In its third ever sex issue, the Nass goes deep into reproductive rights, contemplates hard truths about men, and penetrates the taboo.
The Nassau Weekly
Volume 47, Number 7 November 16, 2023
In Print since 1979 Online at nassauweekly.com
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November 16, 2023
The Sex Issue
Masthead 4 6 7 8 10 13 16 18 20
He’s Not A Munch: Interviews About Oral Equality
By Mariana Castillo Designed by Cathleen Weng and Emma Mohrmann
A Note on Dobbs v. Jackson and Brexit By Sam Bisno Designed by Jasmine Chen
All About the Money: On Fiscal Republicans’ AntiChoice Rhetoric By Amanda Kural Designed by Jasmine Chen
The Case Against Sex
By Miss Tree Designed by Jasmine Chen
The 3rd Nassau Weekly Smut Competition
Designed by Hazel Flaherty and Chas Brown
Sexter, Over Time
By Heejae Cho Designed by Vera Ebong and Chloe Kim
Kissing Covens: The Gilda Stories as a Manifesto of Radical Black Love By Sierra Stern Designed by Pia Capili
DEAD DOVE: DO NOT EAT: A Personal(ish) History of Fanfiction
By Beth Villaruz Designed by Cathleen Weng
A People’s History of the Sex Issue By Julia Stern Designed by Vera Ebong
Letter from the Editors: We strive to be a democratic publication, one whose direction is shaped by our contributors more than our editorial staff. When we floated the idea for a sex issue, we received overwhelming enthusiasm from the Nass community. So we went ahead with it. Previous mastheads had done this—in 1988 and 2006. But those were different times. Since then, OnlyFans has taken off, Roe v. Wade has been overturned, and we talk and think about sex differently than we did even twenty years ago. As you might expect, in these pages, you’ll encounter an abundance of bad sex jokes and steamy fiction you might not want to read over breakfast, capped by our smut competition, which we revived from 2006. You’ll also find sober reflections on intimacy, reproductive rights, and the nuclear family. We feel that this mixture of content reflects the many sides of sex. Sex is fun; it’s also hyper-policed, deeply personal, and politically consequential. It’s unlikely that much of what follows would be published by other outlets at Princeton. We hope to provide a space for our writers and readers to confront and discuss sex, even if doing so is sometimes uncomfortable or taboo. Needless to say, this entire issue carries a content warning for sex. Hands where we can see them! With love, Sam Bisno and Sierra Stern Editors-in-Chief
Editors-in-Chief Sam Bisno Sierra Stern
Assistant Design Editor Vera Ebong
Publisher Allie Matthias
Art Director Hannah Mittleman
Managing Editors Assistant Art Director Lucia Brown Emma Mohrmann Charlie Nuermberger Events Editor David Chmielewski Staff Creator Director Audiovisual Editor Lara Katz Teodor Grosu Director of Outreach and Engagement Ellie Diamond Alumni Liasion Peyton Smith Business Manager Jana Pak Senior Editors Lauren Aung
Hannah Mittleman
Social Media Chair Ellie Diamond Historian Julia Stern Social Chair Kristiana Filipov
Trustees Junior Editors Alexander Wolff 1979 Frankie Duryea Katie Duggan 2019 Isabelle Clayton Leah Boustan 2000 Otto Eiben Leif Haase 1987 Sofiia Shapovalova Marc Fisher 1980 Daniel Viorica Rafael Abrahams Eva Vesely 2013 Ceci McWilliams Robert Faggen 1982 Julia Stern Sharon Hoffman 1991 Sharon Lowe 1985 Head Copy Editor Beth Villaruz Design Editor Cathleen Weng
Cover Attribution
Web Editor Jane Castleman
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Volume 47, Number 7
This Week:
Verbatim:
Fri
10:30a McCarter 2023 Princeton Poetry Festival
8:00p Richardson Princeton Pianists Ensemble Presents: Aurora
Tues
Thanksgiving Break
Sat
Art on Hulfish Open House: The Ten Commandments of Renée Cox
3:00p Taplin Shakespeare and Beyond
Wed
Thanksgiving Break
Sun
2:30p Chapel Princeton Chapel Choir in concert: “To St. Cecilia”
3:00p Richardson Richardson Chamber Players
Thurs
Thanksgiving Break
Mon
8:00a Chapel Being Yoga
ALL DAY 185 Nassau The Movement-Image: Exhibition
Got Events?
Email David Chmielewski at dc70@princeton.edu with your event and why it should be featured.
Overheard while fixing appliances Bystander: “I’ve seen people do CRAZY things with nine volt batteries” Overheard in Coffee Club Film buff: “Judi Dench is an actress? Oh right, she was in Cats.” Overheard while watching NCAA soccer game Fan: “Girls don’t wear bras anymore, it’s 2021.”
About us:
Overheard over text Resolute socialist: “Watching the GOP debate with the college republicans right now.” Friend: “How’s that going?” Socialist: “Holding in my scoffs of indignation.” Overheard while driving to a curling tournament Curler: “All bassists are sweaty” Overheard in New College West Sophomore, possible bassist: “When I think of my bedroom, I think of sticky and sweaty.”
The Nassau Weekly is Princeton University’s weekly news magazine and features news, op-eds, reviews, fiction, poetry and art submitted by students. There is no formal membership of the Nassau Weekly and all are encouraged to attend meetings and submit writing and art. To submit, email your work to thenassauweekly@gmail.com by 10 p.m. on Thursday. Include your name, netid, word count, and title. We hope to see you soon!
Overheard after the final Nass submission deadline Nass newcomer: “I should probably submit a verbottom.”
For advertisements, contact Allie Matthias at amm8@princeton.edu.
Submit to Verbatim Email thenassauweekly@gmail.com
Overheard while reading the Nassau Weekly Smut Competition entries Smut reader: “Don’t ruin this pear for me” Overheard on a walk Gamer guy, walking on gravel: “This sounds just like breaking a Minecraft dirt block.”
Read us: nassauweekly.com Contact thenassauweekly@gmail.com us: Instagram & Twitter: @nassauweekly Join us: We meet on Mondays at 5pm in Bloomberg 044!
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Volume 47, Number 7 PAGE DESIGN BY CATHLEEN WENG ART BY EMMA MOHRMANN
He’s Not A Munch: Interviews About Oral Equality
about head once again at a college dining hall, my girlfriends gathered before me. They were enthusiastic to speak on the matter—this was something many of them had pondered before. They spoke of shame and of power dynamics. I held the banana now, biting into it as I listened to their experiences.
Talking head.
