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TAKE 4
The cat has barfed in the hall, the laundry threatens avalanche, the kids are pounding the bedroom door, clamoring for lunch. There is simply no time for proper porn.
Enter the sex GIF: glorious, animated snippet of smooth, heaving bodies, played on endless loop. The sex GIF is perfectly engineered for time-crunch titillation. A sneaking glance at one’s phone during the daily grind is all one needs to transcend into the erotic.
Sex GIFs can be found by simply Googling “sex GIF,” which is helpful for the easily confused, like me. There seems to be a sex GIF for every kink, although I have not tested this hypothesis. If you want to see a housewife get stuffed with anal beads, the GIF provides. Many are black and white, so a lady can still feel cultured. Some come from movies or TV shows and carry the libido-shriveling risk of realizing you’ve been getting off to an excerpt from Vampire Diaries.
While many sex GIFs are taken from porn, their necessary brevity divorces them from that genre’s flaws. The GIF contains no cringey dialogue and is too short to allow you to contemplate whether the actor looks like an enforcer for an Eastern European crime ring, or ask yourself, Should I be shaving my asshole? Porn provides a complete narrative, from the coach’s arrival in the locker room to his triumphant cum shot all over the face of the cheerleader: the viewer is subservient to the screen. But the sex GIF has no narrative at all. It offers merely a tantalizing glimpse, allowing my own fantasies to flourish.
In this era of constant information overload, a quiet moment to retreat into our imaginations is itself erotic. Or perhaps it is only the hollowness of Baudrillard’s hyperreality, the merging of the digital/GIF and the physical/masturbation, the repeated dopamine hits that leave analog life a dreary, blue-balled ache.
Anaïs Nin once wrote about awaiting a lover, “Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.” Outside my door, kids and cat barf await. But here I am with my most reliable lover, myself.
—Rebecca Saltzman
TAKE 3
My next-door-neighbor Stephanie had old parents. They didn’t stay up late enough to watch To Catch a Predator and did not know that people with eleven-year-old daughters should keep their computers in the living room and render them nonfunctional with spyware. The Chens tucked their desktop in a corner of the basement; the only security measure between Steph and me and the Seeking Encounters chat room were two creaky stairs and a minefield of desiccated millipedes.
We logged in as XxkrystalxX (the sluttiest username we could think of). I, winner of our middle school typing lab’s WPM competition, manned the keyboard, while Steph paced behind me, dictating.
a/s/l? asked soccerdad69, when we joined. Age, sex, location.
18/f/fl, I typed. (Florida was the sluttiest state I could think of.)
At the news of an F in the heavily-M chat, Seeking Encounters was inundated with an amount of porn that surpassed the capacity of the Chens’ DSL, loading in slow-tick bars. Steph and I clicked through the way we did the scary-movie channels on her parents’ satellite TV, each of us insisting the other was too big a baby to look until we both did, then screamed, gasped, shushed each other, insisted we’d never make the same mistake again. We repeated this process over and over, special terror devoted to the photos of male porn stars XxkrystalxX’s admirers claimed to resemble. They were appropriately horror-show xenomorphs with carapace abs and jump-scare erections that produced upsetting fluids.
The women made me think of a bridge-building video I’d watched in science class, hosted by an architect with big white eyebrows who bent over his desk, measuring and marking. I could imagine that, instead of trusses and beams, he had designed the evenly tanned lady in the pictures soccerdad69 sent (i bet u look like this huh), the orchid tattoo blooming on her collarbone like a beautified highway median. Slide-rule stomachs and protractor curves, the space between her raised legs a perfect forty-five-degree angle. Neat and simple and intentional. I understood why people would take pictures. The way they took pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge.
It would be like that forever, only with fewer millipedes. The men a well-rehearsed surprise, the women beautiful and bearing weight.
—Ali Sharpe
TAKE 4
The cat has barfed in the hall, the laundry threatens avalanche, the kids are pounding the bedroom door, clamoring for lunch. There is simply no time for proper porn.
Enter the sex GIF: glorious, animated snippet of smooth, heaving bodies, played on endless loop. The sex GIF is perfectly engineered for time-crunch titillation. A sneaking glance at one’s phone during the daily grind is all one needs to transcend into the erotic.
Sex GIFs can be found by simply Googling “sex GIF,” which is helpful for the easily confused, like me. There seems to be a sex GIF for every kink, although I have not tested this hypothesis. If you want to see a housewife get stuffed with anal beads, the GIF provides. Many are black and white, so a lady can still feel cultured. Some come from movies or TV shows and carry the libido-shriveling risk of realizing you’ve been getting off to an excerpt from Vampire Diaries.
