Sex and Bacon (4 page)

An ex-girlfriend taught me to mix olive oil with hair conditioner, half and half. You apply the resulting masque to your hair, put a plastic grocery bag over your slimy locks to catch any drips, and—if you’re really on a mission—use a hairdryer over the bag to heat the conditioner mayonnaise inside, which allows the moisture to penetrate even more efficiently. After an hour or so, remove the bag and rinse. Your hair will be astoundingly soft. Your scalp may smell a tiny bit salady but if you keep the ratio one to one, the conditioner fragrance should cover up most of the olive oil smell. Because I regularly bleach my hair to powder, pan-frying my scalp in the process, I use this deep-conditioning treatment a few times a month. So far, my hair is still attached to my head and doesn’t entirely resemble fiberglass, so I count that as a success.

You can mash up avocados and apply them to your skin as a moisturizing masque, or so I’ve heard. If you want to be really fancy, you can add honey to the mashed-up avocados. Or you can make an exfoliating scrub of honey, oatmeal, and plain whole-milk yogurt.

But these are all things I’d rather eat, given the choice.

A FRIEND OF
mine who grew up in Southern California told me a story about the dog her family had when she was a little girl. One summer, the dog inexplicably grew a long, lush coat of glossy hair—nobody knew why, but all of a sudden its fur was soft and thick and
fragrant
instead of coarse and doggy. My friend spent hours brushing the dog’s shiny coat, marveling at its shampoo commercial-caliber body and bounce. Everyone commented on the thickness and softness of the dog’s hair, from neighbors to strangers on the street. Everyone wanted to know what brand of kibble the dog was being fed.

One day my friend followed the family dog into the back yard, wanting to brush and pet it. All of a sudden the reason for the dog’s glossy mane became evident: It had been gorging on the avocados that had fallen into their yard from the neighbor’s tree. Once avocado season was over, the dog’s coat returned to normal. My friend still brushed the dog every now and again out of a sense of duty, but the sensual enjoyment she’d taken in the dog’s wonderfully conditioned fur was gone. The Breck dog was no more.

I’VE HAD A
lot of experience with foodsex. I’ve been dribbled with honey, sprayed with canned whipped cream, and topped with hot fudge. I’ve been fed a variety of foods from other people’s fingers. I’ve given blow jobs with Altoids tucked into my cheeks like a minty-fresh squirrel, and I’ve sucked on ice cubes and then nipples more times than I can count.

But all in all, I find erotic eating upsetting—maybe I’m just not enough of a multitasker, but I prefer not to mix the process of digestion and excretion with anything romantic. I’d rather enjoy a slice of birthday cake on a plate than scraped from the ass of an attractive acquaintance—and a tub full of baked beans just seems like a plumbing disaster (and a vicious yeast infection) waiting to happen. I admit to being old and no fun in matters where food is used as a prop for sex.

If I’m cramming fresh strawberries into my mouth, cramming them into my coochie just seems redundant. And if I’m going down on a girl, I want to taste her, not an array of dessert toppings. The Altoid trick is just weird and robotic. And drizzling chocolate sauce anywhere near someone’s asshole just seems blatantly scatological.

Isn’t good food sexy enough on its own?

A FEW YEARS
ago I became aware of a phenomenon occurring in a few publicity-hungry Japanese restaurants. Apparently, for a steep price, the restaurant will hire a model to lie naked and still on a table. The model’s body is then covered in sushi—sometimes leaves modestly conceal private areas—and then restaurant guests are allowed to pluck mouthfuls of sushi from the motionless body with their chopsticks. It is all presented in a very jolly way

First of all, I’d prefer that my sushi not sit at body temperature for too long. Raw fish, body heat, and the ambient bacteria that live on human skin seem like a bad, bad combination. And—no offense to any of the models—but I don’t even share Chapstick with my friends. I can’t see myself eating a tuna roll from someone’s pubes, leaf-covered or not.

