a lot of casual sex and novelty—then Tinder is perfect for you. Highly unrestricted men do tend to be more manipulative, aggressive, and psychopathic—aka, they’re more often jerks. But that represents a modest minority of the people on Tinder. There are all sorts of people on Tinder, just like there are all sorts of people everywhere.”

Sales, however, doesn’t quote a single guy who’s looking to form a relationship, nor a single woman who’s looking to hook up. There’s no voice for people who have found a boyfriend or girlfriend through the app, of which there are obviously thousands. (The majority of my friends found their partners on Tinder. Jeez, there are Tinder marriages! “From the first swipe right, I knew it was right,” was literally a line from my friend’s vows.) I personally have slept with multiple guys from Tinder who are kind and respectful. But the 20-something women in Sales’s article have no such luck; they all have bad sex and feel manipulated, creating the impression that women are forced into a hookup culture they are not comfortable with and have no control over.

Of course, at the heart of her case is a familiar and unfortunate premise: the idea that, by having sex, men are getting something, whereas women are giving up something. It’s outdated, it’s offensive, and it’s psychologically destructive for women, because it has the power to mislead girls into thinking that having one not-ideal sexual experience means that they have lost a part of themselves. Hello? Pitying and victimizing women doesn’t help them; it just dismisses the importance of female sexual agency.

“In our society, if a guy wants to have sex with a lot of women, he is generally viewed as unethical and a jerk,” Vrangalova said. “If you’re a female who wants sex with a lot of guys, not only are you a slut, but you also have ‘issues.’ You couldn’t possibly just want sex for fun, like guys do, so the desire must be coming from low self-esteem, depression, or because you’re ‘ugly’ and can’t get a boyfriend or whatever. And both of these judgments are problematic.”

There is also a long-held puritanical assumption that having sex with a lot of people is damaging for both sexes, but there’s little data to back this up. According to Vrangalova, there’s nothing wrong with casual sex; it just depends on who you are and how you do it. “Casual sex has many potential benefits—for instance, sexual pleasure; an increased sense of self-confidence, desirability, and freedom; and satisfaction of our biological need for adventure,” Vrangalova said. “Study after study finds that people have more positive reactions after hookups than negative ones. Other studies show that casual sex has little or no impact on longer-term psychological well-being, meaning things like self-esteem, life satisfaction, depression, and anxiety.”

And is it true that a lot of casual sex interferes with one’s ability to form real, loving relationships? “Sex and love are two separate needs, and humans have both of them,” Vrangalova said. “Just because you have sex with a lot of people doesn’t mean that you don’t need love and relationships—people will want that no matter what. However, people may decide to postpone love and relationships in order to have more sex, because we live in a culture that doesn’t leave room for open relationships for the most part. But there is no research suggesting that having a lot of casual sex will somehow impede your ability to have relationships or form intimacy in the future.”

Meanwhile, I’m beginning to feel like one of those crazy conspiracy theorist people, because everywhere I look, I see not-so-subtle messages that I should get married, domesticate, and breed—before it’s too late! In one particularly creepy article in The Washington Post last week, Jon Birger argued that hookup culture is not Tinder’s fault but rather the result of an imbalanced dating pool. In 2012, the article says, 34 percent more women than men graduated from American colleges, and the U.S. Department of Education expects this gap to reach 47 percent by 2023. This is creating a scarcity of “marriageable” educated men, giving men an advantage that then sways the dating game toward casual sex.

Okay, that makes sense. But then Birger goes on to advise women “not to put off getting serious about dating because the math will only get worse over time. Call it the musical chairs problem: Nearly everybody finds a chair in the first round. By the last round, however, there’s a 50 percent chance of not getting one.” He then non-ironically suggests that women move west of the Mississippi River, where there’s a more balanced gender ratio, and literally says, “Go West, Young Woman.” Like we’re a herd of cattle marching desperately in any direction of a man who will fill our uterus.

To me, it seems increasingly clear that what dating apps and our so-called hookup culture have actually ignited is a strong case of moral panic—the sort of reactionary hysteria that greeted the invention of the birth control pill and, more recently, the legalization of gay marriage. If you revisit some of the panicky conservative responses to the sexual revolution in the ’60s, they read strikingly similarly to today’s cautionary tales about hookup culture. In fact, a main argument in support of the Pill was that technology does not determine behavior, and studies have since validated this assertion: Unmarried women were having sex before the Pill; it was just less out in the open. Likewise, people were—shock, horror—having casual sex well before the dawn of Tinder; dating apps have only made it more visible. One recent study even suggests that millennials actually have fewer sexual partners than their parents did.

Even when unfounded, moral panic seems damaging because it reinforces double standards between men and women and distracts us from actual problems. We live in a debt-ridden society in which students graduate from college with $100,000 worth of loans that cripple them for life, but it’s Tinder that’s destroying the youth! Right. Sort of like how gay people caused Hurricane Katrina. Or, it’s not our woefully lacking sex education that’s responsible for a rise in STIs—no, it’s technology. (“Swipe Right for STDs” might be my favorite sensationalist headline of the summer.) And most troubling of all: Hookup culture is now to blame in the high-profile sexual assault case of an elite prep school student, who was recently acquitted of the felony charges he faced. Why tackle campus assault when you can point a finger at Tinder?

As with many taboos, casual sex is mildly tolerated as long as it’s properly tinged with shame and swept under the rug; only when it’s acknowledged in the light of day does it become threatening. But thankfully, Vrangalova thinks this, too, may be changing. “As things like casual sex, as well as BDSM, open relationships, et cetera, become more visible, you’re inevitably going to get people who disagree, who will find doomsday scenarios in liberal social change,” she told me. “Basically, our society is experiencing growing pains when it comes to sex outside of long-term, romantic relationships. But in some ways I think that’s healthy for society because it ignites these necessary conversations.” It’s about time.

Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.

Hair and Makeup: Ingeborg

The post Breathless: In Defense of Hookup Culture appeared first on Vogue.

This past spring, I spent a month in L.A. doing what everyone in L.A. does: “writing a screenplay,” aka drinking coconut kale smoothies and sitting in cars. “It’s so 2015,” said one friend, who’d taken a break from her screenplay to have dinner with me. “This girl I know just fucked a guy she met in an UberPool.” At the time, Uber had just launched UberPool, which allows you to share rides with other passengers who are going in the same direction and split the cost. I was a bit skeptical. “No, it’s a thing,” said my other friend, another screenwriter. “It’s like the new blind date.” Or a bad short film.

It sort of makes sense. There’s something quite romantic about two people sitting in the backseat of a car. In a quick Google search, I found an article that reported that at least one couple got engaged after they UberPooled to the same restaurant in San Francisco. It made me think: Could UberPool, which has dramatically changed the way we all get around, inadvertently become the world’s most LOL dating service?

With this extremely deep thought in mind, I went on a Tinder date a couple of days later with a 24-year-old actor, Ari (fake name), who was in L.A. for a month shooting an indie movie. We met up at Little Dom’s in Los Feliz for martinis, and I casually mentioned the UberPool theory. His jaw dropped. “Oh, my God,” he said. “I fucked someone from an UberPool last week!” Clearly my friend was right: It’s officially a thing.

“It was a Friday evening, and I was on my way to a Coffee Meets Bagel date,” Ari told me. “It was a long ride—I was going from Beverly Hills to downtown—and I needed to practice my British accent for the role I’m playing, so I decided to pretend I was British with the driver.” Ari was chatting away, when suddenly the car took a wrong turn. “I realized I’d accidentally ordered an UberPool,” he said. “I didn’t understand what it was. I thought it was just some new, summery name.” Rookie mistake.

“So we drove into the hills and picked up these two girls in their mid-20s,” he said. “Of course I had to keep the British accent, otherwise the driver would have been like, ‘What the fuck?’ So these girls are all dressed up, and they’re showing me photos of some party where they were feeding a tiger milk from a baby bottle for some reason—who knows. Anyway, we were talking, and eventually one of them was like, ‘Oh, my God, it’s my birthday party tonight. You should come!’ I was sort of hesitant, but after we dropped them off, the driver was like, ‘Whoa, dude, you just got invited to a party by two hot girls.’ It made me think I should go for it. Oh, and also, the driver and I exchanged cards and now we’re Facebook friends.”

The Coffee Meets Bagel date was a dud, so afterward Ari Uber’ed straight to the house party. “It was a huge party in a four-story house in Glendale. A lot of models, a lot of muscles, a lot of girls who have 30K followers on Instagram for seemingly no reason—that type of thing.”

Ari was stuck in the British accent, and by the end of the night, he’d created an entire fake story about growing up in London and being an Eton schoolboy. “I was really hamming it up,” he recalled. “I was saying things like, ‘I’m well-off, but I’m not rich. You can’t knock someone for being privileged.’ I don’t know what the fuck I was talking about.” Toward the end of the night, the non-birthday Uber girl was leading him into a bedroom. And then they made sweet Uber love.

The relationship never went anywhere, given the whole creepy fake identity situation. “She actually hit me up a couple days later, but I couldn’t figure out how to explain that everything I’d told her was a lie without sounding like a Mr. Ripley–psycho-murderer-type character, so I just never saw her again.”