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By MARIANA CASTILLO
ome time ago, I was having a conversation with a friend about a recent experience she’d had when she was hooking up with a (very slimy) guy. He asked her for head—unexciting. The real excitement was that she was chewing gum. And after she—or rather, he—had finished, the gum had disappeared from her mouth! It lay somewhere in his stuffy Mathey dorm, stuck to his sheets, we guessed—or even better, we hoped it was stuck to other hairy things. We laughed at the thought of this divine justice. That’s what he gets. Except, why did we feel this way? Why were we indirectly hoping that this guy would be punished for receiving what my friend had willingly given? Because he didn’t give anything back. He would go on and brag that
he had received the best head ever. Nobody would ever hear of the gum bits in his pubes. But we knew, and that was justice. The more I thought about it, the more I understood that what bothered me most was that I had never even thought to ask my friend if he had given her head. I knew the answer. The conversation reminded me of a day in sixth grade lunch when my friends and I had stopped playing with our runny mashed potatoes and cartons of chocolate milk to give our undivided attention to the seventh grade girl before us. She had come to impart on us the sacred new knowledge she’d picked up from her time in the back halls of a smelly mall that past weekend. We watched as she deep-throated a banana under the fluorescent cafeteria lights, an image that remains sharp and clear in my memory. If you do this, boys will like you. She said it just like that before taking a bite of the slobbered thing. This was something expected of us, girls, something we should know
how to do, something we should excel at. Having been told this at such a young, impressionable age, it framed the way I looked at sex. I was taught to give without anticipating anything in return—without knowing I could receive anything back. After pondering my friend’s gum tale, I was curious to know if my other girlfriends had similar experiences, and equally interested to know what my male friends made of my hypothesis: As a man, giving head is a favor. As a woman, it’s an expectation. I set about compiling data. Much like that infamous day in a middle school cafeteria, I was talking
One girl said the first time she gave head, she was sixteen; the first time she received any, she was nineteen. Another girl spoke of how out of the four men she had given blowjobs to, only one (her current boyfriend) had reciprocated. A third shared how on her third time hooking up with a guy (she had given him head on numerous occasions at that point) he had finally asked her if she wanted some. She was thrilled he had offered (because I never would have asked, she said). But right before he scooted on down there, he had hesitated and, sighing, told her that if he was doing this, it meant he really liked her.
But the saddest of all the testimonies was gum girl’s. Guys don’t give head because they think vaginas are disgusting, she said. I would never let a guy go down on me. She was embarrassed of her body and terrified of being deemed gross by a man.
Once I had collected other female perspectives, I moved on to interviewing my male friends.
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Volume 47, Number 7
These conversations were different—more rushed, dryer. Most of them had less to say on the topic, had never considered it, really. One of them even took it as an opportunity to complain that he hadn’t yet received head that semester. I told him I was so sorry. Most said they had no problem giving head. Interestingly though, there was a hint of pride when they said this, like there was something indisputably noble in their willingness to please a woman. There was no talk of shame. Finally, after a couple of interviews, I stumbled upon the perfect specimen of the man I was searching for. I can’t concretely describe him because he exists in endless bodies, infinite worlds, and is really a sadly eternal being. The other guys had been polite, said what they knew would sound fair and pleasant to their female interviewer. But here was a man who spoke his mind, unafraid and bold in the face of my voice-recording app. As soon as he opened his mouth on the subject, I knew this was the interview that would ultimately speak for all the rest. Thus, it is transcribed here
almost word-for-word. You don’t know this man, but think of your friendly bro next door as you read and you might realize you actually do. “I just have that natural dog in me,” he begins by saying. “It’s instinctive—a man gotta do whatta man gotta do.” Upon being asked if he thinks he’s good, he replies: “Ask her, she’ll say I’m a good man. I mean, hit me up if you want it, random reader of this article—ha, just kidding. These services don’t come free.” I asked about his first experience. “Yeah, I mean not gonna lie, it was kinda disappointing that first time because I thought that shit would taste like strawberry shortcake, but it tasted like straight battery acid—like, I was heavily disappointed. I thought it would be tasty. I did not like it. It was not tasty. You know, you think it’d taste good cause women are nice and use perfume. Clearly not. [insert any male rapper name] was tripping, man. And I think clearly he needs to put
me onto these women because my experiences are pretty subpar. I have to give a low rating.” Is there a difference between a woman giving head and a man giving head? “Well,” he says, “I’ve never tried a penis and I don’t plan to—I mean go do your thing, do whatever, not my business—anyway, I don’t really ponder on these philosophical sexual questions every day.” Does he enjoy it? “I’m not a munch,” he says. “If she knows how to wipe it down there, then okay. But if she does not eat good, sorry… I do believe in equal rights, though.” So he’s not a munch. I’m not here to tell you, esteemed reader, what to think. Nor is my goal to generalize. Ponder on these philosophical questions, or don’t. Because here, the interview finished. But I still haven’t.
Mariana Castillo had come to impart on us the sacred new knowledge she’d picked up from her time in the back halls of the Nassau Weekly that past weekend.
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November 16, 2023 PAGE DESIGN BY JASMINE CHEN
A Note on
Dobbs v. Jackson and Brexit
What might Brexit teach us about the political ramifications of Dobbs v. Jackson? By SAM BISNO
D
onald Trump rose to the presidency by pledging only to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade (1973). In office, he made good on his promise, installing justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, who collectively represented a decisive margin in last year’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion. Dobbs represents a grave attack on women’s reproductive health, one prong of a concerted, reactionary effort by the Republican Party to roll back historic progress on gender equity, racial justice, and LGBTQIA+ rights. Now the party’s frontrunner for the 2024 election, however, Trump has subtly retreated from his avowedly pro-life stance. He called state-level restrictions on abortions made possible by Dobbs “terrible.” He has refused to back a federal abortion ban. What explains this sudden reversal?
We might look beyond the borders of the United States for an answer. The United Kingdom’s
withdrawal from the European Union—a process that began with a now-infamous referendum in 2016—fueled sweeping victories for the Conservative Party in the 2019 general election, paving the way for demagogue Boris Johnson’s ascension to the premiership. Since then, however, Brexit has proved an unmitigated disaster for the British right. A series of embarrassing by-election defeats in traditionally Conservative districts spelled Johnson’s downfall in 2022, and observers agree that last month’s landslide Labour victories in Mid Bedfordshire and Tamworth are the death knell for the Tories: In the next general election, slated to take place before January 2025, they will almost assuredly fall after close to fifteen years in power. Voters’ disillusionment is understandable. Nearly four years elapsed between the Brexit referendum and official withdrawal in 2020. Now, no longer part of the single market and customs union, the UK has suffered a dramatic drop-off in trade with other European countries. Meanwhile, despite assurances from Conservatives that freedom from EU dues would open up funds to revamp the struggling National Health Service, citizens still face stark healthcare shortages. Unsurprisingly, then, the most recent polling found that just 34% of UK voters still believe Leave was the right choice. While he would
never admit it, current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak—who made his name as an early supporter of Brexit—may well feel the same way. Indeed, seven years removed, it appears that Brexit was more a ruse to drum up Conservative support than a coherent policy program. Perhaps the same could be said of abortion restrictions in the US. Pro-life rhetoric has become such a touchstone of American conservatism that we often forget things were not always this way. In fact, Republicans only began beating the pro-life drum in the mid-1970s, when the religious right started framing abortion as a violation of Christian values to attract evangelicals, who helped propel Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980 and have been a core part of the GOP electoral base ever since. Yet overturning Roe was never popular among a majority of Americans, and it is not clear that Republicans ever truly expected it to happen. Now, it may be backfiring. The opposition party almost always makes strides during midterms under a new presidential administration, but in 2022, Republicans only barely retook the House of Representatives while ceding ground in the Senate and losing key gubernatorial and state legislative races. In the leadup to those elections, more than half of US voters described reproductive rights as a “very important” issue. Just
last week, during another disappointing electoral showing for the GOP nationwide, Ohio became the first red state to enshrine abortion rights in its constitution. Ever the shrewd political analyst, Donald Trump no doubt has these developments in mind as he distances himself from abortion bans. He is likely also thinking of the Tories’ downfall, triggered when the wedge issue they used to mobilize their base became, more or less accidentally, national policy. This is not to suggest that no Republicans genuinely oppose abortion; many certainly do. Moreover, women across the country will continue to suffer under Dobbs regardless of the outcome next November. Yet for his part, Trump seems determined not to let the issue derail his campaign. There’s reason to think he might succeed: As of now, a Democratic victory in 2024 seems far less secure than a Labour one. Still, if offyear elections in Mid Bedfordshire and Michigan are any indication, conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic may have flown too close to the sun.
