A few years ago, I put my old queen-size mattress up for sale on Craigslist. The first to show at my Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment was an attractive brunette in her mid-20s named Darla. She asked if she could lie down on it, and I politely averted my eyes as she bounced and flopped around. “I’ll take it,” she said. As we squeezed the mattress down the stairwell, she explained that she was on a roller derby team, and that it had kindled in her a new sense of self-confidence and female solidarity. After we tied the mattress to the roof of her Subaru, we exchanged numbers.
We talked amiably over the phone a few times, but I never asked her out. Then one day, I came across an ad in the Village Voice for a workshop called “Erotic Bondage and Dirty Domination,” given by the adult sex shop Toys in Babeland. I was not involved in the BDSM scene — in fact, I’d never even considered bringing sex toys, far less weapons, into the bedroom. But I thought it would be a kind of anthropological adventure for Darla and me. It might speed up the expensive and psychically exhausting courtship ritual, and give us a shared experience to discuss. At the very least, it was more original than a bar or a club or a show. A friend of mine had just been to an S/M party, and returned swearing that everyone should try it. That night, I sent a text message to Darla, suggesting we attend.
I should point out that I had only recently discovered the ease of texting. Suddenly, a hand-held device allowed me to write something I didn’t have the courage to say to someone over the phone, never mind in person, and then to sit back and wait, burning with anticipation, for a response. The city at night seemed aglow with the variety of encounters this made possible. In truth, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go to the class. I was half-joking. I was also, frankly, a bit drunk.
Minutes later, a text arrived: “Sounds fun!”
And so on a cold night in November, I pushed open the heavy glass doors of Toys in Babeland’s SoHo shop. Darla appeared soon after, zipped into a sleeping bag-length down jacket.
“Well, here we are!” she said brightly, kissing me on the cheek.
Two employees greeted us — an effete young man in tight pants and a Mohawk, and a voluptuous black-haired girl in a jungle-green velour jumpsuit. Their expressions were identical: endlessly sympathetic, wildly sexual. They handed us packets and pens, and we sat down in a row of folding chairs near the back.
Darla’s green eyes glittered with a kind of teenage mischievousness. But I noticed the packet — labeled “Bondage and Discipline” — was shaking slightly in her hand, as if she was about to give a speech. I instantly felt guilty for inviting her here. There was no alcohol to relax the mood, and the room was full of harsh fluorescence, throwing spotlights on products like the Ophoria Finger Vibe and Penetration Station. Our classmates, with whom I avoided making eye contact, were milling about the vibrator displays.
“That’s the one I have,” Darla said, gesturing at the display table. “The blue one.” The device was large and streamlined, with the kind of wrist cord attachment found on cameras and flashlights.
The girl in the green jumpsuit stepped to the front of the ad hoc classroom, and everyone sat down. She introduced herself as Rosalyn (her name, like the others in this essay, has been changed), and explained that everyone is capable of both domination and submission, that nobody is either/or. Her eyes were smoky and dark — bedroom eyes. When she asked what we wanted to learn, a heavy silence fell over the group.
“Knots!” a girl shouted at last, and the class laughed in relief. The girl was wearing cork-size plugs in her earlobes and holding her girlfriend’s hand. They smiled radiantly, completely at ease under the circumstances. I envied them.
“OK,” Rosalyn said. “Knots. Check! Anything else?”
Silence.
“All right, well. I hope you guys are ready, because this class is gonna be really fun!”
Darla pounced on the opportunity for irony. “Yes!” she whispered, squeezing my knee. I was uncomfortable being here — far more uncomfortable than I’d predicted — and the benign comment loosened me up to an almost psychotic degree. I laughed into my hand, worried I might giggle uncontrollably for the rest of the class, but the fit soon passed.
Rosalyn stepped back and Daniel, a shifty fellow in a baggy sheep’s wool sweater and wingtips, took her place. “Hey, you guys! Welcome to Erotic Bondage and Dirty Domination!” he said, with considerable sass. Rosalyn had seemed a sensitive and reliable guide, but Daniel looked unsteady; he seemed to be in training for the job. Rather abruptly, he began reading from the packet we’d been given, looking up now and then to establish a rapport with the audience. “The masochist is someone who enjoys inflicting pain on others,” he said, “whereas a sadist … a sadist enjoys being the recipient of pain.”