Simply having this story in the bank made Ari the best Tinder date I’d ever been on. I wanted the same bizarre luck, so over the next couple of weeks, I got all dolled up before ordering my UberPools. My first “blind date” was with a group of three über-drunk gay guys on the way to L.A. Pride. The second was with two deeply spray-tanned interns. No one wanted to bang me.

I wanted to know if anyone out there was getting luckier than me, so like the good journalist I am, I tweeted, “Has any1 ever fucked someone they met in an Uber? Lol.” I quickly got a reply from Shonna, a 31-year-old from San Francisco. Technically, Shonna met her hookup in a Lyft Line, which is Lyft’s equivalent service to UberPool. “It was the first day that Lyft Line launched, so I figured I’d try it,” she said. “When the next passenger got in, I was immediately like, ‘Oh, he’s cute.’ We started talking about work, and I suggested we exchange cards. I was being sneaky—I really just wanted his contact info.”

Uber Guy was 25 and getting a Ph.D. at Stanford. Soon after their ride, Shonna emailed him, asking if he wanted to get a drink the next time he was in San Francisco. “He replied saying that he thought it was bold that I’d asked him out. We went on a date a week later.” The two ended up dating for two months, and are still friends.

“I refuse to do online dating,” Shonna said. “I know it’s awesome for some people, but I’m a true personality person—I don’t like assessing someone just from their photos.” This is why, Shonna said, she particularly likes the unique intimacy of the backseat of a car. “It’s like speed-dating,” she laughed. “Obviously that’s not the intention every time you get into a Lyft, but if the person you’re riding with is cute and nice, why not talk to them? It’s very low-pressure and low-risk, because in 15 minutes, you’re going to get out of the car anyway. It’s just another way of meeting people.”

A few days ago, I was in an Uber (non-Pool), and my driver was a particularly enthusiastic and philosophical Nigerian man in his 30s. I decided to ask him if his Pool passengers ever got romantic with each other in his car. “Oh, yes,” he responded matter-of-factly. “Most of my UberPools do that. They hook up themselves.”

He recalled driving a 30-something woman from Harlem to JFK the previous week. On the way, they picked up a guy around the same age, and it turned out they were both on their way to L.A. “They started talking about a lot of things, they exchanged numbers, and they planned to hang out,” he said. “There was no pretense—she was so interested in him. I’m telling you, wherever they are now, I know very well that they are fucking.”

Like Shonna, my driver thinks UberPool is a better way to meet someone than a dating site. “Getting married from an Uber is safer than from eHarmony,” he said sternly, almost preaching. “When you speak to someone for five or 10 minutes, if you are smart, then you’ll know the type of person they are. But two people can write for a year and not know each other. On dating sites there’s no body language. You don’t look in their eyes, you don’t know if they’re telling a lie.”

I asked him if he felt the environment of a cab had unique sexual powers. “I’m telling you, it does. I’m an eyewitness.” he said. He was very passionate. “On most days, you don’t create a situation where two strangers sit in a small space and have a discussion. We are so close together in this city, and yet we don’t connect. But inside an Uber is truly civilization.” And then he gave me his phone number.

Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.

Hair and Makeup: Ingeborg

The post Breathless: Is UberPool the New Tinder? appeared first on Vogue.

For years, during my mid-20s, I slept almost exclusively with skinny hipsters. (Real talk.) It can get a bit formulaic: You meet for an overpriced cocktail at some Brooklyn bar with a faux-1920s interior, where the waiter writes down your order on an old-timey pad; you talk about the freelance work you both inevitably do for Vice and someone brings up David Foster Wallace; you go back to the guy’s loft (being careful not to wake his roommate, the guy who works at the coffee shop you like); you awkwardly climb into his mezzanine bed; you ask him what his tattoos mean; you bang, pass out, and in the morning maybe walk to get a $4.75 cold brew together. Rinse, repeat.

My friends would constantly complain that we needed a new pool of dudes. We’d always joke that we should go to the Financial District for after-work drinks, “to see what it’s like to fuck a banker.” We’re curious women! But we never went. It was too much effort. And anyway, meeting people in bars is always a bit tragic, isn’t it? We were doomed to our social scene. Then came Tinder and the dating-app revolution and the world of sex cracked open.

Last month, after watching Magic Mike XXL (I was on a plane, relax), I became obsessed with the idea of sleeping with a cheesily attractive meathead jock. I tend to date frail Jewish nerds in Warby Parkers who can barely lift their backpacks, so the idea of being with a guy who could throw me around and who had a more complicated skincare routine than me suddenly seemed very exotic. Amazingly, with dating apps, you can actually make this happen. (Maybe I’m late to the game realizing this, but I only recently became single.) Fuck going to Wall Street to prowl for bankers: Tinder is a catalog of every type of person you can imagine. Thus began my search for Mr. (Swipe) Right.

I soon matched on Tinder with a guy I’ll call Matt, a 26-year-old G.I. Joe type whose main photo was of him lifting a dumbbell, shirtless. Our initial message exchange literally went like this. Me: “Hi! What’s up?” Him: “Hey. Just finished CrossFit. Going to get some brunch with the boys, then hitting the gym again. U?” I felt like I was reading the highest form of bro poetry.

Matt is a finance guy who lives on the Upper East Side and does CrossFit eight times a week. We met for coffee and talked almost exclusively about body-mass index, the proper way to do a squat to encourage butt lift (he demonstrated in the café), and “the market.” We barely got any of each other’s references, but it was strangely liberating to be with someone for whom you have no context. I realized I could present myself to him however I wanted. Not that I necessarily wanted to lie, but I definitely shifted some words around to make myself sound more important. “Oh, you know,” I said casually, “I write about social and sexual phenomena and its intersection with pop culture and life in general.” LOL. He seemed impressed. (When I meet a guy through friends, he generally says something like, “Oh, you’re the girl who wrote that blow-job article, right?”)

Turns out Matt is sober, which I was admittedly wary of. I just hate any social situation where someone is highlighting their moral superiority. Like, I get it, you remember what happens at parties, congratulations. But Matt could bench 360, which is something I suddenly cared about. And honestly, it was kind of cool to sleep with someone who I could objectify for once. It was a nice role reversal. And Amy Schumer’s right about buff guys—it’s like fucking an ice sculpture.

On our second date, I got clever. We went out for yet more coffee, but beforehand, I hid a tiny bottle of vodka in my bathroom garbage. Then, when I invited him over, I repeatedly pretended to pee, and instead drank vodka by myself while hiding in the shower. For some reason this didn’t feel tragic at the time, but reflecting on it afterward (and again now, ugh) made me a bit scared of myself. I realized that being with a sober person makes me feel like an alcoholic, and I’m not ready for that level of self-reflection. But meeting Matt made me realize that, with apps, dating can be like anthropology-lite. Curious what it’s like to be with a yoga person? Now you can find him though your phone, from the comfort of your bed. If you want, you can steal a new life, just for a night.

Some people like the idea of dating someone in their social scene because it’s a way of vetting them. (The dating app Hinge, which connects you to people you have mutual friends with, plays on this preference.) In a way, your date’s actions are accounted for. For instance, a person is less likely to be cruel to someone on a date if there’s going to be social repercussions for that behavior within their shared friend group. But this social monitoring can also be restrictive, especially for women, in a culture where female sexuality is already policed.

Say I lived in a small city and could meet people only through friends and work. Well, people talk, so if you’re dating within a network, people tend to know your business. Depending on how open-minded your social scene is, sleeping around even just a little bit could give you a bad reputation or discourage you from having casual sex altogether. But dating outside of your network gives you anonymity, which increases your autonomy.

Another amazing thing about dating apps is that not only can you bang a total random, but if you’re in a foreign city, that random can also become your default tour guide. For instance, last week I was in Paris, making the incredibly difficult decision of whether to stay in and read or go out until 4:00 a.m. (I’ve yet to find a middle ground.) I ended up choosing the latter, after I “crushed” with a guy on Happn (an app that connects you with potential matches whom you’ve recently crossed paths with). Happn guy—let’s call him Pierre (why not?)—was 25, studying law at the Sorbonne, and one of his profile photos was of him playing golf in khakis and a sweater-vest. You get the idea.

Pierre liked the fact that I was American because it meant he got to seem impressive by talking about Parisian architecture as he walked me around the city at night. He showed me the Medici Fountain, Luxembourg Palace, the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which is the oldest church in Paris. (I’ve spent months in Paris before, but I’ve only been to the wrong places, or so said Pierre.) Dare I say, the evening felt genuinely romantic.

Eventually we went back to his house and had sex on his terrace. It was good, although he was being a bit weird about me touching myself during sex. “Girls don’t do that in France,” he said. “I’m sure they do,” I said. “I would know—the French invented sex,” he insisted. To which I replied, “Okay, but we improved it. Just like French food. Have you had steak frites in New York?” This made him a bit angry, which made the sex better. In the morning he served me tea out a cereal bowl, which maybe was try-hard avant-garde, but I bought it. He held my hand and made out with me in the street before putting me in an Uber. “Guys don’t do that in America,” I said. He liked that.