While many sex GIFs are taken from porn, their necessary brevity divorces them from that genre’s flaws. The GIF contains no cringey dialogue and is too short to allow you to contemplate whether the actor looks like an enforcer for an Eastern European crime ring, or ask yourself, Should I be shaving my asshole? Porn provides a complete narrative, from the coach’s arrival in the locker room to his triumphant cum shot all over the face of the cheerleader: the viewer is subservient to the screen. But the sex GIF has no narrative at all. It offers merely a tantalizing glimpse, allowing my own fantasies to flourish.
In this era of constant information overload, a quiet moment to retreat into our imaginations is itself erotic. Or perhaps it is only the hollowness of Baudrillard’s hyperreality, the merging of the digital/GIF and the physical/masturbation, the repeated dopamine hits that leave analog life a dreary, blue-balled ache.
Anaïs Nin once wrote about awaiting a lover, “Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.” Outside my door, kids and cat barf await. But here I am with my most reliable lover, myself.
—Rebecca Saltzman
TAKE 4
The cat has barfed in the hall, the laundry threatens avalanche, the kids are pounding the bedroom door, clamoring for lunch. There is simply no time for proper porn.
Enter the sex GIF: glorious, animated snippet of smooth, heaving bodies, played on endless loop. The sex GIF is perfectly engineered for time-crunch titillation. A sneaking glance at one’s phone during the daily grind is all one needs to transcend into the erotic.
Sex GIFs can be found by simply Googling “sex GIF,” which is helpful for the easily confused, like me. There seems to be a sex GIF for every kink, although I have not tested this hypothesis. If you want to see a housewife get stuffed with anal beads, the GIF provides. Many are black and white, so a lady can still feel cultured. Some come from movies or TV shows and carry the libido-shriveling risk of realizing you’ve been getting off to an excerpt from Vampire Diaries.
While many sex GIFs are taken from porn, their necessary brevity divorces them from that genre’s flaws. The GIF contains no cringey dialogue and is too short to allow you to contemplate whether the actor looks like an enforcer for an Eastern European crime ring, or ask yourself, Should I be shaving my asshole? Porn provides a complete narrative, from the coach’s arrival in the locker room to his triumphant cum shot all over the face of the cheerleader: the viewer is subservient to the screen. But the sex GIF has no narrative at all. It offers merely a tantalizing glimpse, allowing my own fantasies to flourish.
In this era of constant information overload, a quiet moment to retreat into our imaginations is itself erotic. Or perhaps it is only the hollowness of Baudrillard’s hyperreality, the merging of the digital/GIF and the physical/masturbation, the repeated dopamine hits that leave analog life a dreary, blue-balled ache.
Anaïs Nin once wrote about awaiting a lover, “Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.” Outside my door, kids and cat barf await. But here I am with my most reliable lover, myself.
—Rebecca Saltzman
TAKE 1
I like looking at naked men on screen. There are naked men on Industry (HBO Max), and you see their dicks. There is more ass than dick, and there are more female parts than male parts on the show, but there are a number of dicks just hanging there. You don’t see hard dicks on TV except in porn. From porn, I learned stuff you could do with people in bed, when porn was a thing screened in regular theaters in the 1970s. Porn is like an Andy Warhol movie, but instead of looking at the Empire State Building for eight hours, you look at cocks and pussy and ass in an abstract way. In porn, there is often nothing but dick, and it can come to look like an aquatic animal searching for a coral reef to rest on. Everywhere else, there isn’t enough dick.
One of the interesting things about the sex on Industry is it’s shot from the perspective of the two central characters, who are women in their twenties who work in private banking. The women are randy all the time and looking for coked-up sex with whomever, when they aren’t selling incomprehensible financial Legos to a money mogul. On the plus side for the women, they assume positions they can come in. There’s a lot of going down on these women. The men drop to their knees like dogs hearing a whistle silent to us. The camera likes to look at the women, who are feeling something we’re meant to think is pleasure.
Many of the directors on the show are women, but the show runners, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, are men, and for the most part the scenes are shot to excite male viewers. If they wanted to excite me, the camera would be on dicks and male ass while the people were fucking. The naked male body isn’t shown much during sex because it’s not exciting to men, unless the men like other men.
When things that turn women on enter public space, they lift the lid on all things people are not supposed to know about and say out loud. Once the male body is not protected by privacy, and once the vulnerability of the male body—the size and shape of the cock, the beauty or lack of beauty of other parts—is introduced for evaluation, nothing in culture and society is protected. The male body becomes what the female body has always been and what the male body has always been secretly. In the history of human freedom, a long chapter belongs to looking at naked parts.
—Laurie Stone
TAKE 2
I don’t know how to experience sexual release without imagining myself as, or being, an object of a male, or making an object out of a woman. Do we all feel this way? In a 2016 randomized controlled trial published in the British Journal of Social Psychology (56.2, pp 334-353), researchers concluded that we, both women and men, are so deeply wired to objectify women, that it is a strain on our cognitive resources when we attempt to not objectify women.