We might look beyond the borders of Sam Bisno for the Nassau Weekly.
All About the Money
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Volume 47, Number 7
PAGE DESIGN BY JASMINE CHEN
On Wealthy/Fiscal Republicans’ Anti-Choice Rhetoric A Nass writer speculates about what the political right stands to gain from overturning Roe v. Wade By AMANDA KURAL
Regardless of the bullshit they spew on national television, most Republican legislators do not actually care about “protecting the lives of the unborn.” Case in point: say one of their wives, daughters, or mistresses had an unwanted pregnancy, rest assured that they would shuttle her across state and national lines if necessary, to ensure her access to the proper medical procedure. Herschel Walker, Scott Lloyd, Tim Murphy, and Elliott Broidy come to mind as bigname Republicans who have done just that; I would name more, but I don’t want to run up my word count. Abortion—like tax evasion, or drugs —will always be safe and legal for the wealthy. Those most at risk from the fall of Roe vs. Wade are working class and poor women, who can’t afford to take off work and travel for the care they need. Like women of all class backgrounds, they, and only they, know best whether they are prepared—physically, mentally, emotionally, and financially—to care for a child. When they are forced to carry a pregnancy to term and give birth against their will, their children are disproportionately likely to live in poverty, and to experience all of the injustice and trauma (i.e. foster care, juvenile detention, shitty public schools) that come with it. Left-wingers like yours truly often point out that “Republicans are not pro-life, only pro-birth.” Indeed, in the ideal Republican America, unprepared women are forced to raise unwanted children, unsupported by the state.
Sometimes, this is brought up as a sort of “gotcha,” as though the hypocrisy of Republicans being anti-choice and anti-public assistance is some sort of oversight. This is not the case. In fact, I believe this is the whole point of the fiscal right’s attack on Roe v. Wade. For the last half-century, wealthy Republicans have used Christian values as a shield, while they slash away at very government programs on which much of the country, including their own supporters, depend for food, education, healthcare, shelter, and survival. Now, by overturning Roe v. Wade, they have succeeded, in the most sickening way imaginable, of forcibly
this because the pain of the masses means the profit of the very few. Of course, there are some who will succeed despite the odds, who will go on to brag that “I pulled myself up by my bootstraps, why can’t you?” Frankly, this doesn’t matter, because they will be in the minority. The Ballad Brief on “Intergenerational Poverty in the United States” found that only 16% of “persistently poor” children (i.e. those who lived more than half of their childhood in poverty) reach even working-class income by age 30. America’s system of class inequality means that only the exceptionally gifted and exceptionally lucky can escape poverty. Very
at an all-time low. And especially during and post-Covid, the economy floundered without employees willing to accept starvations wages for work in service industries— does the Great Resignation ring any bells? America’s straggling labor movement may be slowing down, but investors in the industries that reap profit from poor people—whether working for low wages, fighting overseas, or laboring unpaid in prison — have been given good reason to worry. I believe that Republicans’ longterm siege on abortion rights, culminating with the fall of Roe vs. Wade, has less to do with Christian values, and more to do with capitalist calculations. It is to the advantage of wealthy Republicans, and wealthy people in general, to create the most populous and disenfranchised underclass possible. By snipping the last few strands of America’s already-strained social safety net, Republicans ensure the suffering of any “precious child” they force a woman to deliver. As Wisconsin Republican Robin Vos put it, “Think how many Americans today would be alive in our workforce, doing all the things that helped make America great, if we hadn’t had such easy access to abortion!” Republicans want to exploit the reproductive labor of women, so that they can exploit the physical labor of their offspring, 18 years down the line. The poor, unborn and living alike, are not “lives” to the fiscal right, so much as human fuel for a faltering capitalist machine. If that’s not unjust, if that’s not un-Christian, if that’s not obscene, I don’t know what is.
bolstering the population of their red states (many already amongst the poorest in the country). Basically, this is what Republicans want: a generation raised by parents without the resources to provide for them, traumatized by foster care and juvenile detention, immobilized by lack of access to quality education. Children who grow up, and adults who grew up, in the most adverse conditions possible. They want
few may claw their way up; the vast majority will be left behind. Republicans have done their damnedest to create a country in which there are only three possibilities for poor people: first, taking a working-class job; second, enlisting in the military, and third, going to prison. Let me address these industries, and their recent declines, Amanda Kural, like tax evasion or one by one. Lately, there’s been drugs, will always be safe and legal a downtick in prison population for the Nassau Weekly. nationally. Military enlistment is
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November 16, 2023
THE CASE AGAINST “What about sex reduces the male brain to a pile of mush? Are these the leaders of the next generation? The very best of our future investment bankers and Raytheon interns? We’re doomed.” By MISS TREE
Recently, pondering my life’s mistakes as any good man does, I uncovered the source of all my problems: sex. Two additional conclusions. First, I am a loser. Second, men are evil. But they have taught me an important lesson: We don’t like to talk about sex. The male homosexual is a fascinating creature—simultaneously sexually liberated and eternally caged within deviances that others can never understand. I am lonely and ever feel more naked than on Grindr. Such impossible feelings— what am I to do with all this clotted rage and failed romance? Keeping them bottled up would entertain only our most perverted philosophy students. So, in the boldest move I’ve ever made, I present all the reasons I am never having sex again.
1. I AM A FUCKING IDIOT AND SO IS EVERYONE ELSE He was a well-endowed senior, I a lonely and sexually frustrated freshman. Yes, I did walk 20 minutes to his dorm at 2:00 in the morning. And yes, I did wave hello to everyone I knew on the way. And yes, I did tell them that I was just getting a midnight snack at the U-Store. And yes, I did knock on the wrong door when I got there. Apparently large age gaps are sexually exploitative, but power dynamics aside, the whole thing was pretty hot. He was twenty-two, tall, and I didn’t really know what he looked like—all good signs. The only picture he’d sent me was a dirty mirror selfie with flash on, and God were his barely visible chin and eyebrows a turn on. Most importantly, I didn’t know his name and he didn’t know mine. A perfect match.
PAGE DESIGN BY JASMINE CHEN
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X
2. I HATE EVERYONE AND I HATE SEX One time an older man asked me if I learned to suck dick from YouTube videos. What the fuck? A guy pulled my pants down and said, “Damn, you got that thang on you.” Mid-sexting, a man told me the new cold weather was making his testicles shrink. I’ve never been more horrified.
I didn’t realize just how literal the phrase “dirty talk” is. What foul, disturbed language. What about sex reduces the male brain to a pile of mush? Are these the leaders of the next generation? The very best of our future investment bankers and Raytheon interns? We’re doomed.