“I think you got that backwards there,” said a black man in sunglasses and a white Kangol hat near the front.
Daniel blushed and flipped the pages back and forth. He gave an exasperated “Ah!” before redefining the words correctly.
Just then, Rosalyn said, “I smell smoke. Is something burning?” As Daniel turned around, Rosalyn leapt at the table behind them, where a scented massage candle had lit one of the fanned sex-pamphlet displays. “Oh my God!” she shouted, laughing as she brought a hardback erotica book down on the table, smothering the flames.
Darla leaned in again and whispered, “Couple on first date dies in Babeland fire.” An image came to me of our blackened corpses lying amid the molten remains of sex toys and flavored lubricants. I smiled. I sensed we were bonding over this strange lecture.
But the comfort was short-lived. Rosalyn began playing a DVD of “The Devil and Miss Jones,” calling it “a classic BDSM film available for purchase after the workshop.” On-screen, a large woman in a corset, wielding an Indiana Jones-style whip, lashed another woman shackled to a mahogany table across the buttocks. The shackled woman screamed with pleasure and pain.
I am not squeamish by nature, but I suddenly started to panic. My heart was thumping. Each breath demanded more air than the last. The reason people go to dark bars on dates, I remembered, is to avoid having massive panic attacks. It was like being 13 again, halfway through a first date to the movies, not enjoying myself so much as trying to survive one moment to the next.
Meanwhile, Rosalyn fast-forwarded to a new scene: This time the dom was male, sternly clothed in a tight white T-shirt and black slacks. Jenna Jameson, the famous porn star, hung by her hands from a deluxe home-fitness machine, wearing a pair of vinyl chaps and nipple clamps, her mouth held open by a vicious metal gag. The man lightly flogged Jenna’s vagina in a figure-eight motion, then told her what he was going to do with the knotted, glass-blown dildo in his hand. Jenna managed an obstructed “Oh-ay.” Accordingly, he slid the dildo gently inside her. Jenna coughed out the gag. “Sorry,” she said. The man quietly accepted her apology in a don’t-let-it-happen-again kind of way.
At that exact moment, the guy in front of me put his arm around the woman beside him. It was surprising to see, this act of casual tenderness in the face of what struck me as frightening sexual role play. By contrast, I’d been avoiding any physical contact with Darla, even the slightest grazing of her boot with mine, for fear of implying that I was into this, that she could expect such things from me. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught her glancing at me cautiously.
Later, a professional dominatrix named Sheila came out. Gothic and rail thin, she began tying Daniel to a chair with cold, automatic grace. “This is your basic Lahrer knot I’m making,” she told us. Rosalyn distributed short lengths of rope so we could practice on one another.
This, I discovered with a stab of self-pity, was the last straw. Earlier, I’d feared being summoned to the front of the class to take part in some kinky demonstration. Instead, the rope came to us. The tangible reality of it overpowered any attempt on my part at humor or ironic detachment. Darla and I stared at one another helplessly, like a couple of lost children.
“Should I … tie you?” she said, blushing to her hairline.
“Sure, sure,” I said, offering my wrists like a prisoner about to be handcuffed. Following the steps in the packet, she carefully lashed them together in a trembling approximation of the Lahrer technique.
“Nice job,” I said.
“Thanks,” she said.
Afterward, while our classmates stayed behind for what appeared to be the true goal of the workshop (buying Babeland merchandise), Darla and I walked quickly to the nearest, darkest bar, where we drank whiskey and beer until our self-consciousness all but disappeared. We chuckled at our recent selves as though they were different people, clueless and socially inept.
Had she really wanted to go to the workshop, I asked, or had she been pretending?
“No, no, I wanted to go!” Darla yelled over the music. “I mean, if only so I could talk about it with the girls from derby. One of them gave me an S/M handbook a while back, but I still haven’t looked through it.”
Had she felt at all queasy during the dungeon scene?
