Good Afternoon, May I Help You Choose an Anal Toy Today?
An Essay, Believe it or Not, On Writing.
NOTE: Welcome to “Swimming in the Afternoon,” a new writing section here on Fetal Position, the title a reference to a Kafka diary entry I’ve written about on FP before. Swimming in the Afternoon will not be the usual “how to write” essays (structure, character, theme) but will focus rather about how to be a writer, the mental game so to speak — about the necessary attitude, defiance, remove, approach and mentality I’ve found, over time, I have to maintain in order to write. And which very few writers seem to discuss.
I will post a new SITA every few weeks; this first post will be free, but future SITA posts will be for paid subscribers only.
“Good afternoon,” said the sunshiny young saleswoman who greeted me as I entered the adult store. “May I help you choose an anal toy today?”
I was horny, but confused. She had the bright countenance and joyful exuberance of a kindergarten teacher on the first day of school – “We’re going to have fun today, kids, yay!” - but she was saying the words “anal” and “toy.”
For a moment, I thought I’d walked into the wrong store.
“Um,” I said.
She smiled and clapped her hands as if Storytime was beginning.
“We have some wonderful new items that just came in!” she sang. “My name’s Sherri, let me know if you need any help!”
Thanks to e-commerce, I haven’t been inside an adult shop in some time. But my wife and I had a weekend away coming up - no kids, no work, no interruptions - and it being Thursday already, I thought I’d stop in and buy something wonderfully dirty.
It was not to be.
This was not a dirty store.
It was a very clean store.
The walls were white and the ceiling was white and the floor was white. The shelves were glass, and the tables were glass, and even the dildos were glass, though the sign above them didn’t call them dildos, it called them “Insertables.”
I felt my passion waning. The whole place looked less like a sex shop and more like an Apple store. Apple stores are not sexy. Apple stores are the opposite of sex. They’re an entirely different kind of anal.
As I made my way between $250 “Interactive Male Masturbators” and $145 “Body-safe, stainless-steel, phthalate-free, double-sided pleasure tools,” I tried to figure out what was wrong. Something about this place felt off. It had all the basic elements of sex, but it wasn’t remotely sexy. Ten minutes earlier, I had been afire with lust, lust that had now been extinguished.
Maybe it was the posters, I thought.
All about the store hung friendly informational posters, as friendly and bright and cheerful as Sherri.
One read “Let’s talk about Anal Play.”
“The anus is rich with nerve endings!” it explained. “Everyone can enjoy anal play with communication, relaxation and ample lubrication!”
What the fuck was going on?
Another read, “Get To Know Dildos!”
Dildos, it explained, are “abstract toys used for penetration!”
Penetration?
You mean fucking?
By now my mood had gone from horny to disinterested to angry. Sherri came bounding out of the “App-Controlled, Non-Porous Thrusters” section.
“Any questions?” she sang.
I wanted to ask her why they called handcuffs “Love Restraints” and spanking paddles “Impact Play Devices.” I wanted to ask her why the sign outside read “Sex Shop.” I wanted to ask her where my passion had gone.
“Just FYI,” she said, “all our Luv Mor lubes are twenty percent off. The lavender-jasmine is my fave!”
Luv Mor, I thought. Even the names of the lubes are chaste.
And that’s when I realized what that lovely, open, accepting, well-lit store was missing:
Sin.
I grew up in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in New York – women sat in separate sections from men, often hidden behind a wall or a curtain, and sex was never discussed – so trust me, I am no fan of shame. I’m all too familiar with the debilitating effects of guilt and judgement, and perhaps you are, too. And so perhaps this is the kind of sex shop you prefer.
Me, I need a little sin.
I need a touch of the venial, a smidge of wrongdoing. I’m sure sex was lovely for Adam and Eve before The Fall, with lots of communication, relaxation and lubrication. But their first fuck knowing sin was epic.
“What the hell was that?” Adam asked, trying to catch his breath.
“I don’t know,” Eve gasped, busy rolling the first cigarette, “but I’ve never cum so hard in my life.”
I guess that explains why God was so angry – his whole punishment backfired.
Which brings me to writing.
I was raised on the Five Books of Moses, and so holiness bores me. Virtue puts me to sleep. Literature, when I discovered it in my teens, was dangerous. It was sinful. Kafka and Beckett, Voltaire and Vonnegut, Pinter and O’Connor and Twain and Faulkner. They laughed, mocked, questioned, shouted, wondered, upended. They sinned, gloriously. Here’s Pinter on Beckett:
“He’s not fucking me about, he’s not leading me up any garden path, he’s not slipping me a wink, he’s not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he’s not selling me anything I don’t want to buy – he doesn’t give a bollock whether I buy or not - he hasn’t got his hand over his heart. Well I’ll buy his goods hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely.”
In short, said Harold, Sam sins.
To write, I need to have a sin. I need something unholy. I need to do something that shalt not be done. Without it, there’s no point in writing.
In Foreskin’s Lament, it was an admission I was ashamed to make: I’m still afraid of God.
In Hope: A Tragedy, it was a sinful question: is focusing on the horrific past helping us or hurting us? And maybe Anne Frank, being the iron-willed girl she was, wouldn’t like being turned into the victim of all victims?
In Mother For Dinner, the sin was to write a character, in this day of cultural identity, who was a hero for leaving his people - for assimilating, for tossing the past away.
I think the best writers, at their best, were the best sinners (and there are not enough sinners writing today). I don’t mean Biblical sin. I mean trangression. I mean doing or saying that which shouldn’t be done or said. Because that, for me, is what the best writing does.
The sin can be philosophical. Voltaire thought it would be a wonderful sin to question optimism, not to mention the most respected philosopher of his time.
The sin could be petty. Cervantes wrote Quixote because he really, really, really hated the knight errant novels all the idiots in his time so adored.
The sin can be social. In a nation still torn by slavery, Twain told a story about a boy who was a hero for helping a slave escape. “All right, then,” says Huck in one of the most beautifully sinful lines in all American literature, “I’ll go to Hell.”
The sin can be literary. Beckett thought it would be fun to write a play where nothing happened, contra every rule of theater, where a couple of characters just waited around for someone to show up. And oh - he never does.
“Fuck it,” said Voltaire and Cervantes and Beckett and Twain, “let’s sin.”
I know now that when my passion flags while writing, it’s usually because I’ve not identified the sin of the piece. And so I stop and ask myself what it is. What am I saying that shouldn’t be said, what am I admitting that I would rather deny, what truth am I speaking that often remains unspoken?
If there is no sin, there’s no point in my continuing. If it’s not a genuine sin, I’ll walk away as well. The way I know it’s genuine is either because I laugh – a deep, spiritual, healing laugh - or I shake my head and think, “They are NEVER going to publish this.” Or, if I’m really lucky, both. But once I have that sin, the story that was dead comes to life, the character that wouldn’t breath starts to speak, the words that wouldn’t come start pouring out and I struggle, running after them on my keyboard, trying to type and keep up.
The next time you’re stuck on a piece or lose passion for something you’re writing, ask yourself, as I do: “Where’s the sin?” It works for me. And it’s a noble tradition. And at the very least, hey - you sinned!
Swimming in the afternoon,
S.
illustrations by Orli Auslander
I just gifted your subscription to 5 family members and friends. I recommended you as one of the best writers on Substack. The first email my friends and family will get from you includes this headline? What are you doing to me man? Now they all are thinking I am a sinner, which come to think of it feels a little good.
Pro tip: do your sex shopping at a store that caters to a largely military clientele. Discipline + young (mostly male) hormones = some interesting and sinful items, Apple-free.
My husband is a veteran. I know of what I speak.