After Paris I became slightly obsessed with the app situation. I had Tinder, Happn, Raya, 3nder, and Bumble on my phone and was switching between checking all of them. Eventually I started talking with a 41-year-old Irish guy who works at an NGO. We had zero mutual friends on Facebook. He was relaxing in New York for a couple of days after the recent U.N. Summit. God, he was hot. The sort of guy who looks like he could get into a bar fight but would also give you very sensual head—a powerful combination. Over drinks, he told me that he works as a peace negotiator in the South Pacific, dealing with tribal warfare and gender-based violence. I said that complicated sentence again—the one that makes me sound important.

We got drunk and I told him that I thought his accent was sexy too many times. He didn’t know who Justin Bieber was, which blew my mind. We went back to my apartment. It’s cool how with older guys you feel younger and with younger guys you feel older. Afterward I expected him to leave, but he didn’t, and I ended up bringing him to a party at my friend’s place—a guy whose parents left him an apartment in Soho, which makes us all love and resent him. We stayed out until 4:00 a.m. In the morning he told me that he’d message me the next time he visited New York, which he had no plans of doing anytime in the near future.

When I was a teenager, the Internet truly felt like a tool for meeting people outside of my world, through forums and chat rooms. In the post-Facebook age, our online interactions are almost exclusively with people we have “mutual friends” with. Social media lets us know exactly how and to what extent we are connected to everyone, and online dating websites further encourage this behavior, with algorithms rating our “compatibility” based on location and similar traits and interests.

Dating apps are different—more random. They connect you with anybody and everybody, and sometimes they feel like the only escape from our increasingly self-referential social circles. Forcing ourselves out of the pattern of our lives can be a really good thing. Okay, so maybe you won’t marry the zany South African orthodontist who can’t name a single Beyoncé song, but not meeting up with him simply because he isn’t The One seems like a missed opportunity for . . . something.

Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.

Hair and Makeup: Ingeborg

The post Breathless: How to Tinder Your Way Out of Your Social Scene appeared first on Vogue.

I woke up on the morning of my 30th birthday naked and alone in an unfamiliar hotel room, with a dead phone, covered in peanuts. As I crawled around the room, desperately searching for a phone charger, I attempted to piece together memories of the previous evening. All I could think was: This is 30? I realize that 30 isn’t “old.” Still, each milestone age is inevitably approached with some anxiety, because it forces us to assess our lives and our achievements and our bodies and our relationships, and basically to compare our worth as a human being to that of all of our peers. And that’s annoying.

But back to the day itself. On my birthday eve, I had dinner plans with a 36-year-old lawyer from D.C. About a year ago, the lawyer met a close friend of mine on OkCupid, and the two had a really fun night out. But at some point during the date, my friend decided that if she couldn’t imagine sleeping with this hot, sweet, successful guy, she had to finally admit to herself that she really was a lesbian. Instead of scheduling a second date with him, she just gave him my number. “If you like me, then you’ll like my friend,” she said, “because she’s basically me but blonde and half-straight.”

A couple weeks later, the lawyer and I met for drinks in Soho—my first and only blind date—and really hit it off. Since then, we’ve met up whenever he has come to town on business, and when my relationship was in one of its “open” phases. (My ex and I opened and closed our relationship more often than I changed my sheets, which says something about our romantic turbulence, as well as my personal hygiene.) I suppose it’s a bit of a red flag that he has always refused to tell me his last name, but he’s hot and seems harmless enough (he does ballet as a hobby), so I’ve just stopped asking questions. A few hours before the last dinner of my 20s, I got a text from him: “Hey so I reeeally want you to meet my friends. They’re a married couple who swing! I think you’d get along. Mind if they crash dinner?” Followed by a salsa-dancer emoji. I said “Fine,” and the martini emoji, and headed to meet them for dinner at Narcissa, at the Standard East Village, where the lawyer always stays.

The couple were in their mid-30s, he an all-American sensitive jock type who looks like a young Christopher Reeve, she a cute, dimpled blonde with a full sleeve of tattoos. They both work in finance. They’ve been together for more than 10 years, open for six. They want to be together for the long haul, they said, and after reading Sex at Dawn, they came to think that having one partner for life just wasn’t realistic. (In the ’90s, people read the Atkins diet book and shunned carbs. Today, people read Sex at Dawn and shun monogamy.) The lawyer kept rubbing the back of my neck affectionately, as if we were actually dating. He ordered another bottle. Now, maybe I was being naive—or plain dumb?—because I hadn’t picked up on any vibes about the evening from the lawyer’s texts. But once I was two drinks deep, it suddenly became very clear that we were on a date with this other couple, and that the three of them had been plotting this for some time. I started nervously chugging my prosecco.

“Turning 30 isn’t a big deal,” the swinger wife said. “Turning 29 is the big deal, because you spend the entire year anxiously counting down the days until you’re 30. You turn into a maniac. But once you’re finally 30 you can just chill out and move on with your life. You start to care about things less—it’s so freeing, not to care.” She’s right, honestly. The past year—and specifically the past few months—have seen some sharp and somewhat bizarre shifts in my personality. A couple months ago, I abruptly decided that I no longer wanted to dress like a senator’s wife and developed a sudden passion for sportswear, and began creepily lurking around city basketball courts in an Adidas sweatsuit, smiling at sweaty 20-year-olds. I once opened my mailbox to find a pair of pink velour sweatpants that said YOLO across the butt that I had no recollection of buying. I started wearing glittery eyeshadow. I set my Tinder age range to 22–26 and starting going on a lot of mediocre first dates that involved talking about people’s internships. I impulsively bought a shirt with a giant marijuana leaf on it even though I don’t smoke weed. I remember, when I turned 26, I threw out all my $12 Rainbow skankwear and started buying Escada power suits because I wanted to be taken seriously. Now, apparently, I want to look like a teen mom from the British projects.

“Is this a group date?” I asked the lawyer after following him to the bathroom. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” he said. I smiled. “Yes, I’ve heard of consent, thank you.” “We live a double life,” the swinger husband said. “We have our swinger friends, and then our regular friends. They’re not necessarily close-minded, but if they knew what we were really like . . . well, it wouldn’t go over well.” He was painful-handsome in a very obvious way—like, you can imagine that in the wrong outfit he’d just look cheesy. But he was not in the wrong outfit. “Years ago, when we started swinging, we’d meet people on Craigslist,” said the wife. “Usually people wouldn’t send photos with their face, so we’d be going in blind. We met a lot of creeps. Like this one guy who showed up alone and wouldn’t stop talking about his bowel movements.” Now they meet people through apps and life’s way easier.

After dinner we went up to the lawyer’s hotel room. I’d never done the two-couples thing before. I’ve had threesomes (which I like) and been to sex parties (which I can live without), but this was new. It really turned me on that these two good-looking men were confident and open enough for a foursome. I mean, all guys want a threesome with another girl. It’s like a default question these days: Just after “Where did you grow up?” comes “Would one of your hot friends like to come over?” But most can’t handle the idea of sex with another dick in the room. They’re too afraid they’ll like it.

I had imagined a tangle of bodies, but what ended up happening was a straight-up swap. It felt very ’70s. That went on for about half an hour, with the husband and wife occasionally pausing to kiss each other and then going back to whatever it was they were doing. After that my memory is pretty hazy. I’ve yet to reach the point where I know when I’ve had enough to drink. Maybe that happens at 40?

In the morning, I showered off the peanut dust and shame-walked down to the lobby to charge my phone behind the front desk. I had an email from the couple’s joint Gmail account: “It was a pleasure fucking you into your 30s. Hope to see you again sometime!” And a text from the lawyer: “I had an early meeting. Do you remember spilling the gross mini-bar nuts all over the bed?”

I got home, hungover and happy, and threw out my Adidas sweatsuit. I couldn’t decide whether I should invite Sam, the software engineer who I met on Tinder who I actually like-like, out for after-dinner drinks. He’s a multilingual bisexual—the best type of guy. He seems to like-like me, too, but that may be because he just moved to New York a few months ago and therefore is not yet jaded slash doesn’t have any other friends to hang out with. New transplants are the best lovers, because they haven’t yet assessed their worth. “We’ve only been dating for eight days. Is it too much to ask him out for my birthday drinks?” I asked this of my friend Kaitlin over Bloody Marys. She looked at me like I should already know the answer to that question. “Absolutely do not invite him,” she said. “It’s more chic to look like you don’t care.” “But I’m 30 now, so I just generally care less. Which actually allows me to care more, because I care less about caring.” She looked at me like I was an idiot. “You wouldn’t understand,” I said. “You’re only 25.”