When I was nineteen (c. 1988) and worked in the accounting department of an advertising agency in Buffalo, New York, I befriended Debbie, the receptionist—another funny woman with her life ahead of her. She drove a sporty car and liked classic rock, male strip clubs, and Playgirl, which I had never cared about. One night, she took me to a strip club in Canada where we were old enough to enter. All these years later, for some reason, I still remember the four men who performed.
The first man: smiley, with brown feathered hair à la David/Sean Cassidy; meaty body; spandex short-shorts that may or may not have been removed during his act, a recital-type dance with spinning and more spinning. My reaction: laughter hidden behind a beer bottle.
The second man had a handlebar mustache and a curly dirty-blond mane. He wore a cowboy hat and G-string and smiled wide as women tucked dollars into his penis-packed pouch. When he pointed to me, I recoiled.
The third man was a gay mohawked punker, pale and thin with a flaccid penis, defiant attitude, and Tina Turner confidence. He was totally uninterested in women. I wondered why he was on stage.
And then man number four: short, beautiful, young, with long platinum hair and shapely body. His act was an other-worldly strip dance to club music. He took off his white suit and every article of clothing until we could see his complete erection, back arched. My reaction: gobsmacked. What I loved most of all, though, was the dancing, which made him more beautiful. I could have watched just that. I believe I wanted the suit back on afterwards. Can we do that again?
—Thea Swanson
TAKE 3
My next-door-neighbor Stephanie had old parents. They didn’t stay up late enough to watch To Catch a Predator and did not know that people with eleven-year-old daughters should keep their computers in the living room and render them nonfunctional with spyware. The Chens tucked their desktop in a corner of the basement; the only security measure between Steph and me and the Seeking Encounters chat room were two creaky stairs and a minefield of desiccated millipedes.
We logged in as XxkrystalxX (the sluttiest username we could think of). I, winner of our middle school typing lab’s WPM competition, manned the keyboard, while Steph paced behind me, dictating.
a/s/l? asked soccerdad69, when we joined. Age, sex, location.
18/f/fl, I typed. (Florida was the sluttiest state I could think of.)
At the news of an F in the heavily-M chat, Seeking Encounters was inundated with an amount of porn that surpassed the capacity of the Chens’ DSL, loading in slow-tick bars. Steph and I clicked through the way we did the scary-movie channels on her parents’ satellite TV, each of us insisting the other was too big a baby to look until we both did, then screamed, gasped, shushed each other, insisted we’d never make the same mistake again. We repeated this process over and over, special terror devoted to the photos of male porn stars XxkrystalxX’s admirers claimed to resemble. They were appropriately horror-show xenomorphs with carapace abs and jump-scare erections that produced upsetting fluids.
The women made me think of a bridge-building video I’d watched in science class, hosted by an architect with big white eyebrows who bent over his desk, measuring and marking. I could imagine that, instead of trusses and beams, he had designed the evenly tanned lady in the pictures soccerdad69 sent (i bet u look like this huh), the orchid tattoo blooming on her collarbone like a beautified highway median. Slide-rule stomachs and protractor curves, the space between her raised legs a perfect forty-five-degree angle. Neat and simple and intentional. I understood why people would take pictures. The way they took pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge.
It would be like that forever, only with fewer millipedes. The men a well-rehearsed surprise, the women beautiful and bearing weight.
—Ali Sharpe
TAKE 4
The cat has barfed in the hall, the laundry threatens avalanche, the kids are pounding the bedroom door, clamoring for lunch. There is simply no time for proper porn.
Enter the sex GIF: glorious, animated snippet of smooth, heaving bodies, played on endless loop. The sex GIF is perfectly engineered for time-crunch titillation. A sneaking glance at one’s phone during the daily grind is all one needs to transcend into the erotic.
Sex GIFs can be found by simply Googling “sex GIF,” which is helpful for the easily confused, like me. There seems to be a sex GIF for every kink, although I have not tested this hypothesis. If you want to see a housewife get stuffed with anal beads, the GIF provides. Many are black and white, so a lady can still feel cultured. Some come from movies or TV shows and carry the libido-shriveling risk of realizing you’ve been getting off to an excerpt from Vampire Diaries.
While many sex GIFs are taken from porn, their necessary brevity divorces them from that genre’s flaws. The GIF contains no cringey dialogue and is too short to allow you to contemplate whether the actor looks like an enforcer for an Eastern European crime ring, or ask yourself, Should I be shaving my asshole? Porn provides a complete narrative, from the coach’s arrival in the locker room to his triumphant cum shot all over the face of the cheerleader: the viewer is subservient to the screen. But the sex GIF has no narrative at all. It offers merely a tantalizing glimpse, allowing my own fantasies to flourish.
In this era of constant information overload, a quiet moment to retreat into our imaginations is itself erotic. Or perhaps it is only the hollowness of Baudrillard’s hyperreality, the merging of the digital/GIF and the physical/masturbation, the repeated dopamine hits that leave analog life a dreary, blue-balled ache.