“A bit. I sort of wanted a safe word, you know? To shout if things got too weird?”
Had she thought I was into BDSM?
“Totally. You looked super into it.”
Really?!
“No, I’m joking. You seemed shy about it. Like me.”
After the bar closed we went back to her apartment. She showed me her blue vibrator and the S/M handbook, as if they were evidence that we had indeed been at Babeland earlier, that it hadn’t been a dream. I marveled at the complex contortions and decorative rope bondage (the Dragonfly Sleeve, the Japanese Pearl Harness) depicted in the book. The patterns were amazingly intricate. It must have taken generations to develop the techniques — years of groping in the dark after some elusive form of sensual excitement. All those agonizing botched attempts before someone finally got it right and a surge of pleasure shot up their spine! The thought of it made me feel ashamed for trying to hasten my relationship with Darla to its sexual endpoint. How had I become so blind to the subtleties of dating? Much like erotic bondage and dirty domination, it was a craft one honed over time with the willing and adventurous participation of another. Looking for shortcuts was an exercise in pointlessness, maybe even pain.
I closed the book and walked to the window. It was then that I noticed her bed. Stuffed animals and a fluffy white comforter had disguised my old mattress beneath. I’d forgotten all about it.
“How have you been finding the mattress?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s delightful,” Darla said, rolling her eyes in mock ecstasy. “It provides excellent lower back support.”
We lay down on the bed together and stared at the ceiling, where she’d stuck a small galaxy of glow-in-the-dark stars and planets. I told her I’d had a similar arrangement as a kid. Within minutes, we were both asleep.
Dig if you will the picture: A middle-aged man stands in an elevator on the 26th floor of the Palazzo, one of the most luxurious (well, expensive) casino/resorts on the Las Vegas strip. At 6-foot-3 and 245 pounds, he’s a pretty big guy, though he “carries it well.” His red hair is cut in a flattop, and he has a closely cropped beard, but he doesn’t look particularly imposing. He’s dressed in a faded sea foam green Banana Republic polo shirt, khaki shorts from Target, and Birkenstock sandals. Over one shoulder is a small messenger bag. He stands in the corner and tries to look like everyone else; he may or may not be checking messages on his PDA, but he’s pushing buttons on it and appears busy.
The doors open and three women step on: a blonde, a brunette and one whose hair has been bleached and blown dry so many times it’s not a discernible color. All of the women could stand to have a good 3 inches cut off their hair. They wear slight variations on the Little Black Slut Dress. They wear too much makeup, a pair of shoes that doesn’t quite match the dress, towering heels.
The man in the corner rolls his eyes and thinks to himself, “And I’m the hooker.”
That’s right: I’m 47 years old, I’m a good 30 pounds overweight, and I make my living by taking care of men who come to Las Vegas hoping for some skin time with other men — for a fee. And in case you’re ready to dismiss me as someone clinging onto the last shreds of his faded beauty, you should know that I was well into my 40s before I started hooking.
If you find it hard to believe that anyone would pay the likes of me for sex, you’re not alone. I get lots of hate e-mail telling me how pathetic it is for a “fat old queen” like me to be charging for his company. About half of it comes from skinny smooth-skinned rent boys who were never going to be my competition, and the rest is from 40-something men with bodies similar to mine, probably mad because they don’t have the balls to hang out a shingle for themselves. And almost all of them include a variation of same question: “There are actually guys who pay you?!”
Allow me to let you in on one of the dirty little secrets of human sexuality: Hardly anyone (except for the very stupid and very lazy) has ever accepted the ideals of beauty and/or desirability as set forth by their respective cultures’ Fashionable Intelligence. And for every type of attraction, there is a market to be tapped.
In gay culture I am what is known as a “bear”: bigger, hairier men who favor some kind of facial hair and tend to embody a jeans-and-shirt version of masculinity. Of course there are also metrosexual bears who groom their eyebrows and wear black tie to the opera. Some of us are stocky but in generally good shape; others are what the American Medical Association considers morbidly obese. There are leather bears, muscle bears and polar bears (men whose beards or body hair are white). I myself have been called a “ginger bear” (a British expression, from their term for redheads) and, when I had shoulder-length hair, a “lion.”
