Hot Stuff
Oh god I'm like the crypt keeper
“You’re not as hot as you think you are!”
This is something my friends from college and I quote to each other constantly, calling back a memory from Junior year. It was Spring Weekend, which meant we were dressed to the nines for a 2014 music festival despite it being fifteen degrees too cold for denim shorts and tube tops; tribal-printed bandeaus hanging off our bodies—enviable figures fueled by cafeteria chicken fingers and New Amsterdam flavored vodka.
We were on the way to a bar at 11am, drunk already and shrieking in the April sun about who we might see at the next location. As we passed an apartment with some guys drinking on the roof, we felt something rain down on us: Jell-O shots in tiny plastic containers. The guys launched them at us, barely missing our flat ironed hair, while shouting the above phrase.
We were offended and momentarily ashamed, until we started to laugh—because they were wrong. We were, objectively, exactly as hot as we thought we were back then.
The other night a man guessed my age correctly and it bothered me.
I don’t like that it bothered me—I know I don’t look 25 anymore and I know that the silver Stacy London streak in my hair gives away my seniority. But still, I thought I had been getting away with something. I also assumed common courtesy meant subtracting a few years when you tried to pinpoint someone’s age, which made me consider: Do I look even older than 33? And then: Do I really care?
It’s hard to accept getting softer and more crinkly while being served constant GLP-1 ads and videos of 10-step skincare regimens. I feel like I’m supposed to be fighting an uphill battle against my body’s natural inclinations. And being both vain and a hypochondriac isn’t doing me any favors. The other day I googled “liver spot early signs” after seeing a faded freckle on my cheekbone.
It seems at 33, the same year our lord and savior Jesus Christ also found himself at a crossroads, I’ve reached a strange intersection.
I miss so badly the feeling of being 21 and impossibly thin, taut, and wrinkle-free. I wish I could bottle it and take it like The Substance. And yet despite being at the physical peak of my youth then, and knowing it—I was still so, so deeply insecure. I used to spend hours picking apart my arms or my cheeks or stomach in photos on Facebook, or wear midriff tank tops out to the bar only to try and pull them down the entire time, feeling miserable. I had then what I would call now a perfect body, but I wasn’t happy about it.
Now, that same body, heftier and creakier, doesn’t quite move in the same ways it used to. I find strange hairs and stretch marks and rolls of fat that seem to appear overnight. Some nights after I’ve smoked a joint I’ll look at myself in the mirror naked and think, Oh my god, my tits really are all the way to my knees.
In some cliched ways I do feel like I’ve lost my luster. I don’t walk into a room anymore feeling like I could go home with anyone I wanted to—a specific confidence I used to rely on when I was younger—but I do feel more comfortable and at peace in my skin now than I ever did before. And I would trade that for a smaller frame or toned abs any day.
Lately I’ve been reading novels narrated by postmenopausal or perimenopausal women (Vladimir and All Fours, respectively), and I’ve been struck by the rituals of vanity that emerge—or continue—with age. And the ones depicted are innocuous—no needles or operations, but still: all the lotions and the expensive creams and the incessant hair plucking and dyeing just to maintain some outward notion of attraction.
It scares me because I think I’ll probably be the same way. And I don’t know that I want to be. I’d rather seize my moment now, be exactly as hot as I imagine myself to be, and then let the grip on my youth go with grace. Be able to tell my face and my body once they lose their collagen: Go with god, you served me well.
But I’m not ready to let go yet. I spent so long hating what I saw in pictures and in the mirror and feeling ashamed of myself. I took my body—my youth, my vibrancy—for granted. I know I still have plenty of time left. And I know that aging is a gift. But I feel like I just walked in the door of my childhood home after a long absence only to find that they’re planning to sell it and turn it into an assisted living facility.
With a deep, visceral ache, she wished her true form might prove to be a sleek and shining one, like a stiletto blade slicing free of an ungainly sheath. Like a bird of prey losing its hatchling fluff to hunt in cold, magnificent skies. That she might become something glittering, something startling, something dangerous.
— Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times
In grief, my stomach has been a bottomless pit.
I’m hungry all the time. And even when I’m not, I still want to eat something. There is a wide open, gnawing hole in my gut that begs to be filled at all hours. When I was younger and newer to the feeling, I would satisfy it with all of my vices. But drinking often made me sad and drugs made me tired. The only thing that seemed to satiate that hunger was sex.
Not just the feeling of a warm body next to me or on top of me, but the thrill of anticipation: trading sexts for hours while out running errands to race home and send a nude and possibly, if I were lucky, get an invitation to come over later that day. Or being out on a Friday night feeling the pulse of possibility that I might not wake up in my own bed in the morning. Of course, it wasn’t all glamorous. But there was always a sense of relief. The intense hunger I felt at all times finally had an outlet, and even these casual encounters genuinely helped to chip away at the hole of grief, filling it with one pound of sand at a time.
Two problems have emerged as of late: I’m not (as stated) so young anymore as to feel like the hottest person in the room. And, what’s worse—my horniness seems to have walked away from me entirely.