Anaïs Nin once wrote about awaiting a lover, “Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.” Outside my door, kids and cat barf await. But here I am with my most reliable lover, myself.
—Rebecca Saltzman
TAKE 4
The cat has barfed in the hall, the laundry threatens avalanche, the kids are pounding the bedroom door, clamoring for lunch. There is simply no time for proper porn.
Enter the sex GIF: glorious, animated snippet of smooth, heaving bodies, played on endless loop. The sex GIF is perfectly engineered for time-crunch titillation. A sneaking glance at one’s phone during the daily grind is all one needs to transcend into the erotic.
Sex GIFs can be found by simply Googling “sex GIF,” which is helpful for the easily confused, like me. There seems to be a sex GIF for every kink, although I have not tested this hypothesis. If you want to see a housewife get stuffed with anal beads, the GIF provides. Many are black and white, so a lady can still feel cultured. Some come from movies or TV shows and carry the libido-shriveling risk of realizing you’ve been getting off to an excerpt from Vampire Diaries.
While many sex GIFs are taken from porn, their necessary brevity divorces them from that genre’s flaws. The GIF contains no cringey dialogue and is too short to allow you to contemplate whether the actor looks like an enforcer for an Eastern European crime ring, or ask yourself, Should I be shaving my asshole? Porn provides a complete narrative, from the coach’s arrival in the locker room to his triumphant cum shot all over the face of the cheerleader: the viewer is subservient to the screen. But the sex GIF has no narrative at all. It offers merely a tantalizing glimpse, allowing my own fantasies to flourish.
In this era of constant information overload, a quiet moment to retreat into our imaginations is itself erotic. Or perhaps it is only the hollowness of Baudrillard’s hyperreality, the merging of the digital/GIF and the physical/masturbation, the repeated dopamine hits that leave analog life a dreary, blue-balled ache.
Anaïs Nin once wrote about awaiting a lover, “Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.” Outside my door, kids and cat barf await. But here I am with my most reliable lover, myself.
—Rebecca Saltzman
TAKE 1
I like looking at naked men on screen. There are naked men on Industry (HBO Max), and you see their dicks. There is more ass than dick, and there are more female parts than male parts on the show, but there are a number of dicks just hanging there. You don’t see hard dicks on TV except in porn. From porn, I learned stuff you could do with people in bed, when porn was a thing screened in regular theaters in the 1970s. Porn is like an Andy Warhol movie, but instead of looking at the Empire State Building for eight hours, you look at cocks and pussy and ass in an abstract way. In porn, there is often nothing but dick, and it can come to look like an aquatic animal searching for a coral reef to rest on. Everywhere else, there isn’t enough dick.
One of the interesting things about the sex on Industry is it’s shot from the perspective of the two central characters, who are women in their twenties who work in private banking. The women are randy all the time and looking for coked-up sex with whomever, when they aren’t selling incomprehensible financial Legos to a money mogul. On the plus side for the women, they assume positions they can come in. There’s a lot of going down on these women. The men drop to their knees like dogs hearing a whistle silent to us. The camera likes to look at the women, who are feeling something we’re meant to think is pleasure.
Many of the directors on the show are women, but the show runners, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, are men, and for the most part the scenes are shot to excite male viewers. If they wanted to excite me, the camera would be on dicks and male ass while the people were fucking. The naked male body isn’t shown much during sex because it’s not exciting to men, unless the men like other men.
When things that turn women on enter public space, they lift the lid on all things people are not supposed to know about and say out loud. Once the male body is not protected by privacy, and once the vulnerability of the male body—the size and shape of the cock, the beauty or lack of beauty of other parts—is introduced for evaluation, nothing in culture and society is protected. The male body becomes what the female body has always been and what the male body has always been secretly. In the history of human freedom, a long chapter belongs to looking at naked parts.
—Laurie Stone
TAKE 2
I don’t know how to experience sexual release without imagining myself as, or being, an object of a male, or making an object out of a woman. Do we all feel this way? In a 2016 randomized controlled trial published in the British Journal of Social Psychology (56.2, pp 334-353), researchers concluded that we, both women and men, are so deeply wired to objectify women, that it is a strain on our cognitive resources when we attempt to not objectify women.
When I was nineteen (c. 1988) and worked in the accounting department of an advertising agency in Buffalo, New York, I befriended Debbie, the receptionist—another funny woman with her life ahead of her. She drove a sporty car and liked classic rock, male strip clubs, and Playgirl, which I had never cared about. One night, she took me to a strip club in Canada where we were old enough to enter. All these years later, for some reason, I still remember the four men who performed.
The first man: smiley, with brown feathered hair à la David/Sean Cassidy; meaty body; spandex short-shorts that may or may not have been removed during his act, a recital-type dance with spinning and more spinning. My reaction: laughter hidden behind a beer bottle.
