GIF of Oscar Isaac wearing a chambray button-down and blazer and saying “fornication” very slowly via Thirst Aid Kit’s Tumblr.
On 27 March, New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYC DoH) issued Sex and Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), a five-point bulletin that leads with a question near the forefront of many of our isolation-crazed minds: “But can you have sex?” [1]
The short answer is — well, maybe. The second item in the bulletin reads (emphasis theirs): “Have sex with people close to you,” at which I snorted like a middle schooler. Thankfully, the NYC DoH breaks this command down further, first reminding us that, “You are your safest sex partner,” before conceding — and you can almost hear the sigh — “The next safest partner is someone you live with.”
What about those of us who are single or living with flatmates or otherwise without access to what one OB-GYN calls a Household Sexual Partner (HSP) [2]? The responsible among us are becoming well acquainted with want.
GIF of Frasier S2E3. Daphne is sitting, forlorn, on a chocolate brown Coco Chanel sofa in a white nightgown. Frasier is standing opposite her in a navy dressing gown. Frasier asks Daphne, “Really? Have you been seeing a man?” Daphne responds, “Only when I close me eyes and concentrate.”
We want what we can’t have — one of those aphorisms that reliably pops up at times like these. I want to see friends in person, go hiking in Marin, work in my office, sit in the sunshine in the courtyard of my favorite coffee shop, go on a date, fly to a remote tropical island with nothing more than a bikini and a boatload of books in my bag. I want to go dancing. I want to stop checking on a daily basis that my parents and their students are wearing surgical masks at work, to stop texting them 😷😷😷 and feeling like a nag. I want to go to libraries, bookshops, museums, shows, movies. I want to get within six feet of another human being.
I’ve seen Blaise Pascal’s number-one hit circulating on social media, too: “J’ai dit souvent que tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos dans une chambre,” [3] or — and this translation with all its faults is my own — “I’ve often said that all of man’s suffering stems from just one thing, which is his inability to sit quietly in a room.”
It’s a compelling statement. I would tend to agree. And I know that staying at home is precisely what I ought to be doing. But having been doing so for two weeks now, with no end in sight, I want to give Pascal — that long-dead smug-ass little polymath — a good, long look at my middle finger instead.
None of my wants are serious. These days, I work from the apartment I share with just one flatmate. I use our spare room as a home office while she has taken over the living room. Our pantry is well-stocked with staples, our fridge full of fresh produce. We have clean running water and central heat and air-conditioning. I have stacks of books and a decent supply of toilet paper. I have soap, laundry detergent, and access to a washer and dryer in my building. I wear wool socks when the nights get chilly and floaty pyjamas that my grandmother sewed for me by hand. I have a jazzy smartphone and a new computer, fast wireless internet, a car. I share subscriptions to Netflix and Amazon Prime and Spotify.
I want for nothing. And yet.
What is one to do with want? Other than deny it, the obvious candidates are: move beyond it, acknowledge it, give in to it. The latter is not compatible with the moral demands of being a good citizen during a pandemic. Achieving the former is the stuff of lifelong quests for spiritual enlightenment — not a viable option in the short term nor the sort of project to undertake on a whim. The most practical option then would seem to be to feel one’s feelings. To acknowledge desire without acting upon it.
One flavor of felt desire is to long, pine, yearn, lust. But those terms conjure images of doomed lovers standing on opposite sites of stormy and windswept moors, stealing glances or maybe even fleeting touches at assemblies or in parks, gazing at each other from aboard steam trains departing in opposite directions into the fogbound night. It’s all very Victorian and repressed — characters end up dead or married, sometimes both. There’s nothing casual about this sort of want.
Take Anna Karenina — Tolstoy describes Count Vronsky’s initial reaction to Anna as the onset of a suffocating, ecstatic desire [4].
What would come of it all he did not know, he did not even think. He felt that all his forces, hitherto dissipated, wasted, were centered on one thing, and bent with fearful energy on one blissful goal. And he was happy at it. He knew only… that all the happiness of his life, the only meaning in life for him, now lay in seeing and hearing her.