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Volume 47, Number 7
4. I AM ASHAMED AND 3. I DON’T KNOW DROWNED IN WHAT TO SAY SELF-LOATHING In case you didn’t know, boys can do it, too. I sucked his dick, maybe poorly, but well enough that he finished. In my mouth. I did not—the only part of me he touched was my hair, which he grasped in a way that told me he’d watched a lot of porn. There is nothing more humiliating than having to do it yourself, and still, I tried. Then, he looked up at me, and asked me a very fair question: “So, what’s your favorite dining hall?” I gasped. “What res college do you live in? Where are you from? What’s your major? Which gays on campus do you not like?” Suddenly I realized exactly what I’d been putting myself through. I was having sexual encounters so detached, so unintimate that we had literally nothing to talk about after. So, to save us both from the barrage of icebreakers, shushed him. I fucking shushed him. And there we were, laying in silence, awkwardly begging for it to be over soon. When I got home, he messaged me and told me I was bad at kissing.
There are probably more precise ways to talk about sex, but I tell my therapist that I wake up and then everything starts feeling weird. I move on with my day, tumble through a cycle of unforgiving and unsatisfying sex that I splice from the rest of my normal, untainted life. I look in the mirror and wonder if any of it happened. I freeze up when I see them, wretched beasts, walking around campus. I consider making eye contact. He does not, but sends me a message that night confirming he saw me. What the fuck is happening? I remember, as a failed pervert and momentary sex toy for any nameless man who will ask, I am just like the rest of them. I will never find an answer. So, to keep myself protected from further crimes against my own psyche, from now on I am taking up a vow of iron-clad celibacy. You will see me in an asylum before another man’s bedroom. I am a spritely, supple young man in the time of my life, and to ruin it with impure urges would be a terrible shame. So I am signing off from this filth, and until someone expresses vague interest in me again, it will stay that way.
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Volume 47, Number 7
PAGE DESIGN BY HAZEL FLAHERTY ART BY HAZEL FLAHERTY
The 3rd Nassau Weekly Smut Competition CW: This is some gross stuff.
Best Overall by Joyce Feral Oates She shook her wack-ass pussy with ease, aired it out in the cold autumn air. Her boobs farted. Loud, just the way he liked it—he had always wanted to watch her boobs fart loud, and god was she a squeaker. Her pussy came loose while she boobfarted directly into his face, so he reached down and smacked it until it popped. “Yes,” she moaned, “shove your entire arm in there, gay boy.” He got confused as her gooch swallowed up his limb, all the way to the shoulder, but in a really hot and wet way. He swiveled around and positioned his massive three-and-a-half inch cock against her butthole, her boobs releasing small puffs as he teased it with the tip. He shoved his enormous member in and went, “Wheeeeee!” and she had never been more turned on in her entire life. Ever. “I’m gonna cum!” she squealed like a chimpanzee, and her juice flowed out of that special place where a woman keeps her deepest secrets. Then she came, and he said, “Wow!” and you, dear reader, got so horny that you jizzed your undies. And so we beat off, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Runner-Up by William Fuck-ner As he shoved his girthy member inside my pulping hot, worn wormhole, my eyes began to pop with the vigour of a mother in labour. I, Lord Fuck-quaad, realised what was happening. I could feel the crown of my yeastened bulbous ogre-child lick the walls of my ploughed fuckhole. Shrek, the destroyer of all (my) holes, released the most violent, primal, lustfully charged mating call of fear I had ever heard in my entire life. A crinkle had formed in my universe as the space-time gravitational continuum collapsed. My vocal cords tore the room’s silence apart as my pregnant body cracked itself open. The yeast-boy was sliding down my anal canal using shrek’s viscous seed as a lubricant. Like the unanchoring of the Ever Given in the blockage of the Suez canal, my child was coming (so was I). Still screaming, Shrek grabbed my throat. “SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!” he roared. My eyes bulged through the asphyxiation of his meaty palms entrenched within my oesophagus. He fucked, and fucked, and suddenly, he extracted not only his immense velvety shaft, but the umbilical cord of my green passenger, entangled upon his uncircumcised, foreskin-abundant prong. I inhaled the breath of a thousand ogres as the onion within my gaping hole began to unlayer and unravel at the seams. At the entrance to my inner thighs lay a pool of shrek’s sacred seed and my beautiful, freshly baked, steaming, gingerbread child—he would grow to become the monstrous, sexually deviant, Gingerbread Man.
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Volume 47, Number 7
Most Historically Accurate REVERENT by F Smut Fitzgerald Paul eyed a tiny man in a comely red coat across that bar. He ignored common sense and led the man to a bathroom stall. Pants unzipping, Paul brought his mouth to the head of Redcoat’s bayonet. He advanced… retreated…teased and dared the barrel to fire its load. Paul’s act was intolerable for his lover, and Paul’s face quartered the casualty. Redcoat’s milk-tea seed dribbled from Paul’s lips, down his chin. He smiled: “The British are cumming!”
This is Where I Really Got Uncomfortable by H.P. Lustcraft His tongue searched my mouth and grazed my ears, his kisses rushing to cover my every inch. Working his way down, his tongue made tiny sweet circles around my nipples, which grew hard as his fingers lingered on my inner thighs before slipping inside. His tongue joined in a circus of arousal, my clitoris bulging to the size of a grape. He rose, tasting his fingers, and whispered in my ear, I want you so bad. He made deep subtle rings inside me with two fingers and I quivered, shoulders tense, head back, pure delight. I spread my knees and pulled his hips right up to my wet, quivering pussy, telling him I couldn’t take another second without his hard, massive cock thrusting into me. I stretched a condom around his girthy member and he slid inside, slowly, teasing me, exploring my pulsating clitoris with the tip, then plunging in, my insides clenching around his dick, wanting more. I shook with pleasure and cried out and inhaled his skin as he fucked me, speeding up, sliding in and out in staccato motions. I yielded—Please, daddy, more, harder!—needing more, feeling him sink into me again and again, smoother each time. Too smoothly. Something felt different, wet and easy. He knocked up against something bunched-up and squeaky deep in my slippery tunnel and slid out. I looked down. His dick went limp like one of those inflatable characters at car dealerships. Where the fuck was the condom?
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Volume 47, Number 7
PAGE DESIGN BY HAZEL FLAHERTY ART BY HAZEL FLAHERTY
Best Motif by Walt Clitman The only way he could describe her at this moment was sopping wet. As she took a sip from her sopping wet water bottle, he looked over at her with his sopping wet eyes and saw her large, sopping wet breasts jump as she swigged the bottle over her head. His sopping wet jaw dropped at the sight of her sopping wet physique. Not only was her face beautifully sopping wet, as was her clothing as it clinged to her sopping wet body. Did she have an unfortunate runin with a hose? Did she fall into a medium-sized puddle? He didn’t care how she got so sopping wet, just that she stayed that way. Her nipples protruding through her sopping wet t-shirt; her sopping wet shorts bunched up wedgied between her labia; her sopping wet socks drooping over her sneakers. However strange, it all made him sopping wet. Once she finished hydrating her insides, her hydrated outside got up from the chair, naturally leaving an ass-shaped water mark on the sopping wet chair. She sauntered past him, her sopping wet shoes squishing with each step. He couldn’t help but follow her out of the building, his sopping wet gaze following her every sopping wet move. With each sopping wet step she took, her clothing started to fall off her body, due to the sopping wetness. He picked up each sopping wet article, eventually catching up and handing the sopping wet heap over to her. Then they fucked.