“At 25, you care,” I explained. At 25, you don’t get invited to the good parties, you wear the wrong clothes, and you sleep with guys who you think are successful but in hindsight were actually hangers-on, and when they don’t text you back, you care. At 25, you can’t afford a good colorist so you dye your own hair from a $9 L’Oréal box and in the wrong light your blonde looks green. You’re insecure, you fake orgasms, and your Craigslist roommate’s coke parties keep you up all night. People don’t take you seriously, and you hate that you care, but you do. Sure, my boobs were a bit perkier at 25, but they didn’t even look that great because I bought the wrong bra. “Around 30,” I went on, “your life starts to naturally sort itself out. You have this surprising newfound confidence—it’s like it just sneaked up on you in the middle of the night. You stop caring about the little, insignificant things. It’s so freeing, not to care.” But she wasn’t listening to me.

Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.

Hair and Makeup: Ingeborg

The post Breathless: I Rang In My 30s With a Foursome appeared first on Vogue.

I recently dated a guy named Dan, a graphic designer. It was love at first swipe. He was perfect: 6-foot-2 and 125 pounds, like an overgrown dandelion, aka my ideal male body type. I thought about him day and night. I checked my phone 30 times an hour. I spent $300 that I didn’t have at Agent Provocateur. We had so much sex, I could barely walk; my stomach was so full of butterflies, I couldn’t eat. I lost 3 pounds! He put his arm around me in a bodega, and suddenly all the sappy poetry and romantic literature I’d ever read no longer seemed embarrassing.

Then, 10 days into our affair, I woke up and noticed a stack of DVDs on his Ikea TV console: Scarface, Rush Hour, et cetera. And then . . . wait, eww. How had I never noticed those old sheets tacked to his windows as makeshift curtains? And the fact that he owned no books? I looked at Dan and felt an overwhelming nausea. Not only did I never want to see him again, but I suddenly couldn’t remember why I’d ever liked him to begin with.

Over the course of my dating life, this has been the pattern of most of my “relationships.” I meet someone, fuck them, and then become instantly obsessed. I want to be with them all the time. One day I’m dreaming about marrying them; the next, I’m fantasizing about a place to bury them.

The creepy thing is, my sudden, inexplicable disgust always comes out of nowhere. It’s not triggered by something significant, like cheating or finding out the person is pro-life or whatever. Rather, it’s something totally inconsequential—the way they cuff their jeans, a random sneeze, their weirdly shaped earlobe. And in most cases, the disgust is irrevocable. You notice the clicking sound he makes when he bites his nails and you will never be able to un-notice it.

Last week, I was complaining about this phenomenon to my friend Mel over vegan brunch in L.A., two tables down from Miranda July. “I keep having these flashbacks—the DVDs, the beige console. I think I might have PTSD,” I whined, slurping my “I am worthy” beet-and-ginger elixir. “I think there’s something wrong with me. I don’t trust my romantic instincts anymore. Not only do I fuck losers, but I’m the type of person who fucks losers and doesn’t even realize it. Shouldn’t you be able to tell someone sucks before they’ve been inside you?”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re being melodramatic,” she said. “Everyone has that. It’s called Sudden Repulsion Syndrome. SRS. Hello.” A quick Google search proved that she was right: SRS is “a thing.”

I was in L.A. with an old editor of mine I’ll call Malcolm, whom I’ve been on-and-off in love with for five years. Malcolm doesn’t sleep with me anymore, but I continue to follow him around, recording all of his casually nihilistic musings with my phone, until he gets fed up and tells me to go away. He promised that if I decide I want a baby in five years, he’ll impregnate me. “Why not?” he shrugged. “I have interesting genes.”

Malcolm advised me, “The way to avoid SRS is to approach dating in a balanced way.” He elaborated, “My therapist told me it’s like this: You meet someone who you like, but you don’t fuck them right away. You wait three days to call them, and you make plans for the following week. Again, you don’t fuck them, and then you make plans for a week after that. And then a month down the line, you can finally have sex. This way you don’t burn out.”

“Have you ever done that?” I asked.

“Oh, God, no,” he said. “When I was young, I would meet a girl, fuck her immediately, and then move into her house within a week. I think that for some people—certainly for myself—sex is like a drug. All you want to do is get higher and higher and crazier and crazier. It just feels so good to be in it, to be completely intoxicated by another human being, that I’m inclined to just push it and push it until it explodes.” A man after my own reckless heart.

This past weekend, at dinner in the East Village, I brought up this groundbreaking idea to my friends: Could it actually benefit us to wait to have sex, rather than being DTF in the bar bathroom after like two drinks?

“I didn’t sleep with my husband on our first date,” said Sarah Nicole, who’s my age. She and her husband are both seriously good-looking, serious journalists who write for serious magazines. “Actually, I think it was the fifth date that we finally did it.” A quiet yet definite gasp could be heard around the table. I assumed she was lying. “It’s true,” she said. “As soon as I met him I knew I wanted to marry him, so I didn’t sleep with him.”

“The hottest waitress at Café Henri told me that she’s seeing five guys and only sleeping with one of them,” said Kaitlin, who’s 25 and still in that phase where she’s playing side-bitch to men in their late 40s who she thinks are famous. “Are women not having sex anymore?”

“Women withhold sex with someone they view as a catch,” offered Avi. Avi’s 33, grew up on the Upper East Side, and recently took over his family’s textile empire. His idea of fun is switching the occupation on his Happn profile from “banker at Goldman Sachs” to “artist” and seeing which gets him more girls. “But men withhold sex, too,” he went on. “Drawing it out makes it more interesting. You tug at the heartstrings. You shouldn’t even kiss on a first date, especially if the date is going well. You just kiss goodbye on the cheek and lightly touch their neck, and then you make vague plans to hang out again but don’t nail anything down.”

“Isn’t that just manipulation?” I asked.

“Seduction is manipulation. And besides, it’s not healthy to overdose on people,” Avi scolded. “It affects other parts of your life—you work less, you stop seeing your friends—and there’s a limited amount of time that you can realistically carry on like that. If you don’t sleep with someone right away, you become less instantly obsessed. You get your emotions under control.”

Okay, that made sense to me . . . in theory. But the goal here isn’t necessarily to form controlled relationships. I just want to stop making copies of my apartment keys for artists with inner-lip tattoos who have never made any art.

Later, I met L., my hot British neuroscientist friend, for coffee uptown. I love hanging out with her because she explains my feelings to me. She was sitting in the courtyard outside her lab in big Monica Vitti shades. “Infatuation is a form of temporary insanity,” she said. I thought this sounded so sexy. “It’s like being on ecstasy. And when you land from that, it can feel like a comedown.”

L. explained that when you’re falling hard for someone, there’s a depletion of serotonin levels in your brain, which is also found in people with OCD. So basically, being in the early stages of romantic love is similar to having obsessive compulsive disorder. And people with OCD are more prone to feelings of disgust, she explained. “It’s like Elie Wiesel said: ‘The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference.’ And we know that thwarted love can turn to hate very quickly. So you might think of obsession and disgust as just another version of love and hate.” She sipped her Diet Coke seriously. “It’s just a fetishization of an object, and the object happens to be the latest person you’re banging.”

When we have a crush on someone, in other words, we’re essentially writing fiction. We’re projecting an irrational image of perfection onto them, until the reality-check moment when you finally realize what a person is actually like. And allow me to step down from my pedestal: It’s entirely possible that the last guy who didn’t call me back might have woken up and realized that I use my stove as a second closet. (But actually, so did Carrie Bradshaw, so fuck that guy.)

So what’s the alternative to SRS? Withholding sex? Making responsible decisions? Forming a sterile relationship with a nice person whom you go plant shopping with on the weekends? Well, that just seems boring. I don’t think I could trust a relationship with someone whom I wasn’t instantly obsessed with. I’m too romantic for a slow burn. Because sometimes, infatuation does segue into real love. It has for me. And I’d rather crash and burn 20 times trying to make that happen rather than pride myself on being controlled. In the end, we almost all end up in the same place anyway. Only some of us have better stories.

Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.

Hair and Makeup: Ingeborg

The post Breathless: There’s a Name for My Problem and It’s Called Sudden Repulsion Syndrome appeared first on Vogue.

Having Feelings, Part 1

Last month I was in Los Angeles, on a self-imposed writing retreat, aka Tindering. I matched with Josh, a gangly 36-year-old with protruding ears and a body like a line drawing. It’s L.A., so Josh is an actor. We met for drinks in Los Feliz, and he talked very enthusiastically about a “lesbian feminist haunted house” he’d been to (twice), which I took as a good sign. I told him that I was in L.A. making a documentary about Tinder, but that I promised our date wasn’t research. He told me that he was acting in a Web series about Tinder directed by one of the actors from Girls, but that he promised our date wasn’t research. It all made total sense.

We went back to his apartment and watched a clip of his Web series in which he’s fucking a girl from Tinder in his bed—the same bed we were lying in. It was all very meta. In the show, after sex, he instantly starts to find his date intolerable and wants her to go home. In the show, it’s funny.

We had sex, and it was really great. I was feeling really happy about the whole evening, and in my post orgasm bliss, I started to nod off. I felt a tap on my shoulder. “Umm,” he said, “Were you planning on sleeping here? Because I find it hard to sleep with other people in my bed.”

“Are you kicking me out?” I asked. It was almost 3 a.m.

“No, you should do what you want,” he said, trying to be polite, though it was transparently clear that he wanted me to leave. “It just will be hard for me to sleep if you decide to stay.”

