There are two kinds of men in this world: the ones I can have, and the ones I’m obsessed with.
I’m hot now, or hotter now, or at least more confident, or embodied. And so every time I try to craft some revenge narrative — he wouldn’t look at me before and now that I’m thinner he wants me! — it gets spongy and begins to wear down. That’s not the whole story, is it? Looking back, the real story is: he was into me and I didn’t understand why. I think I didn’t know quite what to do with them, or what they wanted from me. With the advent of my thirties and the confidence that brings, I know what I’m doing now. But what’s at stake here is this: there were endless blips, missed chances or fuck-ups, like that night I took a stacked WASP with a matted chest home, and got so nervous that I had to stop midway through fucking to make myself a bowl of Chobani.
The point is, it’s not like I’m getting revenge on any hot man who turned me down, but rather on myself for putting them above me in the first place. This pedestalization has roots in borderline-y stuff, earlier abuse, intimacy issues, etc. That’s enough psychology for Substack. Here’s how it works: beauty is a hierarchy, one which puts me in my place above some and below others. And when I encounter one of the Beautiful People, I go insane, forgetting my name, ditching any dregs of selfhood for an audience with Apollo.
And the irony is this: when I look back on these intense surges of limerence, attraction rarely enters the picture. Though these men — from golden gentile gods to Sephardi superhumans — are no doubt stacked, it’s not about some pheromonal charge, but a recognition of power. Power which I don’t have, natural entitlement. I recognize that I’m now hot, but it’s a weathered attractiveness. There are some people in the world who never experience an “awkward phase” or go through extreme weight fluctuations between the ages of 23–27. There are some people who don’t have to question their place on this earth, scratching away at the padded walls of reality, nauseated in the cab, dizzy under overhead lights, blood sugar crashing, needing to leave the movie to pee, dazed, dissociated, on an endless ride from Victorian confinement to feverish rapture. No, these men just are.
And then there’s the other aspect, which is where my fucked up relationship with bottoming comes in. To be clear: I think bottoms are the vessels of the divine, the true arbiters of pleasure, the ascended masters of self-assertion. I love fucking them, I love worshiping them, and I love when they tell me in clear terms exactly how I’m to feed their every desire.
And yet, and perhaps this is my Mars in Pisces speaking, my education in bottoming came in a different time, before the Caroline Polachek girlies had begun to state their rights on Twitter. This was back when Kylie Minogue’s X was just coming out, when I was 18, never been kissed, recently emaciated, and freshly unleashed into a savage sexual economy. I had no awareness of my own sexual trauma. It was like painting with oven mitts, or learning a language phonetically. I was pantomiming sexual freedom, assuming the role assigned to me of twinky bottom, unsure of what was going on. What I wanted, and clearly still want, is a parent, and not a lover. OK, now we’re getting into psychology again. I’ll keep it moving.
The point was, I didn’t know that I was supposed to like it — and wouldn’t experience the surging, Dark Phoenix experience of riding it like you stole it until I was 27 or so. Back then, with no scope on my actual desires, it was all empathic. The experience of being penetrated would cause me to either blip out the top entirely, or fall in love with him feverishly. As an unstable, fluid vessel, I was seeking someone powerful (embodying my seventh house Leo) to assimilate me, or to reflect in me some truth about my own inferiority.
“He” has recurred, on dancefloors all over the world.
…That night in Athens in 2009, when “Here Comes the Rain Again” by the Eurythmics came on and he entered the bar, a French-Greek Prince Charming out of Hans Christian Anderson. He was a Fulbright Scholar, and 26 years old. Imagine! He showed me the city on his scooter, while drool blasted out my cheeks from the harsh wind. He had “run out of condoms” or something. Whatever, he’s bald now and I’m the hot one.
…That supreme Long Island Italian I met at a black-tie roving masquerade on my 27th birthday (pictured below, facing one another). My friend Roslyn threw the party, and handed out prompts for us the moment we entered. “Buy a stranger a drink,” read mine, and there he was. The perfect, inscrutable, sexually intense Virgo. To be clear, I had arrived with another man, handsome and sweet, whom I was ready to ditch the moment this sex idiot looked at me. He fucked me in the bathroom at La Gamelle and I was in love. I even shlepped to his Hell’s Kitchen apartment, which was covered in Disney memorabilia and framed illustrations of the Pokemon Eevee. He had a dick made of iron. Anyway, I longed for him desperately, day and night. Now, he makes a lot of money posting videos of himself wearing nothing but “Geek” fetishwear. Good for him.
…And, of course, and this one we’ll mention by name because he probably doesn’t read English: my current and everyday obsession Adir, the ultimate stacked Sephardi specimen. I met him last summer, on the dancefloor at Gazoz, my favorite party in Tel Aviv. The face, the body, the denim shorts, the Adidas chucks, the thick nose, the rough beard…I kissed him briefly, told him I was leaving, and he followed me out. He bought me pizza and took me to his perfect Bauhaus apartment. He said we should do G, which I’d never tried. OK, but I’m not bottoming tonight. In fact, I’m vers! He smiled at me, his mind already made up. Uh-huh. He let me put on Jessie Ware and then proceeded to demolish me, melting my entire existence into dripping amber. It didn’t help that I kept wanting to say not as hard! but in my mangled Hebrew only ended up saying harder! It went on for ages. Beramot, he said, which in Hebrew means “on the levels,” slang for: that was next-level. We ate chocolate covered pretzels and I scootered home.
But here’s the thing: I didn’t think much about him the next day. There were other men, and I was having a liberating summer. Only when I saw him again, at the Rosh Hashanah New Years’ Rave, did it begin. He saw me in line for the port-o-potties and laid a kiss on me. I was too stunned. Hours later, blasted on ecstasy, did I encounter him again. I walked up to him and said, in Hebrew: I just want you to know that that was a really special night for me. I felt all of it. He kissed me, and kind of sent me on my way.
Since then, it’s been pure obsession, and an unreasonable desire to race back to the Holy Land and get his attention. But it’s not real. He doesn’t think about me, no more than the straight boys I obsessed over on my high school soccer team thought about me. I don’t fantasize about him sexually. No, he, like so many men before him, represents an impossible culmination, a kiss of fantasy and oblivion, an encounter with the Terminator, the Destroyer, the God who graces me once and then strikes me down.
I have never known real, sustained, equitable love. What I have known is experience, and a cinematic life. Those stolen moments, those locked eyes on the dancefloor, are what has sustained me. This is not some paean to loneliness — I am not the overlooked sunflower. Since that night with him, I’ve had an array of men that would make Lil’ Kim proud, men who have made me wild, ravenous, submissive, aggressive, insatiable. But perhaps as I come into more real adult encounters with adult men, I find myself longing even more for the ones who rule the kingdom of my childish delusion — the ones who I thought, or think, would save me, judge me, give me value just by looking at me.
Maybe I’ll find love, and peace, and stop fearing the possibility of someone wanting to see me entirely, and not through mirrors and projections. But not yet. I’m not ready to cast away the phantasm for a lover made of flesh.