The second man had a handlebar mustache and a curly dirty-blond mane. He wore a cowboy hat and G-string and smiled wide as women tucked dollars into his penis-packed pouch. When he pointed to me, I recoiled.
The third man was a gay mohawked punker, pale and thin with a flaccid penis, defiant attitude, and Tina Turner confidence. He was totally uninterested in women. I wondered why he was on stage.
And then man number four: short, beautiful, young, with long platinum hair and shapely body. His act was an other-worldly strip dance to club music. He took off his white suit and every article of clothing until we could see his complete erection, back arched. My reaction: gobsmacked. What I loved most of all, though, was the dancing, which made him more beautiful. I could have watched just that. I believe I wanted the suit back on afterwards. Can we do that again?
—Thea Swanson
TAKE 3
My next-door-neighbor Stephanie had old parents. They didn’t stay up late enough to watch To Catch a Predator and did not know that people with eleven-year-old daughters should keep their computers in the living room and render them nonfunctional with spyware. The Chens tucked their desktop in a corner of the basement; the only security measure between Steph and me and the Seeking Encounters chat room were two creaky stairs and a minefield of desiccated millipedes.
We logged in as XxkrystalxX (the sluttiest username we could think of). I, winner of our middle school typing lab’s WPM competition, manned the keyboard, while Steph paced behind me, dictating.
a/s/l? asked soccerdad69, when we joined. Age, sex, location.
18/f/fl, I typed. (Florida was the sluttiest state I could think of.)
At the news of an F in the heavily-M chat, Seeking Encounters was inundated with an amount of porn that surpassed the capacity of the Chens’ DSL, loading in slow-tick bars. Steph and I clicked through the way we did the scary-movie channels on her parents’ satellite TV, each of us insisting the other was too big a baby to look until we both did, then screamed, gasped, shushed each other, insisted we’d never make the same mistake again. We repeated this process over and over, special terror devoted to the photos of male porn stars XxkrystalxX’s admirers claimed to resemble. They were appropriately horror-show xenomorphs with carapace abs and jump-scare erections that produced upsetting fluids.
The women made me think of a bridge-building video I’d watched in science class, hosted by an architect with big white eyebrows who bent over his desk, measuring and marking. I could imagine that, instead of trusses and beams, he had designed the evenly tanned lady in the pictures soccerdad69 sent (i bet u look like this huh), the orchid tattoo blooming on her collarbone like a beautified highway median. Slide-rule stomachs and protractor curves, the space between her raised legs a perfect forty-five-degree angle. Neat and simple and intentional. I understood why people would take pictures. The way they took pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge.
It would be like that forever, only with fewer millipedes. The men a well-rehearsed surprise, the women beautiful and bearing weight.
—Ali Sharpe
TAKE 4
The cat has barfed in the hall, the laundry threatens avalanche, the kids are pounding the bedroom door, clamoring for lunch. There is simply no time for proper porn.
Enter the sex GIF: glorious, animated snippet of smooth, heaving bodies, played on endless loop. The sex GIF is perfectly engineered for time-crunch titillation. A sneaking glance at one’s phone during the daily grind is all one needs to transcend into the erotic.
Sex GIFs can be found by simply Googling “sex GIF,” which is helpful for the easily confused, like me. There seems to be a sex GIF for every kink, although I have not tested this hypothesis. If you want to see a housewife get stuffed with anal beads, the GIF provides. Many are black and white, so a lady can still feel cultured. Some come from movies or TV shows and carry the libido-shriveling risk of realizing you’ve been getting off to an excerpt from Vampire Diaries.
While many sex GIFs are taken from porn, their necessary brevity divorces them from that genre’s flaws. The GIF contains no cringey dialogue and is too short to allow you to contemplate whether the actor looks like an enforcer for an Eastern European crime ring, or ask yourself, Should I be shaving my asshole? Porn provides a complete narrative, from the coach’s arrival in the locker room to his triumphant cum shot all over the face of the cheerleader: the viewer is subservient to the screen. But the sex GIF has no narrative at all. It offers merely a tantalizing glimpse, allowing my own fantasies to flourish.
In this era of constant information overload, a quiet moment to retreat into our imaginations is itself erotic. Or perhaps it is only the hollowness of Baudrillard’s hyperreality, the merging of the digital/GIF and the physical/masturbation, the repeated dopamine hits that leave analog life a dreary, blue-balled ache.
Anaïs Nin once wrote about awaiting a lover, “Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.” Outside my door, kids and cat barf await. But here I am with my most reliable lover, myself.
—Rebecca Saltzman
TAKE 4
The cat has barfed in the hall, the laundry threatens avalanche, the kids are pounding the bedroom door, clamoring for lunch. There is simply no time for proper porn.