I couldn’t help but feel sort of hurt, but then I immediately felt like a girly loser for having feelings, so I just quickly masked my sadness with defensiveness. “You know,” I said, my voice rising to a defensive register. “I think I’ll stay, because I don’t have any issues sleeping.” I then rolled over and anxiously pretended to pass out.

A few nights later, over steak at Cafe Stella, I whined about this to my friends. “Am I being too sensitive?” I asked. “Maybe he really does have sleep issues. He asked me out again. If I go, should I bring up the sleepover thing, or is that weird?”

“Don’t bring it up,” said Casey Jane, an artist who wears black lipstick and speaks in a dry monotone. “It’s better to seem unaffected. Besides, you met him on Tinder.”

“It’s not a Tinder thing, it’s a human being thing,” said Alexi, sipping her third vodka soda. Alexi writes the blog ImBoyCrazy, hosts a dating advice radio show, and is kind of like me—meaning, she has great advice for everyone—except herself. “I don’t like sleepovers with someone I don’t really know either, but now I always let guys sleep over at my house. If I was willing to have sex with someone, then I should be able—or at least try—to handle the intimacy of sleeping next to them. I used to kick guys out, because for years I assumed that men don’t have feelings, but apparently that’s not actually true.”

“Maybe the rule should be this,” I suggested. “The guest can decide to go home, but if the guest wants to stay, then the person whose house it is shouldn’t kick them out. Right?”

We decided to ask our hot waiter for his opinion. “It’s not cool to straight up ask a person to leave right after sex,” the hot waiter said, confidently. “But if you want them to go, you basically just keep saying, ‘God, I have so much to do tomorrow’ over and over, and usually they get the hint and decide to leave themselves.”

“See, I’m old school,” Alexi sighed wistfully. “I prefer the guy to pretend he wants me to sleep over, so then I can be the defensive one that’s like, ‘No, I’ll just leave.’ And then the guy should offer to pay for the Uber.”

Having Feelings, Part 2

Gabe is a successful screenwriter in his mid-40s. We’ve slept together maybe 12 times over the past two years. It’s very casual—we’ve never once had a sleepover, actually—and it’s never felt like it was going to evolve into something serious. But we’ve also become somewhat friendly outside of hooking up. (We sometimes give each other writing notes, for instance.) A couple months ago, Gabe and I were drinking martinis at Soho House, feeling very cool and entitled and spontaneous, when we suddenly decided that we should have a threesome.

I texted Kaitlin, a generally DTF writer who’s one of my closest friends. “You’re her type,” I said. “What’s her type?” he said with a smile, raising a cocky eyebrow. “Oh, you know, quasi-famous perennial bachelors who are always searching for the one despite their unrealistic expectations.” He frowned and gulped his cocktail.

Back at his West Village apartment, he put on some embarrassing earthy instrumental music and opened a bottle of wine. Kaitlin showed up drunk, and we all started making out on the couch. Slowly, we moved into his bedroom. As it happened, they were more into the whole situation than me, and I sort of fell into the role of spectator.

“Isn’t it hot watching us?” he asked. I said yes with mediocre enthusiasm, then got up and went to the kitchen for more wine. There I got distracted, nosing through his kitchen cabinets—quinoa and chia seeds, to match the music. By the time I came back, they were done. I didn’t make any efforts to get things going again, and neither did they. I wasn’t very bothered by it, honestly—on a scale of 1 to 10, my annoyance was maybe like a 4—so I just brushed it off. Fifteen or so minutes later, Kaitlin and I left, walked to Raoul’s, and talked for an hour about a friend who’s getting divorced.

Over the next couple months, I never heard from Gabe, but didn’t think anything of it. Kaitlin and I talk on a daily basis, however, so I was a bit thrown when, last week, I got this text from her: “I’m on my way to a date with Gabe. Just wanted to check that was okay?” Apparently, after our hang, he found her on Facebook, and one thing had led to another. I had a sharp pain in my stomach. My first thought was: Is it possible to actually throw up your ego? I immediately texted Gabe: “You’re fucking Kaitlin?” He replied quickly with a blushing-face emoji, and then, “Haha, yeah wanna come?” To which I replied: “Kill yourself.”

Now, I’m the first to admit that I have a short fuse and a bad temper. I’ve been known to have “episodes.” But I’ve been trying to chill on the anger front, so I called up my most rational friend, a late-40s restaurateur who never has any relationship problems because he never has any relationships.

“It’s just bad threesome etiquette!” I snapped. “It’s shady. If you care about someone at all, you don’t fuck their best friend. And now I can’t sleep with him anymore, out of principle. Just because a relationship is casual means that no one’s supposed to have any feelings? Sluts have feelings too, okay!”

He let out an exasperated sigh: “How can you be mad that your best friend fucked your fuck buddy when you literally facilitated your best friend fucking your fuck buddy?” He wasn’t saying what I wanted to hear. “You’re applying traditional rules to untraditional behavior. I don’t think you have the right to be angry about a threesome ending poorly. We’re humans. People naturally pair up.”

“That’s not true about threesomes,” I said, spitefully. “And you sound old.”

“I am old.” He hung up.

I was confused: Was I “allowed” to be hurt by this? Did I actually care, or did I just feel rejected and need to get my ego in check? I tried to rationalize: It’s unattractive to be possessive; you’re not in love with this guy; you ultimately want Kaitlin to be happy. So I texted her, and told her that it was fine—I didn’t care.

A few nights later, I had dinner with Kaitlin, thinking I was fine. A couple martinis taught me that I wasn’t. As soon as Gabe’s name was mentioned, all the feelings I was pretending not to have erupted into a full-on “episode.” I’ll spare myself the embarrassment of reliving the entire thing, but let’s just say that I shouted, “Fuck you! I never signed up to be your pimp!” over the table at a packed Narcissa.

I woke up the next morning feeling like the world was an unfair place and that I was its victim. I decided to really indulge in my self-pity and started scrolling through the Instagrams of various supermodels. Then the doorbell rang. It was a delivery of a dozen white roses from Kaitlin, with a note that said, simply, “I’m sorry.”

This made me feel worse, because I was probably the one who should have been apologizing. I got back into bed and looked for an angry text from a different friend, whom I’ll call “Allison.” A few months earlier, I’d had a one-night stand with Allison’s ex-girlfriend. I didn’t think it was a big deal—they’d only dated for a few months. (“Eww, why does she care?” I thought.) Now I saw the irony. Now I realized that, in trying to make ourselves into über-casual, sociopathic robots, it’s easy to forget that our actions might actually affect another person. I took the roses from Kaitlin, wrote my own apology card, and had them sent to Allison.

Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.

Hair and Makeup: Ingeborg

The post Breathless: Is Having Feelings Embarrassing? appeared first on Vogue.

It was 8:00 p.m. on a Friday and Sarah was staring at an open book but not reading it, too busy glaring at her phone out of the corner of her eye. Sarah had dinner plans with Ed. They’d met on Tinder a month earlier and had gone on three great dates—always drinks or dinner in their shared neighborhood in Brooklyn, and then back to her apartment for sex. They’d made plans over text on Wednesday to have dinner on Friday, but hadn’t discussed a specific time or place.

She considered texting him multiple times throughout the day, but didn’t. “I wanted him to text first because I had initiated the past few times we spoke,” Sarah said. At 6:00 p.m., she started getting antsy. “I didn’t really care, because I knew we had plans. I wasn’t freaked out. I was doing my own stuff. Like, I have a life. My dog had a yeast infection. I was very busy.” At 7:00 p.m. came the mild panic. “I was like, ‘Do I get in the shower? Do I not get in the shower? What is the point of anything?’ But eventually I convinced myself that I was probably due for a shower anyway, so I got in.” At 7:30 p.m. she was in a towel, and still no text. “It was a nightmare. I was like, ‘Do I put on the light moisturizer that I use before I apply makeup, or do I put on my night cream and sweatpants?’ I’m in crisis mode here! My skin feels tight and I don’t know what to do!”

Eventually, she gave in and texted him: “Are we still on for tonight?” He never responded—not only that night, but ever again. She hoped it was because he had died. Unfortunately, the next morning, he Instagrammed a photo of himself at brunch.

Ghosting (noun): a modern dating dilemma in which one person suddenly ceases contact with another, with no explanation of why. Scarily, it can happen at any stage in a relationship: after a single date; on the evening before a romantic weekend upstate; even years into a relationship, according to some horror stories I’ve heard. And as many of us know firsthand, it’s psychological torture, because when someone straight-up ghosts you, you’re left to come up with a zillion explanations on your own, from your hideously overgrown roots to your choice of restaurant to that stupid thing you said on the subway about how Rand Paul is, like, sort of hot, right? Before the spiral of self-loathing comes a period of denial—we assume that our lover is just in the shower or at a movie or in a sensory deprivation tank or in a coma. And then we get real and remember that it’s 2015, and it’s more likely they have been abducted by aliens than they haven’t looked at their phone in two hours.