And, having spent a career being a malleable, living body for pay, I can’t help but identify with the sushi models. How trying would it be to lie absolutely still for several hours as sake-laced businessmen and their expense-account guests poked at you with wooden sticks? You can’t tell me your skin wouldn’t crawl. You can’t tell me you wouldn’t stare up into their faces and wonder what would motivate someone to pay a large amount of money for the novelty of using a human body as a piece of furniture—a warm, living table—nothing more. You can’t tell me you -wouldn’t get chilly as you lay there waiting for them to finish. You can’t tell me you wouldn’t have to pee. You can’t tell me you wouldn’t flinch when some red-faced clown used his chopsticks to pinch your nipple, pretending to mistake your flesh for a rosette of pickled ginger or a bit of smoked salmon.

Something seems deeply pornographic about eating sushi from a living model, and it’s not the paid nudity.

Treating a fellow human being as an inert, insensate object is a depraved act, whether you’re jerking off to pictures of them on the Internet or eating food taken from the surfaces of their bodies. Whether they’re getting paid to pretend to be a schoolgirl or a serving tray, pleasure necessitates them being viewed as something other than an actual living, breathing, thinking, feeling individual.

And maybe the models don’t give two shits about what the people eating nigiri from their skin think about them. They probably don’t. But that’s not the point—I’ve been a paid model, and while nobody’s ever eaten sashimi off of me, I’ve never felt victimized by my decision to pose for sexually explicit fare. I’ve cashed my paychecks and paid my bills without a sliver of curiosity about who-would be spanking it to my images later. I couldn’t have cared less if some greasy pervert mistook me for a Catholic schoolgirl
or
a piece of furniture, as long as I was making a fair wage for my work.

I’m not worried about the feelings of the models as much as I’m worried about the feelings of the restaurant patrons. I’m worried about the heads and hearts of folks who can do what they do. I think it’s really bad for us to get used to viewing other people as
things
. I think it really hurts us. As much as we like to believe we can tell the difference between a living model and a table, there seems to be a great deal of confusion between porn models and living, feeling women. Either way—tables or bodies—they are objects for us to use without any consideration for their comfort or sensibilities.

I find this willingness to suspend belief in other people’s basic humanity very, very dangerous.

I LIKE SUSHI
a lot, and I love naked women. But I have no desire to go to one of those sushi restaurants that hire living models as serving platters. I also have no desire to look at a naked woman’s body unless we’re both in the same room together and she’s naked because she wants to be—not because she’s trying to pay her rent.

As the Offspring say, you gotta keep ’em separated.

I’M A RISK-TAKER. I’VE ALWAYS TAKEN RISKS-WITH MY
body
and
my heart, with my mind and my emotions and my health. I’m a gambler, baby. I’d rather play steep odds for the big payoff than live my life wishing I’d had the courage to stake it all and win.

Furthermore, I’m at peace with losing. I’ve gotten my heart broken more times than I can count, and I’m carrying an extra twenty pounds of ballast on my ass and thighs from all the food I’ve gobbled up just because it tasted so good I didn’t want to stop. When it comes down to the choice between living a life of
yes, please
and living one of
no, thanks
I’ll choose
yes
every time, and I’ll generally raise you a
can I have some more?
just to keep the stakes high.

I’m risking my health when I eat certain foods that I love, gambling that I’ll be able to consume them without suddenly clutching my chest and falling over dead on the floor. I’m gambling with long-term systemic stuff like colon cancer, diabetes, and obesity, too, just in case the idea of keeling over with a heart attack before I reach the age of forty isn’t serious enough. I know this. I’m not stupid. I read enough scary health news to know that when you snack on a pound of chocolate-covered bacon, you’re holding your own life in your cupped, greasy hands. One fumble and your candy-covered-pork-eating days are over. There are a plethora of ways to ruin your own health, and many of them are quite delicious. Despite the risk, I eat—and love—with passionate enthusiasm. I’ve never been good at turning down the offer of something sweet.

WHEN I CAME
of age (which is a polite way of saying
When I started to fuck)
in the mid-’80s, AIDS was the cause du jour, the hip concern that inspired legions of socially conscious, breathlessly virginal high schoolers to distribute condoms to their classmates, spreading the gospel of Safe Sex to people who probably wouldn’t be having sex—safe or otherwise—until college.

