vogue.com
Every vagina has its own style, obviously. In the same way fashion and hairstyles change with the times, so does what goes on between a woman’s legs. And now more than ever, it feels like there’s a lot going on down there. For most women, pubic appearance is very intentional, meticulous, and labor intensive, and it has the potential to affect our confidence and behavior, too, despite most people having no clue what we look like without clothes on. It feels akin to women in Saudi Arabia wearing d…
over 10 years ago
vogue.com
It was announced today that the new Barneys New York catalog features nearly 20 transgender models, all photographed by Bruce Weber. One of the models—Ryley Pogensky, who identifies as “gender queer”—is quoted in the portfolio as saying: “What is between my legs is not thoroughly who I am. If gender is black and white, I’m gray.” The portfolio is beautiful, touching—many of the models are photographed alongside their family members, with arms slung around each other—and it offers a more nuanced…
about 10 years ago
vogue.com
Valentine’s Day is tomorrow, and I’m thinking about love. I’m writing this column from an apartment in Rome, home of Saint Valentine—a happy coincidence I discovered from a quick skim of Wikipedia. The story goes that Valentine was imprisoned for performing illegal weddings for soldiers, who had been forbidden to marry by the Roman Empire (single men were thought to make better servicemen). However, there actually aren’t any records of that marriage ban, and V-Day only began being celebrated as…
about 10 years ago
vogue.com
A friend of mine recently came to my apartment in a panic, worried that her boyfriend was cheating on her. When I asked how she’d come to that conclusion, she said, “I don’t know, I can just tell.” I asked her if there’d been any signs—had she seen compromising text messages, was he disappearing at night? “No,” she told me, “there’s no real evidence . . . it’s a just a feeling I have.” At that moment, I wanted to tell her she was being crazy, that she was acting like a stereotype of a hysterical…
about 10 years ago
vogue.com
Nymphomaniac, the new film by Lars von Trier, recounts the extreme, prolific, and at times risky sexual history of a woman named Joe, a self-proclaimed nymphomaniac. Put simply, it’s one of the best films about being human that I have ever seen. As someone who has, at times, reveled in my high sexual appetite, and at other times struggled with it, while watching, I felt—as one does with great films about the human condition—deeply connected to Joe, her pleasures, guilt and compulsions (albeit, t…
about 10 years ago
vogue.com
Last summer, I was at a rooftop party with a girl I’d recently met—I thought it was a date, or at least I hoped it was. I didn’t know much about her, but she was pretty and seemed nice enough, until out of the corner of my eye I saw her swatting at the air above my head. “Is there a bug?” I asked. She answered, “No, there was just some dark energy hanging around you. Don’t worry, it’s gone now.” I stared at her, hoping to find some sarcasm in her expression. There was none. At that moment, I kne…
about 10 years ago
vogue.com
In early 2010, I went more than four months without having sex. I was living in London at the time, and had become bored with my social scene. Every time I scanned the room at a party I had the same thought—everyone here who’s mildly attractive I’ve either already slept with, or have tried to sleep with and failed. I also had an obsessive crush on a boy who, though he wasn’t giving me any attention, managed to suck up most of my sexual energy. But the funny thing was, during those months, I wasn…
almost 10 years ago
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Last year, after meeting a guy at a party, I ended up back at his apartment in an all too familiar situation: Neither of us had any condoms. Under normal circumstances I would have told him to go out and get some or just settled for some nonpenetrative fun. But this guy was really hot. And I was drunk. And the nearby shop was closed. And I was on birth control. And he was really insistent that it didn’t matter . . . and so, eventually, I gave in. I woke up the next morning terrified. I knew noth…
almost 10 years ago
vogue.com
Last week, I found myself paddling a boat around a lake in Los Angeles. I’m not generally the sort of person who paddles boats around lakes—I don’t like being outside that much; whatever—but my girlfriend thought it would be romantic, and after she suggested that it would also help tone my arms, I agreed. To my surprise, I was really enjoying it. It was peaceful, relaxing, and it was kind of romantic, albeit in a very obvious way. But then I got a text, and, after checking it, I autopilot-opened…
almost 10 years ago
vogue.com
Last week, at my friend’s birthday dinner in Brooklyn, her boyfriend stood up to perform a toast. Following his little speech, and while holding the attention of basically the entire restaurant, he turned to her and said, “And by the way, will you be my wife?” In shock, she said yes, but twenty minutes later was medicating with a flask of vodka in the bathroom. “I wanted him to ask me, but not like that,” she said. “How embarrassing!” She had envisioned him popping the question during a quiet st…
almost 10 years ago
vogue.com
Last weekend, in the penthouse of an upscale, downtown hotel, I attended my first sex party. I went with a friend of mine—I’ll call her Anne—who’s been bugging me to come along to this particular event for months, on the grounds that I can’t call myself a true sex writer until I’ve been to an orgy. Fair enough, I thought.
