ANONYMOUS SEX
Edited by Hillary Jordan and Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
At 10 o’clock on Saturday nights between 1992 and 1997, I, a child, could often be found flipping through channels until I inevitably landed on my real destination: “Red Shoe Diaries” on Showtime. The drama series starred David Duchovny as a widower who puts an ad in the paper soliciting stories by women of their sexual experiences, fantasies and awakenings. Before I discovered those weekly 30-minute episodes, I hadn’t begun to imagine sex, but thereafter I knew: Sex was in showers or offices or abandoned lofts. It happened during the day. It was teddies and knee-high boots and threesomes and easily achieved orgasms. Those romps imprinted onto my too-young mind for future reference.
I revisited “Red Shoe Diaries” before reading its literary counterpart: “Anonymous Sex,” a new anthology of erotic fiction. Nostalgia is one hell of an airbrush tool, apparently; the show was not the enlightening soft-core treasure chest I remembered, but basically five seasons of the same act: All the women were thin, white and writhing on their backs under bland white guys who thrusted to the “rhythm” of smooth jazz. Still, the conceit of the show was so good. I wanted someone to try it again, but better, sexier.
Enter the writers Hillary Jordan and Cheryl Lu-Tien Tan, who over dinner years ago happened to discuss their mutual love of literary sex: the kind that doesn’t just “turn you on,” but “makes you see sex in a new way.” Taking a sapiosexual approach (appreciating, say, the power of the erect nipple as not just erogenous zone but intellectual exercise), they decided to commission stories from a Murderers’ Row of writers, including Helen Oyeyemi, Jason Reynolds, Edmund White, Téa Obreht and Mary Louise Parker. Despite the marketable bylines, none of the stories are attributed — Jordan and Tan wanted to give writers the freedom to really let their freak flags fly.
The book’s seeds were planted long before it bloomed, like a flirtation that takes years to manifest into a tryst. Gathered during the pandemic, these stories offer what many are craving right now: “a lot of sex.” And a break from monotony: Maybe we want different kinds of sex, or with someone other than a quarantine partner, or not on Zoom. Maybe we want sex that feels illicit for reasons other than Covid.
The erotic arrangements tackled in these 27 stories involve people of various ages, time periods and geographical locations. There is sex with a ghost — the final frontier. The stories will satisfy you and fill you with longing. Some are teases, leading you to the edge and leaving you there. Some of the sex is animalistic and raw, some prim, some sensual without ever unsheathing. For the most part, the situations feel modern and honest. They wrestle with current sexual politics, but never feel like Twitter pandering. Descriptions of genitals and what people are doing with them are rarely cringey. (I’m not sure I saw one mention of a “throbbing member” or a “moist blossom” — though no judgment, of course, if that turns you on.)
Of course, both sex and anthologies can be inconsistent. I had to cross my legs while reading “En Suite” (best friends almost turn lovers in a hotel room) and “Find Me” (a widow has a fling with a stranger in her train car to Reno); while “LVIII Times a Year,” in which a husband misjudges the angle of entry and “nudges” his wife’s “petite anal asterisk,” left me totally dry. (The anticlimax of the second-person “Hard at Play” felt less deliberate.) The building tension in “History Lesson” overwhelmed me so much I needed to pause in the middle to relieve some tension of my own.
Even if the sex isn’t quite as shocking as you’d hope (what turns you on is yours alone), the gambit works: Jordan and Tan succeed in tempting readers to guess which author wrote the updated variation on “Rapunzel” that’s so horny Anne Rice is weeping with pride in the afterlife. (The Brothers Grimm couldn’t have known the erotic possibilities of that hair.) Or which author confesses to having sex in the bathroom at the Brooklyn Book Festival. “That whimper you heard as you washed your hands,” the story reads, “that was me, as a much-too-young beard scraped against the soft flesh just past my thigh.”
As with a casual tryst, the best part of this book is the anonymity; the promise of no strings attached. No names or expectations, just give and take what you want. While no single experience or story guarantees the pleasure you seek, the thrill is in taking a chance on the unknown.