Because there are other woodland creatures to be found among the “bear community.” (I strongly resist the ideas “of “community” among gays in general and bears specifically, but for the sake of expediency let’s just roll with it.) Probably the most interesting sub-category of bear is that of “cub,” because it has so many variations. For some, the term cub designates someone younger, who may or may not want to be mentored in the way of the bear; for others, it’s more about relative stature or lack thereof, regardless of the guy’s age; and for still others, it simply indicates a strong identification with the bear “culture” without such physical trappings as a furry chest.
Tall skinny guys with lots of body hair are “otters”; average-size men who are relatively hairy and, often, exceptionally horny consider themselves “wolves.” In the old days, before we got all politically correct about everything, guys who were attracted to bigger men were called “chubby chasers,” but no more. Nowadays, men who don’t fit into any of the above categories who enjoy ursine company are called, simply, “admirers.”
And that’s just the Anglos. Many Asian bears like to be called “pandas,” regardless of where their ancestors were born, though just as many find the term offensive. Smooth-skinned Latinos with short, compact physiques are often referred to as “toros” (or bulls), which also suggests a testicular prowess. The bear scenes in Spain and Italy are so popular that I’m sure they have their own lists of sub-categories. It’s like how the Inuits have a million words for snow.
So, yes: I’m a Las Vegas call bear. But don’t be fooled into assuming that all my clients come from the world of the bears. Far from it. The men who hire me run the gamut from 18-year-olds who want their first male-male experience to be with a man who knows what he’s doing to men in their 80s who just want to be held by a lumberjack type for an hour. They might be fat, they might be average, or they might have bodies so perfectly sculpted they should be underwear models.
Among my regular clients are Jaime and Luis, 28-year-old Mexican boyfriends who barely speak enough English to make the appointment and spend the whole session crying “Ay! Papi rico!” Two or three times a year I spend a night with Nicholas, a charming Canadian businessman who discovered his homosexuality later in life and wants to get “caught up” on the basics of sex with men before he puts himself out there. And when I go to San Diego I love getting together with Bobby, a black mechanic with a beautifully muscled body and a smile that could put Tom Cruise to shame. He likes me to put on construction boots and stomp on his chest. Lucky for Bobby I earned a first aid merit badge in the Boy Scouts, so I know exactly where not to step to keep from breaking off his sternum and killing him.
This is the part where people ask me for the sordid details of my life on the edge of society, and the strange requests I must constantly get in my seedy little demimonde. But the boring truth is that those dark dabblings are few and far between. There was this one time in Phoenix when I was called to the far edges of the suburbs very late at night. When I pulled in the driveway the entire house was dark, including the doorbell. After a few knocks, someone looking like Gollum came to the door and brought me to the only room in the house with furniture or light. He poured Welch’s grape soda into the chamber of a clear glass water pipe and started smoking either crack or crystal meth.
All I remember of that session is how he kept telling me to pull on his nipples as hard as I could and then barking, “Don’t leave marks! My kids don’t know I’m gay!” After as much time as I thought I could reasonably call an hour, I told him I needed to get going. I let myself out while he smoked another bowl and returned to the porn that he’d been watching when I came in.
Creepy? Yes, but not once was I afraid for my own safety. More than anything I felt sorry for the guy. I spent most of my time debating whether or not to suggest he get some help.
But these wacko incidents make up a small percentage of what I deal with on a regular basis. A good deal of that, I think, has to do with how and where I operate: Guys see my ad and get a chance to think about it before giving me a call, a process that seems to do a fair amount of screening for me. Now if I were walking up and down the Strip offering unsolicited $50 blow jobs to drunken fraternity types, I would expect to be beaten up on a regular basis. Instead, I’m amazed at how “normal” most of these guys are.
Some are boyishly cute, some are movie star handsome, and many are the kinds of guys you probably wouldn’t notice in line at the supermarket. What over 90 percent of the men who hire me have in common, though, is that I’d probably have sex with them in other circumstances. If my experience is any indication of the world at large, the idea that men who hire escorts can’t get dates in other ways is a myth. Men have hired me for all kinds of reasons, but never — not even once — has anyone hired me out of desperation. Maybe I wasn’t his first choice of escort, but he certainly could have picked up a guy at a bar, or a bathhouse, or from any of the dozens of hookup Web sites out there.
