THROAT: You Can't Take An Asshole Everywhere

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

The woman spent her last winter in Vancouver swimming in the ocean. From January to April she and her Irish friend Cal would show up at Kitsilano Beach on Saturday mornings, strip down to their bathing suits, and get in the freezing water. After overcoming the shock of the cold (her vagina, nipples, and armpits were the worst bits), she would try to get as still as possible and imagine she was a fridge. She would actually say this aloud sometimes, like a mantra, “I am a fridge!” As Cal took long graceful strokes out into the deep, the woman floated silently and told herself that she did not feel cold but that she was the cold, she was made for cold, in fact, she produced the cold herself.

The woman did not see this as an act of dissociation but distillation. While writing, or doing a grueling working out, or even during particularly rough sex, the woman felt she was being cooked down, reduced into a more potent and enduring version of herself. She cataloged these experiences and returned back to them when she felt distracted, unwieldy, or overcomplicated. “See,” she told herself while replaying a memory of being throat fucked, her head lying off the edge of her bed. “Look how little you need to feel good.” To the woman this was a kind of practice. On her fridge she taped a note, “REMEMBER WHEN LESS WAS ENOUGH.” 

To clarify, it was not so much that she loved to be throat fucked, but that conceptually throat fucking hooked her like an artist fixated on a motif. She felt being throat fucked required an ascetic humility (or humiliation, if that was your thing) like the ocean dips she did on Saturdays. There was also, she felt, something so patently, brutally now about throat fucking. The world didn’t eat your ass, she thought to herself, the world fucked your throat. 

The woman imagined the artist statement she’d write for a piece of throat fucking performance art. In her daydream, the work faintly recalled an installation at the IKEA in Red Hook, a drawer mechanically opening and closing with a digital counter tracking the reps nearby. 

“Here the artist posits throat fucking as the platonic ideal of postmodern sex. A sexual mode that is at once immaculate, universal, passive, and automatic.”

“It’s true!” she’d exclaim, slightly tipsy amiably monologuing at friends in some wine bar in Two Bridges after her opening. “It really is the clearest manifestation of postmodern carnality! Everyone can do it. No one can get pregnant. No one can accidentally shit on you. And,” she’d look sidelong at a potential new lover, “the only thing asked of the person being throat fucked was to let yourself be used.

“Though,” she’d looked down, feigning propriety, then flash a cheeky grin, “That request could be seen as brutal or a relief depending on the person.” She wouldn’t have intended on seducing him but with all this talk of throats…

Three pages into a Literotica message board on throat fucking, a bisexual man with the username “Sterculius” wrote that throat fucking was “a gender-neutral fun activity.” Of course, anal was too, the woman thought, but you can’t bring an asshole everywhere. You can’t smile it at the hot dad dropping his kid off at daycare or open it suggestively at the server from Gemma telling you about the Lambrusco. In contrast, the specter of throat fucking was in the cigarette you shared outside the bar, in the glass bottle of Coke you drank with your tacos, in the salt you licked off the rim of your margarita, or in the drip of ice cream running down your thumb. The woman remembered being in Herbert Von King Park in Brooklyn with a guy who cut himself trying to open her beer bottle with a key. He held up his index finger to her face showing her the tiny cut with a drop of blood pooling from its tip. She stuck her tongue out to lick it. 

As a child the woman walked on the curb like it was a balance beam. She pointed her toe and dragged the instep of her shoe along the curb’s edge then planted it directly in front of her other foot. The aim was then, as now, perfection through consistency. To misstep — to make a bad first impression, to be seen as immature or uninformed, to give up on a project halfway — was, to her, an indication she was not quite herself yet. For the woman, there remained a pleasure, even a virtuous glory, in rote activities that mirrored the effect of this child play. 

Herein lies the gagless fuck. The woman is totally turned on, blissed out, and zen. Her throat stretching and her head rhythmically rocking back with every thrust as though she were praying. Her throat is the perfect receptacle for a cock. She lets all her thoughts and feelings run through her as she focuses entirely on the task at hand. It is a relief to achieve such a streamlining of self. A successful (but temporary) abandonment of her complex relationship to suicide, of her convoluted mixed-race politics, of her Google Drive full of essay drafts. This is like tumbling a gemstone, with every pass she turns from a jagged mineral into something slick, shiny, and serviceable. 

It is then, at her least ambitious and most unkempt, that the woman wants to be called perfect. At school or work perfect was awarded with a fawning admiration that was saccharine and off-putting, like a lollipop with a hair stuck on it. Or else it was a limp response to work that did not matter. (“Yeah, that’s perfect,” was something you said to your barista when they poured you the right amount of oat milk.) But when mascara was smudged to her temples and there was spit stringing from her grinning mouth and she literally almost just puked,

“God, you’re such a perfect little fuck toy.” 

She believed it, 100%. 

Though, to accept oneself as perfect was to abet a fantasy. Perfect was for small, specific things like an engagement ring or a Nanaimo bar. To call a whole adult human perfect required willful denial or a lack of information. Perfect could not hold all of you. So, when the woman was kneeling and panting and sweaty, to say she was perfect was to say that she could be made of openings and feelings. And that was enough.

—

Cal was doing the front crawl 30 feet away from her. She shouted at him,

“How long do you think it’s been?”

“Yeah, long enough.”

They moved like zombies, heaving their frozen bodies onto the snow-speckled sand. They ran in slow motion to their pile of clothes near the boardwalk. As they thawed a pulsing hyperactive buzz overtook them. Cal jumped up and down and shouted at the empty beach. The woman skipped from foot to foot and sputtered a frantic stream of consciousness (“Okay-gotta-find-my-underwear-take-off-these-bikini-bottoms-where-are-my-socks!”). Her body shivered violently, producing a low mechanical warmth that fought out the immobilizing cold like an old engine turning over. She felt the bite of the wind on her nipples. She was right at the edge of her body now, pressing up against every border like a throbbing crowd at a concert. Every single thought and feeling she ever had coming back to her at once.

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