Gave Me Blue Balls by George Whorewell I stare into your eager hole, lining up just right. You make a groaning noise of exhaustion, maybe of impatience, as I fumble for my tool. “Power,” you practically whine, and I want to give it to you. I need to. All too eager to please you, I pick up my gadget, guiding it towards your waiting slit. You hiss receptively, blinking furiously. I hold my breath in anticipation of the connection—two parts fitting together, energy coursing from one machine to another. My mounting anticipation is quickly extinguished—it doesn’t fit inside you. Is it too big? Are you too small? Drat. I bought the wrong laptop charger!!!
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Volume 47, Number 7
PAGE DESIGN BY VERA EBONG ART BY CHLOE KIM
“I feel yucky, I said. I licked a fucking banana. We’ve all been there, my friend said, but I wasn’t so sure that he could relate to using a banana as a sensuous prop. I ate the banana since it was peeled already.” By HEEJAE CHO
T
he first time I sexted someone, I was thirteen. The walls of my bedroom were so bright and clinically white that they made me lose my sense of space, but I had not started to develop a personality yet, so it did not occur to me to put anything up to make it better. I finally had access to a smartphone, even though it only worked on Wi-Fi. I filmed incredibly skilless musical.ly’s and took black-and-white selfies that only accentuated the red hues and sent Snapchat streaks without understanding why and downloaded a chatting app because I was lonely. It was not an established platform, like Kik—I just searched
“chat” in Google Play Store and installed the first app I saw. It did not occur to me that it would be a platform used mostly for sexting, but I instinctively put my age as sixteen in my profile. The first person that I talked to asked for pictures, so I sent them. The next person asked for pictures, so I sent them. One asked for a picture of my butt, so I sent one, and he said, No, I mean like this, and sent an example including his anus in full view. Another one said, When could we lie side by side? I can’t imagine how wonderful it would feel. I agreed over text but did not feel any particular desire to meet this person. Eventually my mom found some of the pics backed up to Google photos. By then, I had already deleted the app because it wasn’t very interesting. The last time I sexted someone was today, if you count “u want my hands in my pants???” at the end of a conversation about how “Road Head” by Japanese Breakfast was playing at Coffee Club. The recipient of this message and I are in love, so every word between us
is inherently sexy in the most purely beautiful sense of the word. My lowest moment in sexting, if you ignore the fact that the history of my sexts already originated from tremendously low moments, was near the end of freshman year. I had just ended things, for the first time, with a boy that I had my first real-life sexual experiences with. This was far from the last time I would end things with him, and I already knew it. I didn’t like myself very much. I went to the first sexting website I could find—I didn’t even make the effort to download an app— and, after declining all the video call requests, found somebody who was okay with just sending videos back and forth. He wanted to see me take off leggings. He called me baby, unlike the boy on my mind. He sent videos of him jerking off with little to no effort to hide his face, and I marveled at the brazenness of that more than any of the contents of the video. At the end, he begged to stay in touch and gave me his number in case I decided to
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Volume 47, Number 7
add him on WhatsApp. I closed the incognito tab and called a friend to confess my sins. I feel yucky, I said. I licked a fucking banana. We’ve all been there, my friend said, but I wasn’t so sure that he could relate to using a banana as a sensuous prop. I ate the banana since it was peeled already. That was my first time sexting in a very long time. In sophomore year of high school, I was such a prolific sexter that if you printed out all the Instagram DMs I exchanged with two boys who were friends (I know, sorry, they initiated separately, and I never talked to both of them at the same time) it would have been longer than War and Peace. At night, I left my door open, even if I was getting naked to take pictures with the phone flashlight on. I preferred to be able to hear the footsteps and see the shadows moving in the kitchen-lit hallway than to risk an ambush. One of those nights, a few months after I had turned sixteen, the boy I had been sexting all day for weeks very nonchalantly said, I’m sure we’ll have sex someday anyway. And he wasn’t wrong, anybody who saw our texts would have thought so too. If we could only maneuver the logistics of making it happen, we would have happily grabbed at the skin we found between us. But something about seeing the words written out made me feel the presence of my entire body all at once. I could feel the shape of the space I took up, my skin, my tangibility, and the fact that I could be seen, even naked. To have sex, I would have to be seen naked. The boy had seen pictures of various naked parts of my body plenty of times, but if we were to get naked in real life, in the
undeniable presence of each other, then we would have to breathe on each other, feel the other move, and be seen, taken in, two eyes focused on only me. To imagine being seen so vulnerable and wholly made me recoil, hoping to shrink into negative space. I watched the unmoving, blurred shadows in the blue-dark hallway as I pressed my body into the smallest volume possible. People don’t change in single instances, except for when they do, and this was one of those times. I became extremely averse to sexual material. Ligma jokes were okay, but poems about the joy of intimacy weren’t. I didn’t care if other people were having fun or connecting to each other in sex; thinking about sex as a tangible act sent me back into that recoiled state, feeling the night around me again. Meanwhile, the world was the way it is: gloriously sexful, for better or for worse. I didn’t crave something that the world said I was supposed to, but it was okay. I didn’t want any of the boys around me, anyway, and all the girls I would have wanted were my friends already. I still wanted to have sex eventually. I just assumed that, when I was finally naked in front of somebody, it would be a result of a long building of trust. Then one night, ending another long stint of loneliness in my life, a second date with a boy from a dating app ended up happening in my room. Since he was there, I gave him wine, and since he was there, I leaned on his shoulder, and my intentions went about as far as kissing, but then I didn’t want to stop. And that was that. Another flip. I didn’t take off my underwear, but my boobs made their debut. As soon as
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Volume 47, Number 7
PAGE DESIGN BY VERA EBONG ART BY CHLOE KIM
we eased down, I grabbed the first T-shirt I could find and put it on and said I felt shy. I stayed shy for longer than I had to because it got me off. The boys I met from dating apps pulled at my shyness, and I willingly gave in, revealing a loud hunger. I liked seeing myself as something to be peeled and hearing my voice teetering in pitch, the same way I liked to take one last glance at the nudes I already sent, just to impress myself, before deleting them from my phone. Sexting had always been about being seen by myself. I started it because I wanted to talk to people, but I wasn’t as interested in listening to them. I didn’t mind if the images I sent weren’t reciprocated; I rarely wanted to see a dick more than I wanted to know that it was responding to me. But this all, letting myself witness versions of myself, is more of an invention than a curation. With identifying details like moles and jewelry cropped out, my nudes have little to do with the reality of my specific body. The dirty talk in between pre-calculus homework had even less to do with the way I went about my life. I can’t project an idealized version of my body or life into my sexuality if they are completely detached from one another. Yet what’s erotic is the possibility. I could be a girl that you’re itching to touch. A girl taking the risks to sneak you a mid-day nude. Girl down to give you a blowjob any time, even at 4 a.m. when she briefly woke up. Girl breaking past her shyness just enough to slobber—imagine what more she could be once the shyness is fully cracked. I could invent
a person who only existed in the vacuum of sex, and to play any iteration of that character, there was no vulnerability required. I had figured out how to take sexting to real life. And in bed, the rest of our lives were a glimmer beyond the vacuum, visible but far. The boys and I sometimes spoke quietly of our dreams. It felt good to be held so close to another person’s chest. To bypass all formalities and reach straight for what wasn’t always visible. To access their bodies and, by virtue of that, some parts of their minds. But this, too, was another possibility to entertain. I could be a girl who cared for them, even a girl that they could devote something to. But nobody was fooled. Then came love. Even before I knew what to call it, love broke down the vacuum. It’s all over my entire life, every part of it. So when I had sex, it was the kind that I feared in high school. We got naked in real life, in the undeniable presence of each other, breathing on each other, feeling the other moving, being seen, taken in, two eyes focused on only the other. And I didn’t want to invent anymore. I just wanted to be there. So I was seen, so vulnerably and wholly, and I ballooned, filling the space of my body. I forgot English. I forgot my name. I said, look at me, I am here, the same person I was a minute ago, a morning ago, a kiss ago. And I meant it, I really wanted to be looked at. The Nassau Weekly had figured out how to take Heejae Cho to real life.
