Free Best Sex Writing 2012: The State of Today's Sexual Culture by Susie Bright, Rachel Kramer Bussel Page B

“It will be okay.” This was a delicate and extraordinary space, where we both unabashedly cried together. For me, it was the emotional antithesis of the wordless reactive shame I often felt but lacked the guts or words to talk about. Thank you for sharing this space with me.
    There were many moments when I doubted myself during those years—hazardous moments, like brushes with bad clients, when yours were the strong arms in which I sought respite. There were also many instances when I lacked the confidence to walk with dignity into a university classroom or a square job interview, moments when I was tempted to blow my ho money by going on benders because climbing the class ladder was terrifying. Thank you for loving me the way you knew best. Your big calloused hands held me strong to this life. You still took me dancing until our clothes were soaked through with sweat. You popped Heart’s Greatest Hits in your car stereo, and we drove the back roads singing “Crazy on You” in comically awful disharmony. You called me “old lady” and “beautiful” and “your girl.” You taught me that butch-femme wasn’t about dress codes, the gendered skills we’d acquired, or jobs we held, or even about who bent over in the bedroom. At the crux of it all, our butch-femme traditions were about creating a place that was distinctly ours. Again and again you brought me to this home, this shelter from external pressures, this asylum from troubled pasts and uncertain futures. Thank you for assuring me that I always had a remarkable, shameless place.

I Want You to Want Me
    Hugo Schwyzer
     
     
     
    Like countless American children, I grew up hearing the nursery rhyme in which little boys are characterized as “snips and snails and puppy-dog tails” while girls are “sugar and spice and everything nice.” As a small boy very attached to our pet dachshund, I thought puppy-dog tails were a fine thing indeed, but the point of the rhyme wasn’t lost on me. Boys were dirty, girls were clean and pure.
    We’re raised in a culture that both celebrates and pathologizes male “dirtiness.” On the one hand, boys were and are given license to be louder, rowdier, and more sexual. We’re expected to get our hands dirty, to rip our pants, and get covered in stains. We enjoy a freedom to be dirty that goes hand in hand with the expectation that we are in a state of perpetual craving for women’s bodies. Even now, too many girls grow up shamed for wanting to be dirty. And if men’s bodies are dirty, then to lust after them is to be dirty as well.
    For many guys, growing up with the right to be dirty is accompanied by the realization that many people find the male body repulsive. In sixth grade, the same year that puberty hit me with irrevocable force, I had an art teacher, Mr. Blake. (This dates me: few public middle schools have art teachers anymore.) I’ll never forget his solemn declaration that great artists all acknowledged that the female form was more beautiful than the male. He made a passing crack that “no one wants to see naked men, anyway”—and the whole class laughed. “Ewwww,” a girl sitting next to me said, evidently disgusted at the thought of a naked boy.
    In time, I discovered that Mr. Blake was wrong about this so-called artistic consensus. But it took me a lot longer to unlearn the damage done by remarks like his and by the conventional wisdom of my childhood. I came into puberty convinced both that my male body was repulsive and that the girls for whom I longed were flawless. (I still remember how floored I was at 16, when the lovely classmate on whom I had a crush farted while I was sitting next to her in German class. I had sincerely believed until that moment that women didn’t pass gas.)
    A year later, in my first sexual relationship, I was convinced that my girlfriend found my body physically repellent. I could accept that girls liked and wanted sex, but I figured that what my girlfriend liked was how