Inspo—
“Major dilemma. If I actually do, by some terrible chance, end up in flagrante, surely these would be most attractive at crucial moment. However, chances of reaching crucial moment greatly increased by wearing these scary stomach-holding-in pants very popular with grannies the world over. Hah, tricky. Very tricky.” —Bridget, Bridget Jones’s Diary
“You can’t always just fuck the big-dick boys, because the problem with the big-dick boys is that they know that they’ve got big dicks. So they go, ‘I’m a big-dick boy, I cummed in you, goodbye!’ But everybody got a hand, baby. Everybody got hand.” —Theda Hammel, “The Fisting Special Casting Special” of NYMPHOWARS
“Oh, what a bore, to be so adored.” —St. Vincent, Masseduction
I have a few theories about sex parties.
The measure of a sex party’s worth is not how many loads you take or how many dicks you suck, but a volume of thrill, an atmospheric applause-o-meter of dirty grins and deft caresses, twirling the air toward that acrid-sweet spot between sterile and stale. It’s the rush of negotiating, hunting, rejecting, attracting, recovering within moments, in rapid succession, in as little words as possible, maintaining a mood. Getting laid is crucial, but cumming isn’t, unless you have a quick rebound period, in which case, call me. Sex party sex feels like a game, but it’s a game for everybody to win, a cooperative puzzle of desire and its utilitarian satisfaction. The game shifts from one hour to the next. Between parties, venues differ, attendees vary considerably, no matter how selective they claim to be.
About that: I think the sex party, as an experience, should be accessible to everyone, and the best way to achieve that is by having a plurality of sex parties that cater to different sexual scenes, comprised of people who like fucking each other. However, sex parties can’t get everyone laid. Open and empowered sexual communities get everyone laid. These emerge through intimate networks and encounters unhampered by shame, policing, and displacement— which is why the structural privileges of cisgender, white men grant them safer and more visible sexual-social spaces. But just because certain sex lives are not as open or visible to us doesn’t mean they do not exist, and haven’t found creative, covert ways to access pleasure.
That being said, all sex parties tend to be difficult, even the ones in which you supposedly belong. These challenges aren’t deliberate features of a sex party, but the natural tension of showing up somewhere for public, group sex with people you don’t know. It can feel counterintuitive to talk to strangers, much less fuck them, much less not fuck them and still share a space with them that revolves around fucking. It’s weird. Sex party producers’ aim is to pad the room, create and sustain a vibe that keeps attendees relaxed and receptive, safe from unwanted aggression but also self-doubt.
It’s not easy, setting the ethical parameters of a place that only works if people touch each other, and permit themselves to be touched, not by everybody, but by at least somebody. Anxieties cluster around the potential for assault, but also neglect. I hate being tailed and touched by somebody after turning them away. But I hate when the ones I want just glance and wait. I hate rejecting, and I hate being rejected. But I hate deciding at all, wishing to let someone else decide for me, which is possible, but a big commitment (and I hate to commit). And while I don’t hate to ask, I hate to have to ask in order to know.
The trick, or the intention, is that you lean into these gaps between wanting and having. You experiment, you let go, you show compassion. You fuck. You embrace what my friend Al B (@lemon_verbena) calls the situational kink, as distinct from material and sensational kinds of kink, although these also come into play. He maps these three categories onto a triangle, within which our desires more or less fit. I find this helpful even if it dissolves in action, like the geography of taste buds on the tongue. It reminds me that the sex party is the fetish in and of itself. It owes its erotic power to libertinism, to risk, to sketch. We might get off on the fantasy of all this with ease, but in fantasies, we get to excise the logistics of getting what we want. This is why we never pursue most of our fantasies in real life, not out of fear, but out of recognition that the undesirability of those logistics outweigh or eclipse or nullify the desirability of their end. This is why porn is not “the theory,” even if it can inspire one— theories are more or less proven by their fulfillment, fantasies are undone. Contrary to what we tell ourselves, we find the most value in sex parties not from trying to realize fantasies, but in recovering possibilities.
If you haven’t noticed, I am trying to demystify the sex party for my own sake, as if knowing the distance between trees in a forest makes it harder to get lost. I have a difficult time. I try to stay receptive, perhaps will find what clicks this time or next. But I tend to leave feeling that I’ve wasted my time and others’. Visibility is a tricky thing. I get plenty of glances and hello’s, and struggle to move nimbly above the reproach of rudeness toward perfectly pleasant people who I don’t want to fuck— or do I? Should I? I freeze up. I wrestle with the porousness of my own boundaries, which I have worked so hard to erect. Too much thinking, my libido sighs. I’ll just be by the bar.
Maybe I’m just not big on thrills. Maybe it’s an issue with New York sex parties, as I’ve been told. My running theory is that it’s a height issue: I’m very short! And while this isn’t usually an issue, it is when I’m standing in close proximity to someone, in a dim room, and have to crane my neck upward to cruise them. There’s something intrinsically humiliating about that for me, about the way looking resembles pleading. There’s something intrinsically humiliating about desire in public, about announcing a want, which is a lack, which is lobbed into the hands of others to disappoint, or worse, take as evidence of a fault. This is easier behind a phone screen or among friends, where I can quickly return to the image I like of myself, of someone full up. Wasn’t that the more attractive image in the first place? At a sex party, my want must be worn clearly, my want is the dress code. Like most questions of costume, I must be overthinking it.
XO
TY