“It’s the best sex party in New York, with the most fun, attractive crowd,” Anne assured me, adding that the attendees are a mix of swingers, “burners” (Burning Man–types), and…
over 9 years ago
vogue.com
It’s been two months since my ex-girlfriend and I broke up—or since she broke up with me, I should say—and I’m miserable. We all understand that breakups are meant to be difficult and painful. They’re the inspiration for endless songs and movies. But as it turns out, heartbreak is a feeling you truly don’t know until it happens to you. We’ve heard that “love hurts,” but that’s just a romantic abstraction until you’ve actually spent 72 hours in your room crying, your only human interaction being…
over 9 years ago
vogue.com
In middle school, I used to jokingly refer to my best friend’s older sister as The Shapeshifter. She seemed to have zero autonomous personality, but rather adopted, drastically and transparently, the personalities of the various guys she dated. When she started dating the musician, she wore ripped concert T-shirts and cutoffs and bought a record player from Urban Outfitters (sans records). When she moved to California and began dating the surfer, she got the requisite spray tan and highlights an…
over 9 years ago
vogue.com
In previous columns, I have written, in lengthy and pathetic detail, about the traumatic breakup I went through at the end of July. In addition to publishing multiple essays about the perils of heartbreak, I’ve also been privately campaigning to get my ex back: shameless, 2,000-word emails listing all the ways I’m prepared to change; sappy, “you complete me”-esque text messages; I even showed up at her apartment crying in a silk slip one evening, like a crazy woman from a Marcello Mastroianni mo…
over 9 years ago
vogue.com
Butt sex is officially on trend. To kick off the fourth season of Girls tonight, Marnie gets bent over a sink and has her butt eaten out—and really likes it. It is strongly implied that anal sex is what we are watching in a certain scene of **Paul Thomas Anderson’**s latest film, Inherent Vice. Mindy Kaling recently did a whole episode of The Mindy Project on anal sex—which aired, remember, on network TV. And in November, Harvard University offered a workshop called “What What in the Butt: Anal…
over 9 years ago
vogue.com
Last month, I flew from New York to L.A. to attend the bachelorette party of a close childhood friend. I’m at that age when suddenly everyone I know is getting married at once—seemingly with zero regard for my bank account—so I’ve been attending a lot of these festivities lately. In my experience, most bachelorettes follow a similar narrative: They begin with good intentions—dinner at a trendy new restaurant; a hike to the Griffith Observatory; rooftop cocktails with bonding!—but then somehow, i…
almost 9 years ago
vogue.com
“How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?” a guy friend of mine recently asked me.
Me: “I don’t know. How many?”
Him: “That’s not funny!”
While I did laugh at the joke, I probably incriminated myself by following up that laugh with an argument about why, in fact, feminists can take a joke. OK?! Of course, my primary defense was the god that is Amy Schumer, whose Emmy-nominated Comedy Central show Inside Amy Schumer and new movie Trainwreck have made her the radical frontrunner o…
over 8 years ago
vogue.com
This past spring, I spent a month in L.A. doing what everyone in L.A. does: “writing a screenplay,” aka drinking coconut kale smoothies and sitting in cars. “It’s so 2015,” said one friend, who’d taken a break from her screenplay to have dinner with me. “This girl I know just fucked a guy she met in an UberPool.” At the time, Uber had just launched UberPool, which allows you to share rides with other passengers who are going in the same direction and split the cost. I was a bit skeptical. “No, i…
over 8 years ago
vogue.com
I woke up on the morning of my 30th birthday naked and alone in an unfamiliar hotel room, with a dead phone, covered in peanuts. As I crawled around the room, desperately searching for a phone charger, I attempted to piece together memories of the previous evening. All I could think was: This is 30? I realize that 30 isn’t “old.” Still, each milestone age is inevitably approached with some anxiety, because it forces us to assess our lives and our achievements and our bodies and our relationships…
over 8 years ago
vogue.com
Look, I’m a feminist or whatever, but I still like it when a guy picks up the check on a date. I understand that in our post-gender, social-justice millennial era, the idea of subscribing to traditional gender roles in a relationship makes you an honorary fascist, and yet, I can’t help getting wet whenever a willowy, beaked artiste pulls out his wallet and says, “Babe, I got this one.” Now, I’m not saying that I’m looking for a sugar daddy to bankroll my leisurely life of masturbation and bloggi…
over 6 years ago
vogue.com
If you’re a sexually curious woman, along with being called a slut, another unfortunate refrain is: “Are you sure you want to do that?” Some of my greatest hits include: Are you sure you want to fuck that married couple? Are you sure you want to go to that sex party? Are you sure you want to be suspended upside down from the ceiling by a guy with a low-hanging man bun? Are you sure you want to pee into that lawyer’s mouth for $200? The implication, of course, always being: because you might not…
about 6 years ago