While ghosting can sometimes feel like a 21st-century problem, the dating disappearing act wasn’t invented with the iPhone. The pilot episode of Sex and the City begins with an English journalist being ghosted by an investment banker after a dreamy two weeks of dating in New York. She thinks he’s going to propose, and then he just never calls her again. In the show, Carrie deems this a Manhattan problem. Today, we blame it on dating apps. (You know, that same moralistic argument about how Tinder and “hookup culture” have made people disposable and killed romance. I’m so bored of hearing that.) But while technology didn’t beget ghosting, it may have made it easier. For instance, it’s easier to ghost someone you met online and have no social crossover with, rather than someone you met through a friend whom you could easily run into at next week’s party. With anonymity comes great freedom—and the risk that someone you slept with didn’t even save your number.

Last week, over drinks on the roof of the Ace Hotel in L.A., I discussed the politics of ghosting with Josh, an actor I met on Tinder, and Alexi, a friend who writes about relationships, both in their 30s. “Ghosting is a dick move, but people do it so often,” said Alexi, who’s very in touch with her emotions. “The last time someone ghosted me, my ego was really bruised—I took it so personally. It’s shitty behavior, but because basically everyone’s had it happen to them, we feel justified in doing it to other people, even though we remember how hurtful it was. It’s become culturally okay.”

“What’s amazing is that sometimes ghosting doesn’t even work,” I said. “A guy once continued to text me for a week after I stopped replying, and then he sent an email asking if my phone was working, even though the iMessages said ‘Delivered.’ ”

“Oh, my God, no,” Alexi gasped, horrified, like I’d just told her I had a brain tumor. “That’s unacceptable. The rule is one text, one response. That is a very clear social boundary.”

“I never ghost,” said Josh, proud of himself and his Midwestern values. “If you ghost, then the person is going to be left wondering what they did wrong, and I don’t want to give someone neurosis. I usually say something complimentary, like, ‘I think you’re a great person, but I just don’t think we’re a match.’ ”

“That sounds like a computer-generated game show rejection,” I said. But this, I noted, is part of the dilemma. At the risk of sounding harsh: How are you supposed to get rid of someone who you’ve already slept with but who you’re not close enough with to warrant breaking up? It’s this weird intermediary point. So either you say something cliché and condescending like, “I’m just not in the headspace to date right now,” which doesn’t make sense because you’re still active on Tinder, or you get awkwardly real and say: “I don’t like you and never want to see you again.” Or you ghost.

“Well, what I do,” offered Alexi, “is say, ‘I’m super busy with work right now, but let me reach out to you when I have more time.’ A smart person will get that you’re trying to politely ditch them. And if they don’t, then I think it’s morally okay to ghost.”

“Technically, that’s called a ‘soft ghost,’ ” I informed her, which is when you disappear but with reasonable forewarning. (I’ve also heard this referred to as the “slow fade.”) “If you want to stop seeing someone, you just start waiting five hours to respond to their texts, and then eventually you respond with something really detached, like, ‘Haha yeah’ or ‘lol.’ If they ask to meet up, you make excuses about being on a deadline or depressed.”

By this point, Josh looked really disgusted by us. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “You’re putting so much effort and stress into avoiding rejecting someone, but you end up making it a far more drawn-out and painful experience than if you were just upfront from the beginning. And it wastes everyone’s time.”

This was hard to deny. Ghosting is for the weak. When you ghost, you’re not doing someone a favor by “not hurting their feelings.” You’re really just avoiding having to deal with life. It’s the same reason why I tell people I’ll come to their DJ set or write for their zine or go to their boyfriend’s birthday party, even when I know I have no intention of doing any of those things. I can’t say no, so instead I say yes and then privately stress out about it for weeks, hoping that if I just ignore the situation long enough, it will go away. But it never does. And if you’ve ever been on the other side of that situation, you know how frustrating it is to be strung along, left staring at your phone for eternity.

“It’s true,” said Alexi, her voice strained, like she was about to confess to a murder. “People ghost because they can’t deal with confrontation. This would all be solved if we could just take responsibility for ourselves—if we could rise to the occasion and actually communicate, which is something nobody today ever wants to do.”

Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.

Hair and Makeup: Ingeborg

The post Breathless: To Ghost or Not to Ghost? appeared first on Vogue.

2015 will go down in history as the year when love won. But there were lots of other extraordinary advancements in the world of sex and relationships. Here, my list of 13 highlights, which includes the year’s sexiest movies, the best TED Talk on relationships, and the pop culture icons who are revolutionizing the way we think about sexual identity.

“To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This”
Is love something that happens to you, or can you make love happen? Back in January, Mandy Len Catron wrote an essay for The New York Times’s Modern Love column titled “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This.” Her essay began: “More than 20 years ago, the psychologist Arthur Aron succeeded in making two strangers fall in love in his laboratory. Last summer, I applied this technique to my own life.” Aron’s study involves two people sitting face-to-face and answering 36 increasingly personal questions, followed by four minutes of silently staring into each other’s eyes. Questions vary from your interest in fame, the last time you cried, and your relationship to your mother. The eye contact part clearly sounds like it would be the most awkward, and prompted my favorite line in the essay: “I know the eyes are the window to the soul or whatever, but the real crux of the moment was not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was seeing someone really seeing me.” Well, spoiler alert: Mandy Len Catron and her experiment partner fell in love. (And, as of the TED Talk she gave in October, they were still together.) Her article went mega viral, garnering more than 8 million views in just one month. All across the world, people began re-creating this experiment for themselves—some finding success, others not—all wondering the same question: Can love be a choice?

The Diary of a Teenage Girl
The Diary of a Teenage Girl is the best sexual coming-of-age story that I’ve seen in years. The film follows Minnie, a teenager who begins an affair with her mother’s boyfriend, Monroe, 20 years her senior. Rather than being a naive, easily manipulated sex object, Minnie is strong and decisive. Through her narrative, we enter her curious and sex-obsessed teenage mind. “I refuse to be a sniveling crybaby. I’m a fucking woman and this is my life,” says the irrepressible heroine. It’s rare to see a film that celebrates the complexity of female desire with such respect—it’s honest, but never exploitative, without ever making it seem “weird” that a teenage girl would be so horny. The film was the feature debut from Marielle Heller, and was a big hit on the festival circuit. Lead actress Bel Powley is captivating, and watching the sex scenes with sex god Alexander Skarsgård isn’t so bad, either.

Esther Perel’s “Rethinking Infidelity” TED Talk
Relationship therapist and cheating expert Esther Perel is one of the most interesting voices on sex and relationships today. Back in March, Perel gave her second TED Talk, “Rethinking Infidelity,” and it’s a must-watch for anyone who’s ever cheated or been cheated on, or who’s simply interested in hearing a new take on a very old dilemma. Perel tackles the question: If even happy people cheat, then what is cheating about? The poignant and funny talk discusses how cheating redefines relationships, how couples can come back from an affair, and even some positive things that can result from infidelity. In a particularly enlightening moment, Perel says, “When we seek the gaze of another, it isn’t always our partner that we are turning away from, but the person that we have ourselves become . . . It isn’t so much that we’re looking for another person, as much as we are looking for another self.”

The Pirelli Calendar’s Feminist Makeover
For decades, the Pirelli Calendar has been famous for its soft-porny images of half-naked models posing seductively on exotic beaches, bent over, covered in oil, et cetera. So the calendar got a lot of attention after it took a bold step in a completely new, more feminist direction. Shot by Annie Leibovitz, the 2016 Pirelli Calendar celebrates intelligent, powerful, accomplished women—Patti Smith, Serena Williams, Tavi Gevinson, to name a few—all photographed with their clothes on. (Or, they’re all clothed except Amy Schumer, looking like the bad bitch that she is in just panties and stilettos, confidently displaying her curves.) The message is clear: Sexy is more than just airbrushed supermodels in latex thongs. Sexy is a smart, confident woman.

The “Abortion Drone”
Drones are good for a lot more than just killing bad guys and hanging mistletoe and making unnecessarily futuristic sex tapes. Back in June, the international women’s rights group Women on Waves launched and flew its “abortion drone” from Germany into Poland, where it delivered packets of abortion pills, some of which were swallowed immediately by women on the ground. The stunt drew attention to the reproductive rights (or lack thereof) of women in the primarily Catholic country of Poland. (Poland, Ireland, and Malta are the only European countries where abortion is still illegal.) Access to abortions has been limited in Poland since 1993; women are permitted to have them in the case of rape, incest, or if a mother’s life is threatened by the fetus. These strict abortion laws result in about 50,000 underground abortions each year.

Monica Bellucci Becomes the Oldest Bond Girl
Monica Bellucci is so hot it’s almost confusing. I’ve always been in awe of her seemingly effortless, European sensuality. She’s so elegant and womanly—the type you’re far more likely to see lounging around with a glass of wine than being a maniac at 6:00 a.m. Pilates. This year, at 51, she became the oldest Bond girl ever, eclipsing Honor Blackman, who played Pussy Galore in Goldfinger at age 39.