Condoms came in all colors and flavors. Their packaging was fun and bright and sassy, incorporating cartoon characters and good-natured puns. The Stealth Condom (“They’ll never see you coming!”) was a popular and much-coveted item. Girls in training bras earnestly debated the merits of vanilla versus strawberry flavoring on condoms meant for safe fellatio, pressing their tongues to the unwrapped condoms as if licking stamps for their scrapbooks.

Condoms used to be mysterious and dirty—accoutrements for the Dirty Old Man set, not fresh, young, middle-class teens—but in the mid-’80s all that changed, and decidedly so: Millions of Junior Anti-Sex League honor students handily demonstrated prophylactic use with bananas years before any of them would ever encounter a hard and urgent phallus. Condoms became first chic accessories, then necessary social items.

I had a stash myself—Beyond 7s, Rough Riders, Trojan Magnums, and Trojan-Knz Larges functioned both as punch lines in their own right among the jock-and-stoner set
and
as jerkoff material in my solitary hours, years before I’d even experienced my first chaste kiss. Through osmosis, I learned that lubricated was better than nonlubricated and that the ones with nonoxynol-9 •were the best of all, though they tasted soapy. I preferred vanilla flavoring to strawberry.

As we grew up and started to fuck, most of us paid lip service to our years of Safe Sex indoctrination: We used condoms. We used them proficiently, squeezing the latex receptacle tip and neatly rolling them down all the way making sure to add water-based lubricant, and holding on to them firmly before dismounting. We fucked like middle-aged Bunny Ranch hookers, pragmatic and shameless as we garbed ourselves (and our lovers) in latex. Itwas like taking a vitamin or going to the gym: We were self-righteously Doing The Right Thing, Protecting Ourselves.

Decades later we would realize the risks of contracting AIDS from each other had been almost nil. We could have been fucking ourselves raw in a great big pileup without worrying about anything more distressing than breaking out before a school dance. Imagining ourselves as jaded libertines in need of protection was exciting but, sadly, almost completely inaccurate—most of us were virgins, and the rest of us were woefully inexperienced. In retrospect, our panic over disease transmission seemed a lot like wishful thinking.

Once I actually started using condoms for intercourse in my junior year of high school, I quickly became disenchanted. It turned out that condoms were far better in theory than in practice. Condoms were messy, inconvenient, and smelly! The studs and ribs didn’t do a thing to increase “her’ pleasure! The flavors made them taste
worse
, not better! And dental dams were just insane—how could a tiny square of latex cover an entire vulva? And more importantly, why would you want to lick bubble-gum-scented rubber when the whole point of cunnilingus was close, hot, tongue-to-cunt contact?

Plus, I was on the Pill. If I wasn’t going to get pregnant—and if I was serially monogamous with men and women I loved and trusted—and if I got tested for HIV regularly—why, I thought, should I have to use condoms and all the other assorted hateful accessories? I didn’t see the point, since two uninfected lovers couldn’t infect each other! In the ‘90s, though, the idea of fucking without latex was suicidal heresy, so I kept my doubts to myself.

But cautiously, slowly, furtively, I began having unprotected sex.

It was my secret—like being bulimic or alcoholic. I didn’t tell my friends. I continued to publicly debate the relative merits of Japanese-versus American-made condoms, between “thin” condoms and the ones sold—confusingly—as “extra-strength.” I owned three different kinds of dental dams—mint, bubble-gum, and unscented. I kept a box of latex gloves under my bed. My boudoir smelled like a Goodyear tire. I kept up appearances.

At first I wasn’t assertive about my preference for bareback lovin’, and I’d allow a partner to put on a condom or slide on a glove, if he or she wanted to. But eventually I became active in my safesex discouragement, purring “I want to feel you inside me” in a way calculated to be irresistible. And I did want that—I wanted it very much. I wanted closeness, intimacy and connection during sex. I wanted the boundaries between my body and my lovers’ bodies to blend and melt. It was only right that an act so emotionally charged carried risk—I wanted to be vulnerable. The risk of death gave sex acknowledgeable weight, made it a sacred act. It was the opposite of casual—for me, sex was crucial. The hardware got in the way lowered the stakes, turned intercourse into slapstick. I couldn’t stand to reduce sex to a series of precautionary acts when, to me, it felt like something holy.