THROAT: The Midcult of Sex

THROAT is a serial about sex written by Sydney Allen-Ash. Sign up to get THROAT delivered to your inbox.

The woman met Jonas at Passionfruit in Bed-Stuy at 11:30 am on Sunday for their first date. It was mid-April. Cherry blossoms were in the news. Life felt possible again. Jonas walked into the coffee shop behind her. She took one look at him and thought, Oh, there you are. 

The timing was auspicious. Over the past year, the woman resolved her belief that you could not look for love. There were no strategies. There was no advice. Love was, she believed, the consequence of compounding luck, magic, observation. How else to explain the statistical improbability of being in the right place, at the right time, with the right mental disposition to receive the person you actually like enough to integrate into every sphere of your life? In an attempt to appease these unknown mercurial forces, the woman had begun to interpret overheard snippets of conversations as implicit guidance from this karmic world. During a frantic two-week love affair with an emotionally evasive 40-year-old the woman biked by a man at a café saying, “My wife and I would simply never treat each other like that.” She knew then she had to end it. The system, she reasoned, was like class participation on a cosmic scale. The more you noticed, the more you accrued. And, one day, the universe would cash you out big.

This belief was an extension of her chaos theory of the universe that erupted into existence during COVID when she left her suddenly untenable career and apartment in New York for its cultural and geographic opposite: Vancouver, Canada. When she returned to New York two years later for grad school, she had softened. She abandoned the purity of her plans and largely curbed her tendency to white-knuckle life, to make it bend at her will. Instead, she became heavily invested in chance and timing. Like Sheila Heti and her coins. When asked what she was doing after her master’s she would rattle off some idea about an essay or novel, then throw up her hands and say, “But hey, what do I know? I just work here!” A newly reformed disciple of the Universe Laughs At Plans club. Around this time, she also grew quietly attached to the fortuitous timing of a large green oil tanker that serviced her neighborhood. The company name “APPROVED” was painted on both sides in 4-foot-tall block letters. Whenever it drove past, she took it as a good omen.

Jonas and the woman walked two miles from the coffee shop to Nowadays under the unspoken auspices of a modern dating fail-safe. If they got to the club and weren’t feeling it, either could bow out of their plans to go dancing at the morning shift of the nonstop weekend party by claiming tiredness (anxiety, back pain) and the other would know: the date was a bunk. The woman herself had considered bailing the day before. (Dancing? At a club? With a stranger? In the morning?) The date had come at a period of both desperation and rapidly diminishing faith. The woman at once did not want to be caught (by the universe) to be looking for love, but did want to be available in case love was looking for her, but did not want to be wasting her time with the wrong people, but did want to be open enough to new people so she could meet The Person For Her that she, again, was not looking for. 

To her surprise, the walk was lovely. Jonas was quick and animated and the two riffed on each other's jokes easily. The luxury, and oddity, of Jonas having two tiny bathrooms in an already small apartment. The chances of running into a whole 12-person polycule as they walked through Bushwick. A burnt-to-hell totally black bagel on the sidewalk, plated. By the time they got within earshot of the bass on Cooper Avenue, the woman had spent so much of the walk laughing that she barely touched her coffee.

Across the street from Nowadays, the pair stood in the sun as the woman finished her drink. As she sipped, she leaned back against a cement bollard and took Jonas in. It’s not that Jonas was hot, she decided (though he was: blue eyes, black curls, big arms, pink lips), it’s that he was full. Embodied. Physically and emotionally all right there in front of her. Like his brain was evenly distributed throughout his whole body like an octopus. His arms and feet and fingertips all actively communicating important and relevant things about him. Where other men deadened themselves, hid truths or feelings around a shaded corner of their being, Jonas’ aliveness surprised her. Like a bright green bush on a morning walk when you had forgotten that something natural could be so vibrant.

“I like your sweater,” Jonas said, a smile spreading to his freckled cheeks. 

“Thanks, you’re actually the third guy to compliment this sweater this month. The other two both said their grandfathers had the same one, which I did interpret as high praise.”

“That is high praise. Did the other guys also try to kiss you after?”

“No, they didn’t,” she held his gaze and grinned. “Do you want to kiss me?”

“Very much so.” 

Jonas nodded at her with his eyebrows raised in a question, and she nodded back with a smile. He stepped forward and took her into one soft but steady, long kiss. Some kisses rush in (and the rushing can be fun!), gripping or grabbing one thing to the next. But that's not what was happening here. Their kiss intensified in fluid, trusting phases, like each was holding out their hand to help the other up a mountain. He wrapped his arm across her lower back. She curled her fingers into his hair. He took her bottom lip between his. She arched into him like a slow-motion swan dive. He cradled her ribcage with both hands. She knew by the way he held her, still and deep as a lake, that he would treat her body well. Eneamored by the steadiness of safety, she conflated this with love. 