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Volume 47, Number 7
Kissing Covens
The Gilda Stories as a Manifesto of Radical Black Love “The horizontal, chosen family works outside of the law—in The Gilda Stories, love is never codified by a wedding, same sex and interracial relationships play out beyond the reach of history, and one can have limitless mothers.” By SIERRA STERN
I
n 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan released The Moynihan Report, officially titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965). This extensive report identifies the “crisis” of the “Black Family”, or the fatherless matriarchy that characterized many Black families in the United States. For a variety of reasons, there is some truth to this generalization—my mother was raised by a single mother, and my brother and I have never known our maternal grandfather. The Moynihan Report praises the white vertical family for its remarkable stability, citing low divorce rates and strong patriarchal heads. He contrasts these statistics
with those of the matriarchal Black Family, which saw consistently higher rates of separation, matriarchal heads, and children outside of wedlock. The report was wildly popular, and for many years, Black families have been led to believe that they are missing something, that they should be striving towards nuclear wholeness. Jewel Gomez’s The Gilda Stories is a novel that reimagines the Black Family through vampiric allegory. By intertwining the socio-political history of the past two-hundred years, as well as the near future, with the immortal life of Gilda, a Black vampire, the book proposes anticapitalist constructions of family that not only validates the Black Family, but identifies its revolutionary potential. At the beginning of The Gilda Stories, Gilda has escaped the plantation where she was born, and her mother is dead. Within the first chapter, Gilda, referred to earlier in the novel as simply “the Girl,” meets the original Gilda, a kindly white vampire who runs a nearby brothel. Gilda is immediately taken in as a part of the brothel’s “family”, and while she remains
haunted by sweet memories of her mother’s touch, this rapid matriarchal turnover makes clear that The Gilda Stories is interested in redefining relational dynamics and expanding the definition of kinship beyond that of the nuclear family. The developing history of the vampire narrative is inseparable from ever-changing attitudes regarding emergent and unfamiliar sexualities. The vampire model interprets vampiric hunger as twofold, sexual desire that manifests in a hunger and necessity for blood. While most vampires require blood to live and routine feedings are a necessary part of their lifestyle, blood alone is not enough—their spiritual hunger must also be addressed. In The Gilda Stories, the vampires’ spiritual hunger, while sexual in nature, stems from a desire for connection with one another and with the human world. Soren, a worldly and experienced elder vampire who embodies the shared values of Gilda’s adopted vampire family advises, “[Gilda] and all of his children toward an enduring power that [does] not feed on death”, and as a result, Gilda learns to survive,
“by sharing the blood and by maintaining the vital connections to life”. In the novel, a vampire feeds on life when they participate in an “exchange” with their human victims, drawing a harmless amount of their blood while telepathically providing them “what’s needed–energy, dreams, ideas”. When a vampire chooses to feed on life, drawing blood becomes an act of listening and responding to the desires of the human world. In contrast, feeding on death severs this connection to the human world, as it requires the vampire to disregard the humanity of their meal and take without giving. By reforming vampiric processes of feeding and reproduction to embody exchange rather than extraction, Gomez invents a vampire that utilizes blood as a means of connection. The ideas of exchange and community are central to the vampires’ ritual of “sharing the blood”, or feeding together. While this phrase is used in reference to the vampires’ social eating, “sharing the blood” is an apt blanket expression for vampires’ overarching philosophy regarding feeding, copulating, and their relationship
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November 16, 2023 PAGE DESIGN BY PIA CAPILI
to the human world. The consumption and exchanging of blood in these vampiric rituals are a means of cultivating and maintaining connection between beings. When Gilda lays with Bird, her companion and mentor, they engage in a naked ritual that is half-sex and half-mutual bloodsucking. As Gilda attempts to parse the new feeling associated with this hybrid act, she reflects that her “desire was not unlike their need for the blood, but she had already had her share. It was not unlike lust but less single-minded. She felt the love almost as motherly affection, yet there was more”. Although Gilda’s stomach is full, she remains hungry for another kind of nourishment that initially eludes her. Cycling through the potential source of her feelings, Gilda compares her emotional appetite to both “lust” and “motherly affection,” but criticizes these forms of care for their limitations of scope and intensity. As Gilda and Bird give and receive motherly care from each other, sex becomes an act of mutual motherhood between the two. With Gilda’s background as an escaped slave and Bird hailing from a Lakota tribe, the disenfranchisement of Gilda’s and Bird’s cultures mirror the social death they experience as vampires. While vampirism prevents Gilda and Bird from engaging fully with the mortal world, they are able to find belonging in one another, and satisfaction in this connection. Incestuous vampirism is an act of world-breaking, as it questions the very efficacy of vertical social structure. Gomez’s notion of “sharing the blood” responds directly to proverbs like “blood is thicker than water” that do the rhetorical work of promoting a vertical family system, as she gives the horizontal family—that which is chosen and nonhierarchical— the same anatomical validation.