The Supreme Court’s Legalization of Gay Marriage
2015 will always be remembered as the year the Supreme Court approved the constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Now people all across the United States can experience the joys of a gay wedding. In Obama’s very sweet speech right after the ruling, he said, “There’s so much more work to be done to extend the full promise of America to every American. But today we can say, in no uncertain terms, that we’ve made our union a little more perfect.”

Amy Schumer Becomes a Raunchy Feminist Hero
2015 has definitely been Amy Schumer’s year. What makes Schumer so special is that she’s changed the way we talk about “women’s issues.” Her comedy tackles issues like campus rape, sexual assault in the military, the sexual double standard, and gender inequality, but she does so in a way that’s so hysterically funny and accessible that she’s miraculously managed to make “women’s issues” something that guys want to tune in for. Not to mention that Schumer proudly and explicitly talks about female sexuality and desire. As a result, she’s become the face of a modern brand of sex-positive feminism. Schumer is to millennials what Madonna was to women in the ’80s—proof that you can be smart, political, funny, and aggressively sexual, all at the same time.

Clancy Martin’s Novel Bad Sex
As with all of Clancy Martin’s fiction, this book is sexy, scandalous, and depressing in the most comical way possible. His previous novel, How to Sell, was a Times Literary Supplement pick for Best Book of 2009. Based heavily on his own life, it follows two scheming brothers as they pull off jewelry scams, take a ton of cocaine, sleep with hookers, and generally make questionable life decisions. Bad Sex is a fast and fun novel about an alcoholic woman who enters an affair with her husband’s banker—“bad” as in immoral, not second-rate, a description one might ascribe to the author himself. After reading How to Sell a few years back, I became sort of unhealthily obsessed with Martin, and have since sent him quite a few inappropriately erotic Facebook messages. He has yet to reply.

The Introduction of Caitlyn Jenner
An astonishing 17 million people tuned in to watch former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner triumphantly claim her true identity and come out as transgender in an interview with Diane Sawyer that informed millions around the world about the reality and the hardships of being transgender. Soon after, she graced the cover of Vanity Fair, shot by Annie Leibovitz. Visibility is power, because we cannot be what we cannot see. In just the past year, the increase in transgender visibility has been incredible, allowing a space for society to look at gender, as a whole, in a more nuanced way.

Tangerine
Tangerine is a raucously funny indie comedy about two black trans sex workers, both dealing with various dramas on the streets of Los Angeles on Christmas Eve. The movie, shot entirely on an iPhone 5, begins when Sin-Dee discovers that her boyfriend-slash-pimp has been seeing a white cisgender woman during her recent stint in jail, setting in motion a series of crises. The film’s characters are raw and complicated, and their hysterical odyssey ends up being less about trans identity and more about the power of female friendship. Not long ago, it would have been hard to imagine black trans characters at the center of a film, let alone as anything more than secondary, two-dimentional embellishments.

John Oliver Blasts America’s Subpar Sex Education
Or, more accurately, the lack of sex education in America. John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight on HBO highlights often-underreported social issues in very thoroughly researched, 15-minute segments, delivered with Oliver’s particular brand of absurdist humor. In this episode from August, we learn what schools in the Bible Belt consider sex-ed—for instance, likening people (mainly women) who have sex to trampled roses, chewed gum, and dirty shoes. The episode enlists the help of celebs like Laverne Cox and Aisha Tyler and is simultaneously terrifying and hilarious.

Miley Cyrus Becomes an Unlikely Beacon of Sex Positivity
Back in June, Miley Cyrus graced the cover of Paper magazine, but it wasn’t the accompanying nude photo spread that got everyone’s attention. Instead, it was her hyper-candid interview, in which she discussed her open-mindedness about sexuality and gender. Cyrus said, “I am literally open to every single thing that is consenting and doesn’t involve an animal and everyone is of age . . . I don’t relate to being boy or girl, and I don’t have to have my partner relate to boy or girl.” Sure, Miley Cyrus can be irritating sometimes, but it’s difficult to deny the significance of these words coming from such a huge celebrity, in a world where bi and trans visibility were basically nonexistent in mainstream culture only a handful of years ago.

Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.
Hair and Makeup: Ingeborg

The post Breathless: The Year in Sex appeared first on Vogue.

Last week, I found myself at Cafe Gratitude in Los Angeles, eating a gluten-free scone and fuming about gender, as one does in 2016. On the receiving end of my rant was my friend “Lori,” a 23-year-old MFA student studying queer theory. I was saying something like, “Sure, it’s cool that we live in this post-everything world where gender is over and hetero-normativity is off-trend and all the rules of sexuality have been thrown out the window. Life is more free now. But we’re also being forced to ask ourselves some serious questions. Like, ‘Does shaving my armpits make me a bad feminist?’ And, more pressingly, ‘Is my strap-on a symbol of male supremacy?’ And if so, should I set it on fire as a performance art piece?”

Lori sipped her green juice and rolled her eyes. “I love wearing a strap-on,” she said, casually flipping her long curls behind her shoulders. “Even though my dildo is bright pink and it’s this laborious process to strap yourself in, something about it still feels real. It’s some Freudian bullshit, but it just feels so fun and powerful to have a penis.” This wasn’t the “feminist” answer I was expecting.

A few nights later, I met my friend “Claire,” a 31-year-old screenwriter, for drinks at the Sunset Tower. Claire is somewhat of a unicorn in that she’s a straight woman who gets off on wearing a dildo. “Think about it: Men are the ones with a prostate. Why isn’t every woman fucking her boyfriend with a strap-on?” Claire asked, as an elderly man played jazz piano in the background. “It’s crazy, you actually feel like you have a dick. I’ve been pegging this guy I met at a Dave Matthews concert.”

Claire admitted that this was not a bucket-list moment for her. “I knew what pegging was because of that Broad City episode where Abbi pegs her crush, but I was never like, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t wait until the moment when I finally get to peg someone.’ ” Her tone turned almost motherly.“I think every woman should experience fucking a man at some point in her life, even just as a therapeutic tool. It’s very empowering. I never thought this would be part of my life story, but here I am. I’m fucking a man.”

After meeting through friends at said concert last fall, Claire and her pegging partner, “Jim,” bonded on a party-bus ride back to West Hollywood, talking about sex.They ended up back at Jim’s apartment, where he produced a double-sided glass dildo—one end for the pegging, the other end shaped like a hook, to be inserted inside a vagina. “It’s essentially a strapless strap-on,” Claire explained. “It’s the chicest kind. I could never go back from this.”

She liked it far more than she expected to. “It’s such a shift in the power dynamic. I kept thinking, I’m literally penetrating someone right now. Plus, it’s a vaginal workout because you have to grip the dildo with your vagina while you use it. It’s basically exercise, which I love. I’m very health-conscious,” she said, gulping her second martini. For the next two months, the two met up for sex regularly. “He would get a colonic every time before I came over,” she said enthusiastically. “He was really on point about his whole anal grooming and cleansing journey.”

Beyond the thrill of the power shift, what Claire didn’t expect was how intimate the sex would be. “The person has to be very trusting of you. You have to listen to their physical cues and gauge if they’re having pleasure or if you’re hurting them. You have a lot of control, and that became very sexy to me. Before Jim, I’d always thought of myself as submissive, but through that experience I accessed a totally different side of myself.”

She made it sound so bizarrely appealing. I wondered if I should resurrect my strap-on from the junk box under my bed, where it’s been in exile since my breakup with my now ex-girlfriend four months ago. When I met my ex, one of the first things I did was run to a sex store and buy a large purple dildo and leather harness. It was my first same-sex relationship, and I was like, “This is what lesbians do, right?” As it turned out, we used the strap-on only like four times in our three-year relationship—partly because it quickly dawned on me that I didn’t need to imitate heterosexual sex in order to validate my queer sex. In the years that followed, I found it insulting when people would ask me, “But don’t you miss dick?” As if the penis is the holy grail of pleasure. Similarly, my androgynous girlfriend resented the fact that just because she wore boys’ clothes, people assumed she wanted a penis. (One day, I remember, she put on the strap-on, looked down, and said, “Wait, I’m gay and dicks are weird. Why is this thing on me?”)

But my worst fear is being one of those cyber-feminists who’s offended by everything, so in order to challenge my aversion to strap-ons, I organized a queer, roundtable lunch with strap-on loving Lori and my particularly opinionated friend Mel, a 37-year-old queer actress.

“My hand is my sexual object,” said Mel, displaying the hand in question, with its immaculately manicured fingernails. “A lot of women get off wearing a strap-on, either psychologically or because of the way it rubs against their clit, but I don’t. I feel erotic pleasure through my fingers. It’s sexual reiki: If I can make you come with my hand, then can I extend that power five inches in front of my hand? Ten inches? Can I sit across the room from you and make you come? When you’re at that level, a fucking phallus seems like kindergarten for me.” The conversation became heated very quickly.

“So is penis envy actually a thing?” I asked. “I just don’t understand why, if you’re queer, you need to bring a fake dick into the bedroom.”

“I know lesbians who, when they go on a Tinder date, will pack their penis in their bag,” said Mel. “Like, that’s their dick. They’re not trans, but they want to be able to fuck their girl without using their hands. When I was younger I wanted that,” she recalled. “I didn’t want a dick all the time, but I wanted to be able to fuck a girl and choke her with both hands, basically.”