So why do they hire? There are as many different answers to that question as there are men with sex drives, but among those who hire me, the fetish of red pubic hair figures prominently in the decision. Take your time and read that sentence again, because it says exactly what you thought it did: The fascination with red pubic hair is as much of a fetish as bondage or voyeurism. For some the fascination stops with the hair on the top of my head, and for others the beard really does it for them (as I started getting more white hair in my beard, a friend started calling it cinnamon-sugar). But most men who want to know “if the carpet matches the drapes” get very excited at the possibility of getting all up-close and personal with my “fire crotch.” Apparently we redheads smell and taste different, too.
Actually, the red hair fascination was what got me started hooking in the first place. I had posted pictures of myself on a gay dating site, and they caught the attention of a wealthy doctor in Beverly Hills. No matter how many e-mails he sent me about his medical accomplishments and his acquisitions of blue-chip art, I just wasn’t attracted to him. Then, out of nowhere, he asked me, “Do you ever do massage?” I’d already told him what I did for a living, so there was pretty much only one thing he could have meant.
At the time I was working as a caterer, so I did the same thing with him that I would have done with a neurotic party planner or a meddlesome mother of the bride: I gave him a price that was so high he’d almost certainly say no — but it would be well worth my time if he bit. As fate had it, he bought my services as a birthday present for his driver, a handsome, stocky Latino who was just my type. It was the easiest $200 I ever made. A few days later I called a photographer friend who was trying to break into the porn market and did some modeling in exchange for some high-quality erotic photos. Not long after that I started buying ad space on certain play-for-pay Web sites.
Beyond the fascination with redheads, most of the men who hire me have come to Las Vegas for either business or vacation and are looking for something they can’t get in their “real lives.” Some of these guys are married to women, some are in relationships with men that have gone south. (Of course, I live in a country where two men or two women are denied the basic human right to be trapped in a loveless marriage, but that’s a different matter entirely.) Some are openly gay men who live in such small communities that any time they have sex it might as well be on the front page of the local paper. So why on earth would anyone waste one of his very few nights of sexual freedom prowling the bars or deciphering personal ads on the off-chance that he’ll find a suitable playmate? At least by hiring an escort he can spend time with a man he knows a little something about and with whom he can work out the sexual menu in advance. Add to that the opportunity to live out a fantasy, and, as I like to say, “what happens in Vegas … is dick.”
And, oh yeah: There are actually men who hire me because they enjoy my company enough to take me to the opera, a formal dinner at the Plaza, or on a cruise to Mexico.
If there’s one thing that continually shocks me about my work, it’s how completely banal the transaction is. Long before that HBO show was on the air, I started calling myself an “intimacy consultant.” It began as a joke, but I soon realized there was some truth in it. I cater to a niche market that is grossly underserved, and I usually provide something more than a quick boink. Las Vegas is home to some stunningly beautiful and sophisticated call girls, as well as some buff, perfectly waxed gay male porn stars — but not everybody dreams of being with one of them. Some guys fantasize about being with a guy who looks and acts like me. And my clients are all too happy to engage in a perfectly civilized transaction to make that happen.
This isn’t one of those stories about how empowering it was to pose naked for a magazine. You’ve read that one already. It usually involves someone who falls just slightly out of the range of superhumanly gorgeous, striking a blow for “real” women everywhere. “Model who isn’t insect thin gets naked for Glamour” — edgy! Miss Universe goes unretouched — keeping it real! “I am showing the world my feminine strength by ditching my underpants!”
Well, that’s not why I did it. And that’s good, because that’s not what happened. So when you see my friends and me nude in New York’s Time Out this week, don’t assume I’m making a big statement on behalf of my sex, or presume I’m trying to be an example to anybody else. Get your own self-esteem role models, girlfriend.