Enter the sex GIF: glorious, animated snippet of smooth, heaving bodies, played on endless loop. The sex GIF is perfectly engineered for time-crunch titillation. A sneaking glance at one’s phone during the daily grind is all one needs to transcend into the erotic.
Sex GIFs can be found by simply Googling “sex GIF,” which is helpful for the easily confused, like me. There seems to be a sex GIF for every kink, although I have not tested this hypothesis. If you want to see a housewife get stuffed with anal beads, the GIF provides. Many are black and white, so a lady can still feel cultured. Some come from movies or TV shows and carry the libido-shriveling risk of realizing you’ve been getting off to an excerpt from Vampire Diaries.
While many sex GIFs are taken from porn, their necessary brevity divorces them from that genre’s flaws. The GIF contains no cringey dialogue and is too short to allow you to contemplate whether the actor looks like an enforcer for an Eastern European crime ring, or ask yourself, Should I be shaving my asshole? Porn provides a complete narrative, from the coach’s arrival in the locker room to his triumphant cum shot all over the face of the cheerleader: the viewer is subservient to the screen. But the sex GIF has no narrative at all. It offers merely a tantalizing glimpse, allowing my own fantasies to flourish.
In this era of constant information overload, a quiet moment to retreat into our imaginations is itself erotic. Or perhaps it is only the hollowness of Baudrillard’s hyperreality, the merging of the digital/GIF and the physical/masturbation, the repeated dopamine hits that leave analog life a dreary, blue-balled ache.
Anaïs Nin once wrote about awaiting a lover, “Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.” Outside my door, kids and cat barf await. But here I am with my most reliable lover, myself.
—Rebecca Saltzman
TAKE 2
I don’t know how to experience sexual release without imagining myself as, or being, an object of a male, or making an object out of a woman. Do we all feel this way? In a 2016 randomized controlled trial published in the British Journal of Social Psychology (56.2, pp 334-353), researchers concluded that we, both women and men, are so deeply wired to objectify women, that it is a strain on our cognitive resources when we attempt to not objectify women.
When I was nineteen (c. 1988) and worked in the accounting department of an advertising agency in Buffalo, New York, I befriended Debbie, the receptionist—another funny woman with her life ahead of her. She drove a sporty car and liked classic rock, male strip clubs, and Playgirl, which I had never cared about. One night, she took me to a strip club in Canada where we were old enough to enter. All these years later, for some reason, I still remember the four men who performed.
The first man: smiley, with brown feathered hair à la David/Sean Cassidy; meaty body; spandex short-shorts that may or may not have been removed during his act, a recital-type dance with spinning and more spinning. My reaction: laughter hidden behind a beer bottle.
The second man had a handlebar mustache and a curly dirty-blond mane. He wore a cowboy hat and G-string and smiled wide as women tucked dollars into his penis-packed pouch. When he pointed to me, I recoiled.
The third man was a gay mohawked punker, pale and thin with a flaccid penis, defiant attitude, and Tina Turner confidence. He was totally uninterested in women. I wondered why he was on stage.
And then man number four: short, beautiful, young, with long platinum hair and shapely body. His act was an other-worldly strip dance to club music. He took off his white suit and every article of clothing until we could see his complete erection, back arched. My reaction: gobsmacked. What I loved most of all, though, was the dancing, which made him more beautiful. I could have watched just that. I believe I wanted the suit back on afterwards. Can we do that again?
—Thea Swanson
TAKE 3
My next-door-neighbor Stephanie had old parents. They didn’t stay up late enough to watch To Catch a Predator and did not know that people with eleven-year-old daughters should keep their computers in the living room and render them nonfunctional with spyware. The Chens tucked their desktop in a corner of the basement; the only security measure between Steph and me and the Seeking Encounters chat room were two creaky stairs and a minefield of desiccated millipedes.
We logged in as XxkrystalxX (the sluttiest username we could think of). I, winner of our middle school typing lab’s WPM competition, manned the keyboard, while Steph paced behind me, dictating.
a/s/l? asked soccerdad69, when we joined. Age, sex, location.
18/f/fl, I typed. (Florida was the sluttiest state I could think of.)
At the news of an F in the heavily-M chat, Seeking Encounters was inundated with an amount of porn that surpassed the capacity of the Chens’ DSL, loading in slow-tick bars. Steph and I clicked through the way we did the scary-movie channels on her parents’ satellite TV, each of us insisting the other was too big a baby to look until we both did, then screamed, gasped, shushed each other, insisted we’d never make the same mistake again. We repeated this process over and over, special terror devoted to the photos of male porn stars XxkrystalxX’s admirers claimed to resemble. They were appropriately horror-show xenomorphs with carapace abs and jump-scare erections that produced upsetting fluids.