Literary depictions of such desire brim to overflowing with small gestures, the kind you’d only notice if you were regarding the object of your desire and, perhaps, performing your part of the elaborate mating quadrille. James Meek writes, “The characters are always smiling, frowning, blushing, twitching, fidgeting, touching, kissing, bowing, sobbing, and deconstructing these signs in each other.” [5]
More than the feeling itself, it’s the thrilling intensity of wanting that proves irresistible, whether we’re chasing it or watching others do so. Meek describes high society’s attitude toward Vronsky’s pursuit of Anna as a “mixture of moral outrage and gladiatorial blood lust.” [5] Their fellow aristocrats are rubberneckers on the highway of love. Tolstoy writes of Vronsky [4],
He was very well aware that in their eyes the position of an unsuccessful lover of a girl, or of any woman free to marry, might be ridiculous. But the position of a man pursuing a married woman, and, regardless of everything, staking his life on drawing her into adultery, has something fine and grand about it, and can never be ridiculous.
But watching a car crash play out frame by frame is also exhausting. At points in Anna Karenina, our protagonists remind me of nothing so much as a pair of pressure cookers that have been brought repeatedly to that excruciating point at which steam is leaking from the release valves — they just haven’t blown. I feel myself losing sympathy for the two of them, wondering why they could not simply have channeled their fulminating passions into vigorous exercise or demanding hobbies — snowshoeing, playing piano, building elaborate dioramas.
It doesn’t help that, despite the performance of passion, there’s little evidence of physical satisfaction in Anna Karenina. All that longing, yet no steam — just a dry, desiccating breeze. It makes you wonder just how much of Anna and Vronsky’s longing has to do with each other. Do we love people, or how they make us feel?
He felt himself a king, not because he believed that he had made an impression on Anna — he did not yet believe that,— but because the impression she had made on him gave him happiness and pride.
It’s helpful to be reminded of how far from the ideal what we want, or think we want, can fall — to take the wind out of one’s own lustful sails. Anna and Vronsky’s life together post-elopement is no honeymoon. Cut off from their natural audience, they have no one for whom to perform the parts of illicit lovers. The passion they once shared, or convinced themselves that they shared, withers in exile.
In his advice column ¡Hola Papi!, John Paul Brammer reminds a singleton in isolation and longing for a relationship that, “It remains very easy to project our desires onto other people’s curated posts.” [6] In the New York Review of Books, Leslie Jamison writes about being responsible for a two-year-old child as a single parent with COVID-19, having filed for divorce a month before NYC went on lockdown. [7]
Quarantine teaches me what I’ve already been taught, but I’ll never learn—that there are so many other ways to be lonely besides the particular way I am lonely.
At The Cut, Anna Silman profiles people stuck in isolation with their recent exes [8]. Joan, a sixty-something woman living in Nevada, says of her soon-to-be ex-husband,
He’s always been very dependent and doesn’t really do a lot for himself. I mean, he’s capable of it, but it’s easier to have somebody else do it. I do most of the cooking. He has learned to make eggs.
That last line takes my breath every time — he has learned to make eggs. A convincing argument for heterosexual partners cohabiting, this is not.
The NYC DoH bulletin also instructs readers, “Have sex only with consenting partners.” [1] Six words that inspire a barrage of follow-up questions, including — would anyone who didn’t abide by the wishes of the person(s) with whom they wished to have sex follow the instructions of the NYC DoH?
Such directives do not go without saying, as a recent article in the New York Times makes clear: a woman living in Istanbul had decided to separate from her husband two weeks before the city went into lockdown but, to avoid upsetting their young children and to save money, agreed to let him remain in their apartment during the pandemic [9]. “The other night he just got into bed like everything was normal and tried to roll onto me to start sex,” she said. “It was like a sick joke.”
Longing, pining, yearning, lusting — the admixture of emotions that produces each of these states includes a healthy dash of suffering. None of these states are comfortable. The discomfort is part of their allure. The tang of suffering makes want exquisite, that is, painful and pleasurable at once.