A week later, the words nearly came tumbling out of her mouth like a prayer as he fucked her urgently, half-dressed, bent over his kitchen counter. She thought of The Argonauts, of the inexpressible contained (inexpressibly!) in the expressed. 

“Spread me open. I need you. Fill me.” I love you, I love you, I love you.

Later, she would lay his head in her lap make him cum into her hand as he sucked on her nipples. As his eyelashes fluttered and his eyes rolled back, she would, for the first time, allow herself to be Mommy. Overcome by his vulnerability and trust in her, she would realize no other man had ever truly allowed her to care for him. And that fucking someone the way they want to be fucked is a kind of love, too.

“Do you want to do this, but inside?” Jonas asked, grinning. They broke from kissing and went back across the street to Nowadays. As the woman walked she felt wetness seep through the crotch of her jeans. Her body felt rubbery and electric, but exposed. While it felt natural to act upon her desire so freely, she now feared it would be used against her. She grabbed Jonas’s hand as they walked through the doors, seeking a kind of comfort it was too early to ask for in words.

Because the woman believed you could not look for love, she had instead spent much of the last year looking for sex. As she explored the terrain of her interests — subbing, spitting, cucking, choking, spanking, butt plugs — she developed a connection to sex that went beyond the somatic into the spiritual. As her North Star, she conceived of a kind of sublime sex, more akin to meditation or prayer, that she believed was possible if you really looked for it. But as she had looked, she was disappointed; most of her lovers were far more secular in the bedroom. And after months of sexually intense but psychically vapid three-week love affairs, she grew disillusioned. “Lassata, sed non satiata,” she read in a Luce Irigaray essay, “Tired but not satiated.”

While her Year of Sex and Ejaculation had initially felt irreverent, enlightened, perhaps even emancipatory, she now feared she had fallen into the midcult of sex. A slippery corruption of the divine sexual ideal she knew was possible but had yet to find. The midcult of sex, which masqueraded as something more advanced than missionary and only men cumming, was, she felt, catalyzed by the mainstreaming of kink (the sexual avant-garde) through trendy dating apps like Feeld, unimpressive movies like Babygirl, and overhyped books like Luster and All Fours. Together, these seemed to popularize a diluted language and aesthetic of kink (kink-lite? Mid-kink? Konk?) that allowed finance and fashion bros alike to obscure their wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am tendencies with terms like “pleasure dom,” “play partner,” and “ethically non-monogamous.” And so, what would at first seem to the woman to be a lover's genuine interest in, say, BDSM as a means of greater intimacy, was quickly revealed to be misogyny in fetish clothing.

The pulling of the thread started at the end of last summer when she brought home a firefighter (a personal goal since season 3 episode 1 of Sex and the City). He slid his cock into her with her legs against his shoulders.

“How long have you been thinking about me fucking you?”

She smiled, “Since the first day you said hi to me.” (She had been strategically walking by his firehouse for the past few weeks.) 

“Oh, you’re such a little slut. You thought of me fucking you everytime you walked by my firehouse?”

“Yes,” she moaned.

“Say ‘yes, Daddy.’”

“Yes, Daddy.” He slid his hand around her throat and she tightened around his cock, he thrust into her faster. 

“Now everytime you walk by my firehouse I want you to think about me fucking you like this, you little slut.” 

She preferred “my little slut” to “little slut” — the former felt endearing and the latter derogatory — but nodded and moaned all the same. 

“This is all you wanted. Isn’t it, slut?”

She feigned a moan and nodded again, but the thrill of being submissive had spun off into a low, burning shame. Sure, she called herself a slut but having this guy she barely knew say it without an ounce of affection felt different. He continued.

“When you have a good day, I’ll come over and fuck you. When you have a bad day, I’ll come over and fuck you. That’s it, nothing else. Do you understand?”

She nodded, “Yes, Daddy,” but was caught up in parsing this oddly specific form of dirty talk. 

“Good. That’s Daddy’s stupid little slut.”

The woman floated away from herself. She knew he must have cum at some point that night but couldn’t remember when or how. Their communication broke down a week later when the woman, still unwilling to accept what was clear, tried to make plans for a date. The firefighter said he wasn’t available but could come over “later” if she wanted. “I did communicate that I wasn't capable of anything more than a physical connection the first time we played together,” he wrote over text. “But I see how you might have misunderstood me in the heat of the moment.” 