“I don’t care to over-intellectualize or over-politicize it,” said Lori. “If you like being fucked by a strap-on, it’s not a reflection on your sexuality. I get where you’re coming from, but if it feels good, then what’s the problem? My girlfriend and I aren’t secretly wanting to have sex with a man.”

This made sense to me. If the point of sex is to create intimacy and to give and receive pleasure, then why restrict yourself from something that feels good just because of the patriarchy or whatever? After all, being a lesbian isn’t about hating dicks, and using a strap-on isn’t about wanting to be a man.

Through my own queer experience, in fact, I’ve learned that it often isn’t true that the more “masculine” or butch woman would be the one to wear a strap-on in the relationship. Mel put it well: “Our default is to think that, in a power dynamic, masculine is top and feminine is bottom. But a butch woman will often want to be subjugated sexually because she has to armor herself in the world so much. She has to be tough, just like a man does. It’s like the Wall Street guy who sees a dominatrix on the weekend. That’s why they say, ‘Butch in the streets, femme in the sheets.’ ”

Speaking of femme tops, I told them about Claire and her pegging saga, which incited a literal round of applause. “I wish more guys would get into pegging,” Mel said. “I think if men knew more about what it was like to get fucked, they would be better at fucking. The only reason men don’t get pegged more often is because of gay shame and bottom shame. It’s really hard for straight men to bottom because they think it’s emasculating, when in reality it can be super hot.”

Beyond all the politics, one can’t deny that strap-ons have a lot of advantages. You never have to worry about a dildo being soft or too small or diseased, and it won’t accidentally get you pregnant. As Mel put it: “When you’re having sex with a real penis, sex becomes all about what feels good for the penis, and then the penis has to throw up all over your tits. But a strap-on is just for the woman’s pleasure. The dildo doesn’t need to be satisfied.”

“That’s true,” Lori agreed. “Dildos are not demanding at all.”

“It’s just a hands-free device,” added Mel. “Like a selfie stick.”

Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.
Hair and Makeup: Ingeborg

The post Breathless: Why (Some) Women Love Strap-Ons appeared first on Vogue.

Love Stories is a series about love in all its forms, with one new essay appearing each day for the first two weeks of February, until Valentine’s Day.

Nothing gets me wet like rejection. I suppose this isn’t so unique: We all want what we can’t have, right? Unfortunately this makes forming a relationship difficult, especially if the other person likes you back.

The summer of 2014 was an all-time low for me. I was dumped by my long-term girlfriend and crippled by sadness in a way that forced me to admit, once and for all, that I was not a sociopath (a tragedy). I spent the summer blacking out on bad Tinder dates and making too-frequent trips to Harlem to sleep with a married-“ish” guy. And then suddenly, like a twist of the knife, I was forced to leave my apartment.

There are few tasks more heinous than searching for a decent one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan on a writer’s salary. I had resigned myself to simply ignore the problem, until one morning, while walk-of-shaming back from Harlem, wearing a pink leather miniskirt and cum in my hair, I got a text from my token neuroscientist friend, Leah: A friend of a friend was giving up his rent-stabilized apartment in Gramercy, she told me. I took the subway straight to the address and arrived at 10:00 a.m., looking like a stripper on my way to the after-after-party.

I was met with trepidation by the apartment’s current resident, “Max,” a lanky 40-year-old book editor in a pristinely pressed oxford shirt and thick-rimmed glasses. He walked me through the meticulously organized apartment. The shirts in his closet where arranged by color, like a serial killer’s (a hot one, though). I asked him if he wanted to get a drink sometime. He smiled awkwardly and said, “No, thank you.” I silently scolded myself: Stop misinterpreting every routine interaction as a dating opportunity—you seem pathetic. Earlier that week, I’d asked out a guy after he stopped me in the street to ask for directions.

In spite of my party foul, I got the apartment. A week later, I met up with Max to exchange keys and convinced him to let me buy him a drink “as a thank you.” One drink easily turned into three, at which point I was pretty confident that we were officially on a date. And that he was in love with me. We had a lot in common: We’d both been long-term expats in London; we were both going through breakups; we both liked alcohol. At the end of the “date,” I leaned in to kiss him. He leaned out.

There aren’t many things that will make you feel worse than someone doing a backbend in order to avoid physical contact with you. Sadly, this wasn’t the first time it happened to me—as someone who tends to make aggressive and ill-timed first moves, it’s actually not that uncommon. Generally, people make an excuse (usually about having a girlfriend or a cold sore). Still, I’m appalled every time. As a general rule, if someone tries to have sex with you, you should have sex with them back—it’s only polite. After Max dodged my kiss, I made a joke about how, technically, his apartment was now our apartment—that we basically lived together—at which point he slowly backed away from me.

The next few months were vaguely awkward, as I had to maintain semi-frequent contact with him. I’d collect his mail and he’d pick it up during business trips to New York. But soon the mail stopped coming and we stopped talking.

More than a year went by. My girlfriend and I got back together, and then, this past September, we broke up once more. Again, I was depressed, though, this time, less so. I had been craving more personal freedom. Still, I wanted to flee the scene of the crime—aka New York—and so I went on a Tinder rampage across Europe. I abruptly decided that my calling in life was to be a sexual anthropologist by means of dating apps. In my first few weeks of singledom, I slept with a CrossFit-obsessed finance guy, a Parisian law student, an Irish international peace negotiator, and a 22-year-old British anarchist who may or may not have been homeless. And then, on a whim, I moved to L.A., because people are happy there. I started sleeping with actors who star in insurance commercials. I felt confident that I could sustain this lifestyle forever—city hopping, writing during the days, Tindering in the evenings, spending beyond my means. It was all so bohemian.

And then, in early December, I got an email from Max: “I think my new debit card was accidentally mailed to your apartment.” How romantic, I thought. I told him that I was living in L.A. Coincidentally, so was he. Coincidentally, we lived only minutes from each other. He invited me over for dinner.

Yet again, I found myself sitting across from him wondering, Is this a date? But this time I’d promised myself that I would absolutely not make the first move, no matter how much wine I drank. Luckily I didn’t have to. After we ate the vegan mush that he cooked, he kindly shoved his tongue down my throat. Right at the moment when I thought he was going to invite me to his bedroom, he stopped. “You should know,” he said, “I’ve never had sex with someone who I wasn’t seriously emotionally involved with. It just doesn’t feel right to me. I prefer to wait.” Here, my brain short-circuited. Getting to know someone before you fuck? It seemed a bizarre concept. People my age have sex to assess if we want to get to know someone, not the other way around. It’s just the millennial way.

For the next 48 hours, all I could do was fantasize about having sex with him. I was packing to go back to New York for a week, hoping this was just a fleeting obsession, when I got a text from him inviting me to a Christmas party that evening. Impulsively, I spent $437 on a new plane ticket so that I could make the party—a deeply uncharacteristic decision, which caused me to worry that his refusal to bang me had triggered a latent psychosis. We went to the party and made out in his car, and then he dropped me off at home, like in a movie from the ’50s.

Back in my New York apartment, I began to notice all the small, potentially creepy ways that Max had remained in the periphery of my consciousness over the past year. Like that I was living among some of his old furniture, or that my mailbox still had his name on it because I’d always been too lazy to change it. I lay in bed with my vibrator thinking about how many times he’d cum in this very same spot. We started talking on the phone—insane, I know. I impulsively deleted all of my dating apps.

I flew back to L.A. We went to see movies, kissed openly at parties, and did “hand stuff,” which is a term I haven’t used since I was 15. He brought me to a pool party in Palm Springs at which I took all of the drugs, aggressively befriended a bachelorette party, decided to swim naked, and was promptly escorted off the premises. I woke up the next morning like, “Oops?” I assumed he was going to end it, but he just smiled and said, “I’m glad you had fun!” and continued to iron his T-shirts. I took this as a sign that he must like me for me, because he clearly wasn’t tolerating my personality only in exchange for the sex we weren’t having.

A few more weeks went by. I gave him a blow job. I once followed him to the bank and creepily waited for 45 minutes while they printed him a new debit card, despite being on a deadline, because I was having separation anxiety. I couldn’t remember a time when I had been so tragically un-aloof. I kept thinking: Is this the trick my mom taught me when I was 13, which I promptly ignored? Ya know: If you want someone to like you, don’t sleep with them right away? I couldn’t believe this trick was working on me. The irony! For a while, I couldn’t help but feel that every time we met up and didn’t have sex I was being rejected somehow, or worse, manipulated. I found myself thinking, Do I really like him, or do I just desperately want him to want me? It’s hard to separate our desire for someone from our desire to be desired. I also began to worry that, after waiting for so long, sex with him was doomed to be an anticlimax.

But then, it wasn’t. It was just nice. Usually, the first time I sleep with someone, I can end up being a bit performative. With Max, I could be in the moment, because I felt comfortable with him. The fact that he turned the tables on me—that a dude made me wait—made him more interesting to me than my DTF contemporaries. And now, randomly, we’re dating.

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