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A Panegyric Regarding the Tenacity it Takes to Bring Philosophy and Anal Sex Together

            They say that your work doesn’t get good until religious groups want to burn it and this one definitely isn’t a morality play or a Cole Porter song or a depressing birthday handjob.

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            I move my mouth between her legs as though I was preparing to translate Song of Songs from the original Hebrew; kissing the outer skin of that sacred, effulgent chalice where the sweet nectar is hidden, seeking the same ripened pleasure that was sought by the ancient Taoists who liked to pretend that they were just replenishing their ch’i through their tongues.

            And as I expand to her further territories like a craven warlord, I ask and she replies like antiphony:

            “It’s nothing.”

            “You sure?”

            “Yeah, put it in my ass if you want.” She demonstrated her willingness by bending her posture appropriately.

            “I doubt that it will make me repent for anything.”

            “But it will make you cum.”

            You laugh in the face of god with your transgression. It is only kink. Only a lark. Some sort of scintillating, lecherous perversion. Just a laugh.

            “Will you keep your crucifix around your neck?”

            “You know that I never take my jewelry off.”

            Is this a moral violation? Is this a violence? Is this conversation the soul of feminism; a sight of pleasure in a parable by Aristotle? Fuck it. Who knows?! I’d rather take Jynx Maze, send her to the French Culinary Institute (now known as the ICC with a convenient location in SoHo), then pay her to cook crepes for me in the nude; buoyant and immeasurably impressed. 

            I could have attempted a joke to start things off – “I have the syphilitic corpse of John Wilmot stacked next to my winter coats in my closet ready for reanimation, so we can make this a threesome if you want” – but I choose to remain mute instead and focus my attention on her radiant posterior which was still erect off the bed like a monument floating away from inconvenient historical allegations.

            Is this poetic journalism? Is there a face to the characters? Or maybe they are just words on paper underneath the weighing elements.

            In this still moment, full of racing thoughts and anxiety about performance (for some reason the only parallel that comes to mind is when Indiana Jones enters the cave inside the Canyon of the Crescent Moon where the Holy Grail is kept in the third film of what used to be a trilogy – the mix of fear, defiant machismo and perspiration on his face), I begin compartmentalizing memories: I once fucked a girl in a stranger’s backyard in the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn. Hidden away from the street, we were bodies pulsating, sweating in the summer heat. In. Out. Her body a half arc, thin arms straightened out to balance her weight against the wall of the building which preserved our privacy from the view of the passerby likely milling about.

            I said “no condom”. She said “no problem”. That was my first experience with a girl letting me penetrate her from behind. I was 16; she was 15. I fucked her there – but I’ve never fucked a Republican. Which is odd because an unwavering allegiance to the GOP can likely be psychoanalytically correlated to some unresolved Freudian anal fixation (nothing to do with the fact that it always seems to be a Republican governor that gets caught in a motel room with a teenage twink and a couple of grams of meth – I know people that would simply qualify that as a good time). Seems like we should get along better than we do, especially considering my libertarian leanings.

            But, anal sex, really, is like trying foie gras for the first time: as soon as you get past the unsavory realization that what you’re eating is a duck liver that was force-fed corn and alcohol until the point that it inevitably burst like a cirrhotic firework of flavor, it’s actually pretty tasty if prepared correctly. It becomes a pleasant and decadent experience. Tight, warm, a little rougher than usual. Which brings me to lubrication: simultaneously important in the practical, literary and philosophic sense.

            She had been on top every night and mid-afternoon for the last two weeks, and maybe her acquiescence to this erotic exploration was levied from either guilt in keeping me underutilized or maybe just a craving to change the structure of the model – either way, I took out the lube and spread it liberally, cool on shaking fingertips, and it seemed to be that this process was similar to Darwinism somehow. Like a tussle between logic and faith where logic should inherently win, but doesn’t always. In October of 2010, The Journal of Sexual Medicine published a study that revealed that women who’ve indulged in anal sex achieved orgasm 94% of the time in comparison to the 65% who achieved climax after vaginal penetration (and 84% after receiving oral stimulation, with respect to that particular art form). The results of this study were, with near immediacy, reported and reposted on various blogs, as well as between the covers of several popular magazines easily accessible at your local Whole Foods. So, during those wonderfully trivial few months, like a moss of stars thick against a black canvas, men all over the United States were bargaining anxiously, canvassing their wives and girlfriends, putting a toe in at a time into the lukewarm water of their propositions by asking whether they were “into it” to start things off. Maybe, even going with the “wouldn’t it be funny if we tried it” approach. Personally, if I was ever the trepidations sort, I would go with something like: “…and I hear that Sinead O’Connor is really into it – and anyone that can do such a great version of The Family’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” (other notable mentions are the Stereophonics and my favorite punk cover band/super group Me First and the Gimme Gimmes) and later be ex-communicated by the pope must be a luminary in most aspects of her life. So…”

            When we begun, we each exhaled – I can’t necessarily tell you if it was for the same reasons. And when I came, she came, we came together. It seemed more than it was, but it wasn’t. She fell asleep next to me while I stayed awake for another month or so thinking about how all philosophy has finally crumbled.

            The next morning I brewed coffee while she scrambled some eggs.

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             They say that your work doesn’t get good until someone shoots you and then asks for your autograph. So what will come of this? When they read this, they’ll likely ask – “Jack, is this true? Are you writing some droll 20 minutes of Sodom?” Definitely not. “Is this thematically part of your cataloguing of love, or death… is this some glorious accident or divine, wild mumsimus?” The answer, shortly, is “I don’t know”. All I know is that no farewell is ever free or fair. My writing is simply my attempt to pay a debt and to acclaim experience. I just never want to become the type of writer that has to look up the word “orgasm” in a Thesaurus.

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