These 50 Kinky Bedroom Tricks

On selling the promise of sex

Once, during an overnight elementary school trip to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the new kid told me a story. He was older than I was by six months, at least, and I immediately looked up to him. We were both sharing a bed in a dark hotel room where there were no adults. This was the first time either of us had been alone like that in our lives, and it was thrilling.

The trip was a sort of poorly-conceived tour of Southern Pennsylvania: we’d spend one day gawking at the Amish in their horse-drawn buggies like they were dinosaurs at Jurassic Park and the next day we’d walk around the Gettysburg battlefield which is, really, a very pretty graveyard.

It was also the first time I ever saw a cow. As a child of the suburbs, I was used to seeing cows in pieces at the grocery store. Steaks and chops, shrink-wrapped, and stacked, each slightly sticky with old blood. The butchers at my local A&P always looked so sad, but the cows I saw out of the bus window seemed perfectly content.

But the best part was sharing a bed with another boy, and a room with two other boys, without a soul to tell us to go to sleep. We wrestled and told dirty jokes, and then he told me a story, in a hushed whisper. He had a friend, who knew a guy, who had not only seen but touched his girlfriend’s naked boobs.

I remember gasping as if I was a young Sumerian hearing the epic of Gilgamesh for the first time. The new kid then went on to describe these breasts with startling detail, as if he had seen them himself.

I asked the new kid if he’d ever seen, or touched, real boobs. “No,” he said, “but one day.”

“Promise?” I whispered.

There are few covenants more poignant than those made between two boys. They do not know that men do not always keep their word.

I have paid bills with money I earned selling the promise of sex. Hope is potent. The problem with promises, though, is people tend to get very angry when they’re broken. No one should be led to believe they’re going to get what they want.

Especially when they don’t even know what they want.

At the dawn of this century, I worked for a popular men’s magazine that had been born around the same time as a TV series about four women who lived in a city and had sex. Both the magazine and this TV show were defining expressions of gender identity at the time.

The TV show told women they could be successful, single, and sleep with whoever they wanted because sex is fun. The magazine for men was filled with jokes, and articles about sports, and cars, and photos of women in bikinis. It told men they could stay boys forever.

Of the two cultural behemoths, the TV show was more subversive. The best-selling women’s magazine preached that its readers were not pretty enough, stylish enough, or enough of anything. The sex articles subtly suggested that boyfriends or husbands would stray unless these 50 kinky bedroom tips were mastered. The TV show ignored these messages.

My magazine, the one for men I worked for, simply gave readers hope — hope that even the most average among them could date, and bed, the beautiful models featured in each month’s issue. Ultimately, I think, the TV series gave millions of women permission to take responsibility for their lives, and the magazine gave men permission to retreat into their ‘man caves’ and seal themselves inside, like a reverse Cask of Amontillado.

Don’t get me wrong. The job was fun, in the way consequence-free selfishness can be fun. I had a Segway in the office. My desk was covered with Nerf guns, and video games, and sex toys. There was a box of fireworks underneath. I had a key to a closet filled with thousands of dollars’ worth of booze. The boys and I would play pranks on one another. We’d get drunk at noon.

In a way, I think, Lord of the Flies is a sort of spiritual sequel to Peter Pan.

I suppose I could have made money other ways. I wasn’t particularly special. I had no pedigree. No connections. I was a state school kid. And worse: a state school kid with a BFA in theatre. The other editors were from prestigious universities. They were trained journalists. I had worked my way up reviewing consumer electronics for small magazines and could write about gadgets. I realized there was no money in writing experimental plays so I jumped at the first writing paycheck I could score. I didn’t know much about magazines, but I knew how to make a redneck laugh. I think that is why I got the job.

I understood the dudes I was writing for because I was one. Or, more to the point, I had hung out with them. I knew them. I liked them. I moved to New York City to get away from them but I understood the foundation of American masculinity — the fear of emotion, the unspoken sentimentality, the faith in violence, the connection between sexual conquest and tribal validation, the empty promise that the world is theirs. And the continued affirmation of that promise, even when it is clearly a lie.

I was good at coming up with new ways to describe body parts. I barely flinched when I learned that the head of one of our cover girls — a TV star — would be photoshopped onto a photo of her body when she was younger. All of the photos were tweaked, airbrushed, cut into pieces and stitched back together. I mean, Dr. Frankenstein did what he did because he had hopes, too.

We never wrote about physical pleasure or emotional connection, because both of those are messy, and unpredictable. The best way to commodify human beings — glowing, feeling, thinking, dreaming human beings — is to break them down into meaty chunks that can be shrink-wrapped and stacked. People are not portions, but capitalism loves the cleaver. And, so, I wrote about boobs, and butts, and thighs, and I was a real poet when it came to that.

I was modestly compensated for my demographic loyalty. Gender is, mostly, just marketing. I was also celebrated by my peers because I could shit talk and drink and when I was drunk a Texas twang came out. And, who knows, maybe I put that on a little. Theatre school was good for something.

One of my early jobs at this magazine was to edit jokes. Once, not so long ago, jokes were one of the few Patriarchy-approved means of communication between men — coded value directives wrapped in knee-slapping and gleefully offensive punchlines. Men joke about sex, and virility, and women because laughing in the face of profound fear, or desperate hopes, is far easier than just facing the truth that none of us are princes. In case you were wondering: the only other Patriarchy-approved form of communication is “drunken babbling,” under whose cover men can express their emotions.

I must have edited thousands of jokes but this is the only one I remember:

A young bull and an old bull were standing on a hill overlooking a field of cows.

The young bull goes, “Hey, I’ve got an idea! Let’s RUN down there and fuck one of those cows!”

The old bull goes “Hey. I’ve got a better idea. Let’s stroll down there and fuck all of those cows.”

The punchline should have been “And the two bulls stood there, until the sun went down.” That would have been honest. But I had a job to do. There were lazy fantasies to bang out on a keyboard with crossed-fingers. And so I did. I lacked the courage of any convictions. I even believed, for a time, the empty promises I made for profit.

“Yes, my dudes,” I’d write. “You have the right to whatever you want.” I am a man of my word.