The women made me think of a bridge-building video I’d watched in science class, hosted by an architect with big white eyebrows who bent over his desk, measuring and marking. I could imagine that, instead of trusses and beams, he had designed the evenly tanned lady in the pictures soccerdad69 sent (i bet u look like this huh), the orchid tattoo blooming on her collarbone like a beautified highway median. Slide-rule stomachs and protractor curves, the space between her raised legs a perfect forty-five-degree angle. Neat and simple and intentional. I understood why people would take pictures. The way they took pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge.
It would be like that forever, only with fewer millipedes. The men a well-rehearsed surprise, the women beautiful and bearing weight.
—Ali Sharpe
TAKE 4
The cat has barfed in the hall, the laundry threatens avalanche, the kids are pounding the bedroom door, clamoring for lunch. There is simply no time for proper porn.
Enter the sex GIF: glorious, animated snippet of smooth, heaving bodies, played on endless loop. The sex GIF is perfectly engineered for time-crunch titillation. A sneaking glance at one’s phone during the daily grind is all one needs to transcend into the erotic.
Sex GIFs can be found by simply Googling “sex GIF,” which is helpful for the easily confused, like me. There seems to be a sex GIF for every kink, although I have not tested this hypothesis. If you want to see a housewife get stuffed with anal beads, the GIF provides. Many are black and white, so a lady can still feel cultured. Some come from movies or TV shows and carry the libido-shriveling risk of realizing you’ve been getting off to an excerpt from Vampire Diaries.
While many sex GIFs are taken from porn, their necessary brevity divorces them from that genre’s flaws. The GIF contains no cringey dialogue and is too short to allow you to contemplate whether the actor looks like an enforcer for an Eastern European crime ring, or ask yourself, Should I be shaving my asshole? Porn provides a complete narrative, from the coach’s arrival in the locker room to his triumphant cum shot all over the face of the cheerleader: the viewer is subservient to the screen. But the sex GIF has no narrative at all. It offers merely a tantalizing glimpse, allowing my own fantasies to flourish.
In this era of constant information overload, a quiet moment to retreat into our imaginations is itself erotic. Or perhaps it is only the hollowness of Baudrillard’s hyperreality, the merging of the digital/GIF and the physical/masturbation, the repeated dopamine hits that leave analog life a dreary, blue-balled ache.
Anaïs Nin once wrote about awaiting a lover, “Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.” Outside my door, kids and cat barf await. But here I am with my most reliable lover, myself.
—Rebecca Saltzman
TAKE 1
I like looking at naked men on screen. There are naked men on Industry (HBO Max), and you see their dicks. There is more ass than dick, and there are more female parts than male parts on the show, but there are a number of dicks just hanging there. You don’t see hard dicks on TV except in porn. From porn, I learned stuff you could do with people in bed, when porn was a thing screened in regular theaters in the 1970s. Porn is like an Andy Warhol movie, but instead of looking at the Empire State Building for eight hours, you look at cocks and pussy and ass in an abstract way. In porn, there is often nothing but dick, and it can come to look like an aquatic animal searching for a coral reef to rest on. Everywhere else, there isn’t enough dick.
One of the interesting things about the sex on Industry is it’s shot from the perspective of the two central characters, who are women in their twenties who work in private banking. The women are randy all the time and looking for coked-up sex with whomever, when they aren’t selling incomprehensible financial Legos to a money mogul. On the plus side for the women, they assume positions they can come in. There’s a lot of going down on these women. The men drop to their knees like dogs hearing a whistle silent to us. The camera likes to look at the women, who are feeling something we’re meant to think is pleasure.
Many of the directors on the show are women, but the show runners, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, are men, and for the most part the scenes are shot to excite male viewers. If they wanted to excite me, the camera would be on dicks and male ass while the people were fucking. The naked male body isn’t shown much during sex because it’s not exciting to men, unless the men like other men.
When things that turn women on enter public space, they lift the lid on all things people are not supposed to know about and say out loud. Once the male body is not protected by privacy, and once the vulnerability of the male body—the size and shape of the cock, the beauty or lack of beauty of other parts—is introduced for evaluation, nothing in culture and society is protected. The male body becomes what the female body has always been and what the male body has always been secretly. In the history of human freedom, a long chapter belongs to looking at naked parts.
—Laurie Stone
TAKE 2
I don’t know how to experience sexual release without imagining myself as, or being, an object of a male, or making an object out of a woman. Do we all feel this way? In a 2016 randomized controlled trial published in the British Journal of Social Psychology (56.2, pp 334-353), researchers concluded that we, both women and men, are so deeply wired to objectify women, that it is a strain on our cognitive resources when we attempt to not objectify women.
When I was nineteen (c. 1988) and worked in the accounting department of an advertising agency in Buffalo, New York, I befriended Debbie, the receptionist—another funny woman with her life ahead of her. She drove a sporty car and liked classic rock, male strip clubs, and Playgirl, which I had never cared about. One night, she took me to a strip club in Canada where we were old enough to enter. All these years later, for some reason, I still remember the four men who performed.