Why, then, did I disrobe? It’s not like I usually go in for exhibitionism — I’ve never even worn a bikini. When, throughout my 20s and 30s, friends were working as strippers and posing nude in men’s magazines, I never once considered joining their ranks. I wasn’t a naked-getting kind of woman, any more than I’m a NASCAR-driving or oil-fire-putting-out one. I harbor no delusions of being photogenic either. For the author picture for my recent book, the photographer took well over 300 shots and informed me, “I wouldn’t have picked any of them.”
But I do like looking at nude pictures, and I’m an unabashed fan of Time Out’s Naked New Yorkers pictorials. Far from the abundantly retouched, trying-too-hard stuff out there, they represent both sexes, a variety of ethnicities, sexual orientations and body types, in tableaux that are always funny and irreverent. An actor poses with his pants down in the park. A woman sits on a chaise, surrounded by well-wishers. If you’re going to be naked, you ought to be having a good time.
A lot of people agree — when Time Out placed the call for more subjects, it was deluged with volunteers. One of them was my friend Stacey, who wrote to the magazine suggesting it photograph her poker group, which happens to consist of a friendly bunch of local moms. “I’m living my life more boldly than I ever have before,” Stacey told me later, “and so I wanted to take that to the next level.” The magazine liked the idea and started coordinating the shoot. As it turns out, some of those poker moms decided that stripping for a magazine wasn’t exactly on their bucket list, so Stacey started looking for other participants. As a member of the poker group’s sister posse of barhopping moms, I decided to join them. My friend Jessica promptly did likewise. “Why not?” she said.
I agreed. Like most of my social circle, I expose myself all the time anyway. I dwell in a world of people who write memoirs about our dysfunctional families and tell jokes about our awkward teen years and write songs about our heartbreaks. And you can’t make a career of expressing the most personal, intimate aspects of life — and consequently being rejected and criticized for it on a regular basis — without developing extraordinary coping mechanisms. Or, as a playwright friend recently said after a particularly vitriolic critique, “And so, another little part of me goes dead inside.”
The challenge is to not become completely dead inside — just dead enough to keep doing what we do without pharmaceutical intervention. That’s why the idea of getting naked for public display in a different way, the non-metaphoric kind, intrigued me. I can blithely crack jokes about my deepest pains, but I’m not so cavalier about showing my body. And so, taking to heart the maxim that you should do something every day that scares you, I decided to drop not just my trousers but also my defenses. The fact that I’d be doing this with friends — strong, supportive and deeply ribald fellow moms — made the notion go down a lot easier. Besides, as someone who traipses through life looking for frozen metal poles upon which to plant her tongue, I never met a dare I could refuse. (You should see how much pie I can put away when my pride is at stake.)
Unschooled in the art of nudity, my first order of business was to call in my experts. A friend who’d appeared in Playboy coached me on how to make the “Barbie toe” and position my ass in a chair for minimum squish. A makeup artist tutored me on the importance of self-tanner. But all the glotion in the world can only do so much for an average person, and I know that. As the time approached for me to bare myself on every newsstand in the city, my physical imperfections began to scream — from the gray at my roots to the lines around my mouth to the breasts and belly that went to hell and back after childbirth to my poor left foot, which is a half inch larger than my right one. It began to seem less like a lark and more like a suicide mission. When I told my best friend about my plans, she asked, “Trying to attract a creepier class of Internet predator, Miss Kardashian?”
The day of the shoot, as I dropped my daughters off at school, I kissed them and told them to wish me luck. “I’m nervous,” I admitted. “Mom,” the 5-year-old said, patting her little hand on my back, “it’s just boobies.” That kid’s got better perspective than Brunelleschi.
That afternoon, I went to my local Dominican salon for a blowout. My hair, after all, was the entirety of my wardrobe. As I gesticulated to my non-English-speaking stylist in the international sign language for “loose, Kate Winslet-like waves,” she looked at me blankly. “Movie star,” I said, adding a quick back-and-forth head shake and the words, “Not Farrah.” An hour later, I headed with Jessica to Stacey’s house, sporting a feathery do that would have earned instant admittance into Charlie’s coterie of Angels.