And it’s not just that I don’t want to sleep with anyone. It feels like desire, especially sensual and sexual desire, has completely deserted me. I have phantom limb syndrome without it.
The other night out at a crowded bar I found myself feeling bored and restless, which isn’t an usual thing in itself, but there was a deeper concern bubbling up that felt a little like a midlife crisis. I wasn’t having any fun, I realized, and wondered if maybe I had just outgrown that kind of setting. Where was the thrill of bumping into a stranger and spilling my drink on them? Where was the possibility of locking eyes with someone across a room while LCD Soundsystem played on the speakers? And in thinking about it more the next day, it hit me: I miss my own desire just as much as I miss being desired.
I think often of Margaret Atwood’s male fantasies quote when I’m angry at men and my own self-voyeurism and self-objectification, but in that moment at the bar surrounded by pheromones and cologne and sweat, all I could think was that I—genuinely, no matter how taboo it might be to say—missed male attention.
In my early 20s it was an unlimited resource. I once got a guy’s number through the window of the Donnybrook without even speaking to him; I once made out with a stranger on a street corner in San Francisco by just going up to a group of men and saying “Your friend in the green is cute.” Like shooting fish in a barrel. Not because I was the most beautiful or the most alluring or interesting, but because I had an unshakeable confidence in my own desire. I wanted something, and so I got it. This had always been something I embodied as a universal principle.
I don’t know when that feeling wavered. Maybe I just keep thinking: You’re not as hot as you think you are!
So many middle aged and elderly women have said that one of the biggest perks of getting older is aging out of being a sexual object. Finally crossing that threshold where men no longer see you as prey. And I agree that it’s nice to not always feel men’s eyes on me when I go out. I like being able to eat alone at the bar without someone staring at my chest or trying to force a conversation.
I love the freedom of existing outside the vortex of wanting, both men’s and my own—I just didn’t think I’d be so bored by it.
When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don’t move, I think. Stay like that, let me have that.
— Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye
I don’t even have my fantasies to keep me company. I can’t think of a man’s hands on me these days without feeling put off by it. But that gnawing pit keeps getting bigger. Remember, I tell myself, longing is momentum in disguise. And so I try to force myself to want someone, to crave the intensity of closeness, to feel a hunger that lives inside my skin instead of my stomach. Anything to propel me forward. But nothing comes.
There’s a man I met at a bar in the Bowery when I was 22 the same way I met most guys back then: I saw him, I wanted him, and I made it known to him. He was having drinks with a friend at a table next to mine, and somehow I inserted myself into their conversation. I’m sure it was somewhat bullish and without much charm (“You kept licking and biting your straw,” he told me—mortifying), but we exchanged numbers and soon began a very serious pen pal relationship. I called him Soho Dan because he lived in Soho, and I knew almost nothing else about him besides what he looked like naked.
Snapchat used to be the keeper of all my horny antics. I had a photo album a mile long of just my own nudes, years’ worth of them, repeats of the same poses sent to different recipients. I would browse the collection often—out of vanity when I was feeling good, and out of anxiety when I had gained a few pounds and wanted to check the way my body now looked from the same angle, comparing a centimeter’s difference in the circumference of my waist or the curve of my stomach.
I don’t have the Snapchat app anymore. I deleted it a few years ago, along with my entire carefully curated collection of nearly a decade. It’s possible it’s still somewhere in the Cloud, but I think it’s better for my mental health if I let go of the past. But I miss the urge to document my own desire, just for myself. So many of those photos were never seen by anyone else.
I think of Catherine O’Hara (bless) in Schitt’s Creek saying: “Take a thousand naked pictures of yourself now. You may be currently thinking, ‘I’m too spooky.’ Or, ‘Nobody wants to see these tiny boobies.’ But believe me, one day you will look at those photos with much kinder eyes and say, dear god I was a beautiful thing.”
Soho Dan and I used to communicate for a while only via Snapchat, so when I deleted it I didn’t hear from him for a while. Over the years our contact has been sporadic, a text or a random call once every 10-16 months.
But on Sunday morning, I woke up to a missed call from him. I had spent the weekend lamenting again that I had lost my desire, and had been meditating on the absence of my horniness, aka begging the universe to return it to me (Come home, Lassie!). I had been served on Friday night by a bartender who didn’t remember going on a date with me. So when I saw Dan’s name on my screen upon waking up hungover and empty, I nearly jumped out of bed like Charlie Bucket’s grandfather.
We spent the rest of the day sexting and FaceTiming. I felt like I had been hit by lightning. I was Diane Lane in Under the Tuscan Sun after she finally gets laid, jumping up and down shouting, “I’ve still got it!”
I went to bed for the first time in months imagining a man wrapping his arms around me and savoring the fantasy of it. So, imagine my surprise the next morning when I woke up alone and realized I was no longer horny—my desire having once again slipped out silently in the middle of the night—and felt relieved.
But I wanted to remember the feeling, and have a reminder that it could come back at any moment. So I slipped out of my pajamas, snapped a nude, and saved it. Just for myself.
Wisdom my girl, you’ve got it!