As blood is shared in the novel, interpersonal ties strengthen and change, and the vampires are able to create horizontal blood-relations with one another. Rather than engaging with the discourse of biological versus chosen family, Gomez constructs a world in which chosen family members can become biological. While other vampire narratives characterize the condition of vampirism as cannibalizing disease, The Gilda Stories reimagines the vampire coven as a self-contained utopia of love, free from the subjugation of traditional gender roles. For instance, the intimate exchange of blood in The Gilda Stories fights notions of dominant and submissive gender by allowing vampires to engage in acts of mutual penetration. This relational confusion is innate to the vampire species, as their non-genital means of penetration destabilize the roles of victim and predator associated with the act of genital penetration. Although Gilda takes a male sexual partner in Julian, a New York City thespian whom she converts to join her vampire family, their sex is non-genital, implying that “sharing the blood” is not a homosexual alternative to genital penetration, but a vampiric replacement for all sex. Gomez appears disinterested in debating the validity of queerness or sex as a means of power. Rather, she offers a depiction of sex without corruption and penetration without dominance, set against the contextual background of a world waiting to catch up. The horizontal, chosen family works outside of the law—in The Gilda Stories, love is never codified by a wedding, same sex and interracial relationships play out beyond the reach of history, and one can have limitless mothers. The horizontal family, at its root, challenges the political, legal, and social order of the Western world. While
Moynihan is concerned with the horizontal family’s social and political invalidity within American democracy, Gomez invalidates the system of democracy itself. Part of the speculation of The Gilda Stories occurs in its final two chapters, which take place in 2020 and 2050 respectively, far in the future of the book’s 1991 publication. Having run out of lived history, Gomez must make a prediction as to what happens next, and projects the implosion of the capitalist world within the next sixty years. With the implicit critique of Western capitalism embodied by Gomez’s vampires suddenly foregrounded, it becomes clear that Gomez has given up on capitalism entirely, and is already onto the next life. This apocalyptic conclusion suggests that the world must end to begin again. Clues to this conclusion are scattered throughout the narrative: in each chronological vignette of Gilda’s life she finds home, and later, makes the decision to leave it behind. In a sense, Gilda’s character is a stand-in for the wary anti-capitalist revolutionary. Despite her investment in Blackness and lifelong commitment to community-building, two hundred years pass before Gilda finally realizes that home is meant to be left and rebuilt over and over again. Amidst a collapsing capitalist infrastructure, true, lasting power is radical in nature. While The Gilda Stories comprehends fully the anti-Black systems in place, the novel marries radical Black feminism and vampire sexuality to refute and condemn the inherent isolation of Blackness. The perpetual unity of Gilda’s vampire family urges socially dead individuals to pursue life outside of hostile structures of oppression: At the novel’s end, the world as it was previously known is over, but Gilda and her vampire family
have survived. As they stand at the dawn of a new, unfathomable reality, social death becomes a kind of rebirth. As Gilda says, “there will be stories and dancing again.” To some, the horizontal family may appear to be the consolation prize for the Black family’s botched adherence to the white capitalist ideal. However, within the female locus and Black feminist scholarship, the horizontal family serves the crucial function of garnering unity among oppressed peoples, particularly women, all while having its sights set on an optimistic political future. Like Gilda and Bird, I’ve found family amidst friends, as many people have. This is not a new concept—queer communities have been embracing the concept of chosen family for centuries. Blood relation, after all, does not guarantee acceptance or even love. The revolutionary aspect of The Gilda Stories comes with its faith in the horizontal family’s political potential and its complete lack of faith in all things nuclear. Until we embrace our communities with the warmth of a mother, treat our lovers as equals, and take one another as our siblings, we will not truly know how to love at all. As we continue to worship the hierarchical family, we worship the dilution of love with power and spite. When Spillers sides with Moynihan to lament the weakness of the Black Family, she is not carrying the revolutionary thinking of Afropessimism far enough. For social death to become rebirth, water must be as thick as blood.
The Nassau Weekly’s spiritual hunger, while sexual in nature, stems from a desire for connection with Sierra Stern and with the human world.
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November 16, 2023 PAGE DESIGN BY CATHLEEN WENG
DEAD DOVE: DO NOT EAT: A Personal(ish) History of Fanfiction “Now that it’s mainstream, Own, before FanFiction.net, even it’s hard for me to reconcile before LiveJournal or DeviantArt, the subcultural nature of there was Spockanalia. fanfiction and fan spaces with its ever-increasing visibility. Contrary to popular belief, fanFor almost a decade, I’ve fiction is an art form that dates been so entrenched in fan back to Dante’s Inferno, perhaps culture that it surprises me the most famous spinoff of the when someone doesn’t know Bible. 1967, though, marks the first what Alpha/Beta/Omega formalized fanfiction that refers to dynamics entail.” itself as such. Spockanalia, which
I
By BETH VILLARUZ
first encountered fanfiction on the tiny screen of my neighbor’s iPod touch. It was 2014: the age of dystopia novels and their movie adaptations, when you couldn’t move for a reference to Divergent or The Hunger Games. Back then, fanfiction.net was the place to be, filled with middle-grade readers, writers, and probably some grownups too. What I didn’t know at the time was how formative fanfiction would be in my interests—and, perhaps more embarrassingly, my sexual awakening. I also didn’t know about the rich history of fanfiction cultivated by generations of fans past. The vast depths of internet fan culture didn’t just appear, beamed to my friend’s iPod like so much advertising. Before Archive of Our
fanlore.org and the Wikipedia entry on “Fan fiction” describe as the definitional fanzine, contained fan-made art, fiction, and essays inspired by the then-currently-airing Star Trek. This analog version of fanfiction was no less diverse in genre than the sprawling fic scene of the internet. It featured romance stories, “write like Star Trek was real” fics, and the original real person fic (RPF). Its third issue, released in 1968, received backlash for a few “dirty” stories that referenced, but did not feature explicit, sexual content. Fanfiction is just like any other genre—it has its own tropes, framing devices, and pitfalls. Some fics are fun for the whole family, whereas others are material strictly meant for jerkin’ it. However, fanfiction that acknowledges that it is fanfiction has mostly lived on the fringes of media. Hamilton, for
example, is essentially RPF fanfiction. So is A Man for All Seasons, which I was forced to read in tenth grade. Not sure either of the respective creators would ever admit that—and why would they? Modern fanfiction is often still viewed as a hobby for run-of-themill geeks and nerds (or, more worryingly, freaks and pervs). However, the increasing ubiquity of the internet has broadened fanfiction’s acceptance in the mainstream: Most people have heard the rumors that Fifty Shades of Gray and Red, White, and Royal Blue originated as fanfic. Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl, about a fic-obsessed college freshman, spawned the Carry On trilogy, which made the novel’s fictional franchise real. Even I, a former paragon of sexual shame, have sent my fanfiction to friends and first dates alike. I may still be a little embarrassed about the hobby, even as I write this article, but it’s a mostly a silly way to work through my emotions—like the fic I wrote about a West Wing character being scared to go to Princeton, or the one that contemplates Catholicism through the eyes of Ace Attorney characters. These, like many fics out there, are far from sexually explicit, which
may contribute to fanfiction’s gradual acceptance in the mainstream (although Fifty Shades would probably beg to differ). But should fanfiction’s more degenerate contributors be exiled for daring to tackle the taboo?
Fanfiction has always been a site of sexual freedom, even liberation—but with the advent of the internet, it has become an ever-changing garden of sexual delights and horrors, all of which coexist alongside fluff (heartwarming fics) and hurt/comfort (exactly what it sounds like), sometimes all at the same time. Now that it’s mainstream, it’s hard for me to reconcile the subcultural nature of fanfiction and fan spaces with its ever-increasing visibility. For almost a decade, I’ve been so entrenched in fan culture that it surprises me when someone doesn’t know what Alpha/ Beta/Omega dynamics entail.