At Stacey’s, Jessica and I were greeted by the final member of our quartet, Aryn, for a little wine, a little conversation and a little group nudity. As Stacey uncorked a merlot, the photographer, Greg Endries, arrived with an inspired idea for the shoot: As if to beat our critics to the punch line, it was the iconic image of dogs playing poker. Jessica got the plum role of the ace under the table player, Stacey was her accomplice, and Aryn and I brought up the other side of the table as the skeptical opponents. I was to be the beagle.
And then we took all our clothes off. Full monty. Starkers. Kits out. (Surprising side effect of nudity: Britishness.) It wasn’t so weird; kind of like when you’re in the group dressing room at Loehmann’s and everybody’s focused on the task at hand – in this case, playing a tense, clothing-free and canine-inspired card game.
The shoot lasted a half-hour. The bottle of wine emptied; the photographer packed up and went home. That’s when finally, alone and naked, the four of us ladies made tender yet surprisingly innovative love until the break of dawn. OK, not really, but I figured if you’ve read thus far, it was likely in the hope of such an outcome. Actually, what we did was put on our clothes and show off our shoes. Mine were a pair of sky-high gold mesh Marc Jacobs sandals clearly designed to be worn with nothing but a wanton smile. Maybe we’d all seen enough girlie mags to make aesthetic assumptions, but independent of each other, we’d brought our sexiest, most expensive heels — despite the photographer’s insistence that we be totally naked.
And until today, that was pretty much that. I’ve spent the last few weeks feeling like someone who’s jumped from a plane but hasn’t yet pulled the ripcord — I’ve made the leap, but don’t know how I’ll land. I can report that when Greg sent me the photo a few days ago, I gasped when I saw it. There — smack in the middle of it — was my naked form. My below-the-waist bits are obscured by the table, so I guess there’s one rubicon I can still cross. But my boobies belong to everybody now. It was jarring. It was also an image as playful and spirited and earthy as I’d hoped it would be. Though Greg — and I — would not dream of passing that image off as unretouched, I can attest it’s a fair representation. “I want people to look pretty,” he told me earlier this week, “but it’s not overboard.” We don’t look like Photoshopped versions of womanhood; we look like the women I know we are (albeit glammed up). “It’s great,” my older daughter said. “Awesome,” echoed the younger one, who still regards the place she gestated just a few years ago as her private property. “Why?” I asked her. “Because you’re naked,” she replied. That’s why I like it, too. (To see the full picture, click here.)
Taking your clothes off, whether for a partner or a few friends or even just yourself, demands letting your guard down. It means accepting the possibility of judgment. At least usually when I get naked for someone, there’s an implicit degree of trust and approval built into the deal. Not so when it’s a stranger with a camera — and, by extension, the entire magazine-reading, Internet-accessing public. So here it all is, world, my four-decades-old body and my prom night 1979 hairdo. I’m as ready for you as I’ve ever been. Because when I got naked that night at the poker table, I had to shed my protective, Gap-issued armor and frequently sarcastic demeanor to become just a body surrounded by other bodies. Bodies that can grow a baby and entwine with a lover and run a race and get dinged up and scarred along the way. That’s all I ever am anyway, really. It’s a difficult thing to admit and to share, especially when I usually have the luxury of being disembodied in front of a keyboard, where I can edit my thoughts and hide behind an avatar.
But life doesn’t take place on my computer screen. If the choice is between doing and not doing, between having an experience and playing it safe, between showing myself and not, I’d prefer the former. The fear of looking foolish is a lousy excuse for missing out on anything. And if you ever need proof that it’s not possible to die of embarrassment, permit me to direct you to any page from the book of my life.
That’s why this isn’t a story of how I took off my clothes and became all empowered by the experience. I came into this a reasonably confident, sexually active, bigmouthed working mother, which basically makes me every song Beyoncé’s ever written. I’m already hustling my empowered ass off seven days a week. But underneath my clothes, I’m always still just my own soft female flesh. Showing that side of myself didn’t change that; it didn’t make me stronger or braver or better. It gave me something else — it let me be, for a little while, vulnerable.
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Mary Elizabeth Williams. Photo by Time Out/Greg Endries 