The first man: smiley, with brown feathered hair à la David/Sean Cassidy; meaty body; spandex short-shorts that may or may not have been removed during his act, a recital-type dance with spinning and more spinning. My reaction: laughter hidden behind a beer bottle.
The second man had a handlebar mustache and a curly dirty-blond mane. He wore a cowboy hat and G-string and smiled wide as women tucked dollars into his penis-packed pouch. When he pointed to me, I recoiled.
The third man was a gay mohawked punker, pale and thin with a flaccid penis, defiant attitude, and Tina Turner confidence. He was totally uninterested in women. I wondered why he was on stage.
And then man number four: short, beautiful, young, with long platinum hair and shapely body. His act was an other-worldly strip dance to club music. He took off his white suit and every article of clothing until we could see his complete erection, back arched. My reaction: gobsmacked. What I loved most of all, though, was the dancing, which made him more beautiful. I could have watched just that. I believe I wanted the suit back on afterwards. Can we do that again?
—Thea Swanson
TAKE 3
My next-door-neighbor Stephanie had old parents. They didn’t stay up late enough to watch To Catch a Predator and did not know that people with eleven-year-old daughters should keep their computers in the living room and render them nonfunctional with spyware. The Chens tucked their desktop in a corner of the basement; the only security measure between Steph and me and the Seeking Encounters chat room were two creaky stairs and a minefield of desiccated millipedes.
We logged in as XxkrystalxX (the sluttiest username we could think of). I, winner of our middle school typing lab’s WPM competition, manned the keyboard, while Steph paced behind me, dictating.
a/s/l? asked soccerdad69, when we joined. Age, sex, location.
18/f/fl, I typed. (Florida was the sluttiest state I could think of.)
At the news of an F in the heavily-M chat, Seeking Encounters was inundated with an amount of porn that surpassed the capacity of the Chens’ DSL, loading in slow-tick bars. Steph and I clicked through the way we did the scary-movie channels on her parents’ satellite TV, each of us insisting the other was too big a baby to look until we both did, then screamed, gasped, shushed each other, insisted we’d never make the same mistake again. We repeated this process over and over, special terror devoted to the photos of male porn stars XxkrystalxX’s admirers claimed to resemble. They were appropriately horror-show xenomorphs with carapace abs and jump-scare erections that produced upsetting fluids.
The women made me think of a bridge-building video I’d watched in science class, hosted by an architect with big white eyebrows who bent over his desk, measuring and marking. I could imagine that, instead of trusses and beams, he had designed the evenly tanned lady in the pictures soccerdad69 sent (i bet u look like this huh), the orchid tattoo blooming on her collarbone like a beautified highway median. Slide-rule stomachs and protractor curves, the space between her raised legs a perfect forty-five-degree angle. Neat and simple and intentional. I understood why people would take pictures. The way they took pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge.
It would be like that forever, only with fewer millipedes. The men a well-rehearsed surprise, the women beautiful and bearing weight.
—Ali Sharpe
TAKE 4
The cat has barfed in the hall, the laundry threatens avalanche, the kids are pounding the bedroom door, clamoring for lunch. There is simply no time for proper porn.
Enter the sex GIF: glorious, animated snippet of smooth, heaving bodies, played on endless loop. The sex GIF is perfectly engineered for time-crunch titillation. A sneaking glance at one’s phone during the daily grind is all one needs to transcend into the erotic.
Sex GIFs can be found by simply Googling “sex GIF,” which is helpful for the easily confused, like me. There seems to be a sex GIF for every kink, although I have not tested this hypothesis. If you want to see a housewife get stuffed with anal beads, the GIF provides. Many are black and white, so a lady can still feel cultured. Some come from movies or TV shows and carry the libido-shriveling risk of realizing you’ve been getting off to an excerpt from Vampire Diaries.
While many sex GIFs are taken from porn, their necessary brevity divorces them from that genre’s flaws. The GIF contains no cringey dialogue and is too short to allow you to contemplate whether the actor looks like an enforcer for an Eastern European crime ring, or ask yourself, Should I be shaving my asshole? Porn provides a complete narrative, from the coach’s arrival in the locker room to his triumphant cum shot all over the face of the cheerleader: the viewer is subservient to the screen. But the sex GIF has no narrative at all. It offers merely a tantalizing glimpse, allowing my own fantasies to flourish.
In this era of constant information overload, a quiet moment to retreat into our imaginations is itself erotic. Or perhaps it is only the hollowness of Baudrillard’s hyperreality, the merging of the digital/GIF and the physical/masturbation, the repeated dopamine hits that leave analog life a dreary, blue-balled ache.
Anaïs Nin once wrote about awaiting a lover, “Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.” Outside my door, kids and cat barf await. But here I am with my most reliable lover, myself.
—Rebecca Saltzman