This kind of bait-and-switch happened several more times throughout summer and fall, but it was only by the new year that she understood what was happening. The pleasure she had used to free herself had been contorted into something mean and cheap. And worse still, she participated in it. This realization betrayed the pleasure-as-political rhetoric she had tacitly endorsed since coming of age in the Me Too era. In the bleak light of a New York winter, the assertions from adrienne maree brown and Audre Lorde that “pleasure was a measure of freedom” seemed inadequate. Power was more complicated now, she reasoned. Markers of freedom needed to be more concrete: a vote, a salary, a home. Pleasure was simply not enough. 

She was embarrassed by the PDFs of Uses of the Erotic she shared with friends, of the screenshotted lines she once used as her iPhone background: 

“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honour and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.” 

She saw her pitiful digital homage as a force of the midcult itself. A literal flattening of the radical into a 9:16 background upon which she received UberEats notifications.

Inside Nowadays the late morning sun fell through small, frosted windows flanking the dance floor. There were a dozen or so people inside, some still there from the night before and some, like the two of them, who arrived this morning. A slight blonde man swayed through the clusters of people wearing a long white t-shirt that said NO PHONES across his middle. They checked their sweaters and walked to the dance floor.

The woman watched as Jonas immediately began to dance with every part of his body. His eyebrow raised to a house beat, then it trickled through his shoulder, elbow, wrist, and flicked from his fingertip. His hip and knee and heel bounced into action, turning in and out as his chest shifted in the opposite direction, a living contrapposto. His entire body was an instrument. The woman kept her eyes on him as she danced from the ground up. She caught every other beat in a two-step and swayed her hips in a smooth figure eight that undulated upwards through her waist and chest, and rolled her head from shoulder to shoulder. She closed her eyes and focused on feeling the bass in the arches of her feet and the bottom of her cunt.

The pair orbited each other, moving closer together, kissing. She put her arms on his shoulders and brushed her breasts against his nipples that poked against his tight blue t-shirt. His hands slipped around her back and pulled her torso into his. Their stomachs touched (what was so erotic about stomachs!), and the bass from a tall column of speakers vibrated through their bodies. Below, the buttons of their jeans clicked together, catching occasionally. 

A song lasted a minute then two hours. They were barely moving now, nestled into each other’s shape. Her face against his shoulder, his hand on the back of her neck, her breasts pressed into his chest, his forearm around her lower back. They were one pulsing, bouncing body wrapped in a haze of synthetic smoke.

“I feel like I’m having sex with you,” she said into the sweat on his neck.

“Aren’t you?” 

Behind the closed door of a men’s bathroom stall, Jonas slipped his hand down the front of her jeans. “You’re so wet already,” he hummed playfully into the side of her face. He ran a finger between her lips as she wrapped both arms around his shoulders and stifled a moan. He continued to stroke her clit slowly and pressed his forehead against hers, nodding without breaking eye contact.

“Uh-huh. That’s so good. You’re doing so fucking good.” 

Her knees buckled and she covered her own mouth. 

It was only 3 o’clock in the afternoon by the time Jonas had walked her home and taken a car to his, already late for afternoon plans with a friend. The woman got inside and immediately fell onto her bed. The daylight felt incongruous with the nighttime feeling that pulsed through her body like an electrified puddle. Her phone buzzed on her stomach.

“I feel insane,” Jonas texted her. “Like drunk and high??” (He had only drunk a chai latte, and she a decaf americano.)

“I feel like this morning never happened, and also is the only thing that has ever happened to me,” she wrote back.

The next evening in his bed, Jonas cradled her body into his and fingered her. He held the back of her head tight against his chest and she wrapped her arms tight around him. As her hips twitched and bucked into his hand she forgot that she was worried about fucking him too soon. About not finding the love she was not not looking for. About pleasure being enough or not enough. She felt protected.

“I need it. I need to cum for you,” she cried out into the hollow of his collarbone, she felt the inside of her cunt press out into his hand. She looked up at him, he didn't look away.

“That’s it, baby. I’m right here,” he whispered into the top of her head. “I’ll give you whatever you need.”

She could not remember the last time she was held like this. Was there ever a time? It did not matter because she was held now. Finally, a closed door. Finally, a firm wall. Finally, a stable floor. She released into him, consumed by wave after wave of orgasm.

THROAT is a serial about sex written by Sydney Allen-Ash. Sign up to get THROAT delivered to your inbox.