Maybe this is because since my first prepubescent encounter with fanfiction, I’ve become something of a connoisseur. I can tell you that Archive of Our Own (AO3) is the best place to find quality fanfiction, that you should always filter for complete fics and exclude
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crossovers, that Wattpad is the home of the straightest, worst-written fic and you should never judge a fic by its popularity. I remember the mass migration from fanfiction.net to AO3, significant mostly because AO3 protects fan creators from copyright infringement suits, and the gradual decline of “lemon” and “lime” (also known as the citrus scale, meant to designate levels of explicitness) as ways to rate smut fics. I wouldn’t be caught dead describing anything as “slash” (male/ male) fic—it’s too cringe—but at one point in time, slash and femslash were the only terms we had to describe queer pairings. “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat” is a label that has particularly intrigued me recently. The term draws on Arrested Development (2003-2019), referring to a scene in which a character opens a bag labeled “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat,” finds a dead dove inside, and comments, “I don’t know what I expected.” This tag is now used to describe the most depraved of fics, those that depict rape, violence, cannibalism, and other unsavory topics of which I’ll spare you the description. Although these topics give me pause, I appreciate both the clear tagging system of fanfiction and
November 16, 2023
its willingness to push boundaries. “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat” is a marker of that which we are afraid to address in real life. Its use as a warning allows fanfiction enthusiasts to either engage or avoid the taboo, and fics that live under this label are a relatively harmless space for people of any age and background to explore the difficulties that plague the world, or those that they may be facing. Perhaps the writer publishing a violent fic is processing their own experiences through fictional characters, just as I have with my own more palatable issues. Extreme BDSM fics are as much an outlet for sexual discovery as the vanilla fics of my youth, the ones that fed sexual exploration and normalized sexuality for my pre-teen self. Fanfiction has its own constantly evolving dictionary, one that changes with new websites and fandoms and often corresponds to the evolution of social justice language. This is no accident—fandom is a haven for weirdos, for the marginalized to imagine a world beyond mainstream stories and representation and create their own. Without fanfiction, would I ever have discovered my own queerness? Where, if not in the corners of the internet, can a young girl use slash fiction
about the Book of Mormon musical to process her own religious doubts? And even my own encyclopedic knowledge of fanfiction, which goes far beyond the average person’s, falls short of the terminally online or elder fans who have been around since Spockanalia. As in 1967, fanfiction is a space for creative expression that exists outside of the constructs of more serious literary publishing. Anyone with access to a library computer can read or write their own fanfiction—and unlike most venues, including this very magazine, original work is verboten. No one logs onto AO3 to read a 200,000-word novel. If I wanted to do that, I’d major in English or something. No, we go to AO3 to read a 200,000-word fanfic that makes the Riverdale characters take down government corruption in the 1930s and fight in a well-researched portrayal of the Spanish Civil War. I may not get off to omegaverse or mpreg fic (both of which, suffice it to say, involve a lot of submissive and breedable men), but their very existence has broadened my idea of what a kink can be, what true sexual acceptance looks like. Fanfiction is, and has always been, on the forefront of normalizing the taboo, and
of depicting new trends in sexual culture. Enthusiastic consent, for example, has become a popular tag, exemplifying the impact of the #MeToo movement and encouraging fic readers to engage in enthusiastic consent with their own partners. Even the “Dubious Consent” tag has helped me recognize the red flags in my own sexual interactions. Fanfiction continues to be a space for me to, whether by writing or reading, work through the multitude of emotions that come with being human. With a cautious mindset (or an experienced guide like myself), it’s a place to safely explore one’s sexuality or dip a toe into the waters of creative writing. Each new fic—sexual content notwithstanding—builds on the work of generations of fans who are committed to pushing boundaries, even as they set clear and specific sexual ones.
Contrary to popular belief, fanfiction is an art form that dates back to Beth Villaruz, perhaps the most famous spinoff of the Nassau Weekly.
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Volume 47, Number 7
PAGE DESIGN BY VERA EBONG
A PEOPLE’S HISTORY
OF THE SEX ISSUE Celebrating 35 years of journalistic perversion. By JULIA STERN
Picture this: The year is 1988, and a new fad called “sex” is spreading on college campuses. Even the blowhards at Princeton are, in the wise words of my Politics professor, itching to get “rough and loose” with their compatriots. What was once a chaste college town is now a No Man’s Land for the pathologically perverse. The pages of Proudhon, Playboy, and Pornhub are running through Princeton; it’s a grim look. The Masthead of the Nassau Weekly observed this troubling trend, and in their alternative, weekly greatness, decided to do something about it. So they
published the very first Sex Issue: “The Levine and Shoulson Report,” described as “an undercover look at Princeton sexual patterns and attitudes.” The “The Levine and Shoulson Report” is now conspicuously absent from our archives — missing from the single copy of the April 28, 1988 issue. Only snippets remain. But with contributions like “A man defends mainstream males,” we can only assume that it rivaled the Kinsey Report in its quality, publicity, and societal impact. A fine craft indeed. In 2006, Princeton underwent the Second Great Sex Revival, and the Nassau Weekly again found itself thrust into a position of moral leadership. Our predecessors only had to glance over at the file cabinets in Bloomberg 044 to figure
out their response. It was time for another Sex Issue.
anthropologists with for ages.”
The 2006 issue managed to capture the beautiful equipoise that brings the Nassau Weekly, the 2000s, and sex together: earnestness with an awkward edge. The best way to show what I mean is to simply list the issue’s fourteen titles:
“A few years ago, I attended a lecture on disability fetishism.”
The Cock (and Bull) Market Looking for Love in the Stacks Yucking at Fale Family Affairs Sex Ed 101 Self-Love The Bad Sex Contest Strange Bedfellows Assault 1, Silverman 0 The Princeton Rub Judging Desire Sexual Blogging Not Just “Like a Virgin” Humpalicious Honchos, Bodacious Bigwigs, and Kinky Kingpins To the eyes of an outsider, this lineup could be a series of self-help pamphlets, the chapters in a book, or the courses cross-listed as “GSS.” Very little about “Humpalicious” screams high-profile journalism. But as soon as you start reading, it becomes clear just how many sides to sex there really are: the personal, the fictional, the political, the satirical, the educational, the fantastical, the informational, the anthropological. You can see for yourself on nassauweekly.com, where the entire issue is posted in our archives. But here are a few sentences to give you a taste: “Let’s face it – not everyone is good at sex.” “Princeton. A well-established, reputable institution. A hotbed of intellectual curiosity and homoeroticism. Wait – come again?” “The incest taboo is something
have
grappled
“Nefertiti, Egyptian Dominatrix Queen” “He swept her off her feet like a stallion sweeping a girl off her feet, and laid her gently down on the bed like a gentle eagle.” Some will claim that the 2006 Sex Issue was nothing more than souped-up smut, meant to clickbait the horny. But why not write about sex? Who are we kidding? The very fact that the Sex Issue was absurd, raunchy, and at points, downright bad, achieved something that a zipped-up report could not: preserved a very candid snapshot of how Princeton students thought about sex. It’s nice to know that our ancestors were not the plodding, cherubic pre-lawites that we make them out to be. And it’s reassuring that how college kids talk about sex hasn’t changed much—it remains a preoccupation so weird, so uncertain, and so thought-provoking that it can fill a whole issue of the Nass. In the words of the 2006 Winner of the Bad Smut Contest, “this most sensual issue of the Nassau Weekly” follows a long love affair between the Nassau Weekly and sex. Indeed, in such a world where tradition is shaky and morals are loose, we can find solace in the fact that the Nass has never lost sight of its sexy heritage. All hail the Nassau Weekly Sex Issue. Some will claim that the Nassau Weekly was nothing more than souped-up smut, meant to clickbait Julia Stern.