I’m more interested in ways to take the edge off, in straight-up pleasure. The kind of pleasure that warms rather than incinerates — a mug of hot chocolate, the voice of a good friend, the heat of sunshine on skin, the sight of a happy family at the park. I want coziness, not edges — unadulterated pleasure — to draw its warmth around me at will, like a heavy duvet on a chilly night.
GIF of Murder, She Wrote S4E7. A middle-aged white woman with short curly hair and wearing a cream cardigan declares, “It was good, clean sex once a week!” Perhaps the most legendary moment in that show.
No media, in any form, is better at eliciting warm pleasure than the weekly podcast Thirst Aid Kit (TAK), created and hosted by Bim Adewunmi and Nichole Perkins [10]. Thirst is a variety of want but is difficult to define even in broad terms, the principal challenge being to specify the connotation. In a 2017 New York Times essay, critic Carina Chocano writes [11]
“Thirst” doesn’t just want something; it makes an unsightly spectacle of a clueless, grasping, gaping need. It encroaches on boundaries and intrudes on others’ space, jostling self-respect and good taste out of the way…
Lately, in fact, the notion of thirst has edged into an inhibiting kind of judgment. It has morphed into a discouraging, feel-bad meme — a potent means of condemning any kind of overreach.
But you’d never guess that thirst was a bad thing that by listening to TAK — in that sense, the podcast may be a massive effort to reclaim the term. In Adewunmi and Perkins’s lexicon, thirst is a feeling to be indulged in joyfully and in community. It’s yearning untethered to any desire for consummation and therefore free of suffering. It’s lust, but dialed down to a manageable level — still hot, but a steady simmer rather than a rolling boil. The podcast’s home page at Slate declares, “Thirst is natural… so let’s celebrate it!”
In TAK, thirst is a celebration of a pop culture figure’s finer points, physical and professional. Each week, Adewunmi and Perkins focus on a thirst object or theme — episodes have examined the charms of Oscar Isaac (S2E1), Blair Underwood, hot clergymen (S4E3), and “Stern Men and Power Femmes” (S4E5) [10]. The attention that Perkins and Adewunmi pay their thirst objects is delightful and at times raunchy, but never obscene. Take an early part of their discussion of Lee Pace (pictured below) from the episode titled “Sturdy but Delicate”.
BA: I feel like in the olden days, he would have been a great charismatic leader of some kind. He has those eyes that you just want to take a dip in.
NP: He reminds me a little bit of Gregory Peck.
BA: Yes, hard yes!
NP: Like old school charm, brows, all of that…
BA: I’m actually in your sentence right now, saying “yes, yes”! That’s exactly who he reminds me of. And I have great affection for Gregory Peck, specifically for his eyebrows, which you may remember from our Golden Baes of Hollywood episode… And Lee Pace seems to me to be a very modern adaptation of a Gregory Peck story. I could look at him walk and just kind of throw his shoulders around for like four hours.
Image of Lee Pace by Pierre-Ange Carlotti in Interview Magazine via Thirst Aid Kit’s Tumblr, where it is tagged #A TALL SNACK WHO REALLY KNOWS HOW THE FUCK TO LOUNGE. Pace is reclining on a bed and frowning into the distance.
The hosts are diligent in their appreciation, with informed references to their subjects’ full CVs, but never intrusive.
NP: Lee has tried to keep his private life private, as much as he can, and I respect that and think that sometimes people feel like that in order to connect to a celebrity or someone of note that they need to know all of their business, and it’s like we don’t necessarily need to know all of that… It doesn’t matter.
Often the discussion has little to do with the thirst objects themselves — discussing the appeal of the Hot Priest in Fleabag, Perkins says
I think sometimes when when people are talking about desire, a lot of the time what they’re also referencing is a sort of need or a desire to be unblocked in the gaze of someone. But for someone to see every part of you. And to not flinch from it.
And they’re steeped in pop culture and analysis — listening to their discussions is like showing up unprepared to a boozy book club meeting with friends who have done the reading. It’s a pleasure just to hear them chat.
There’s thirst, and then there’s hunger. I anticipated the former, having had to cancel dates and trips and plans, but I wasn’t prepared for the latter. Working from home, I’ve started to cook and eat meals as though feeding myself is an activity worthy of my full attention. The other day, I wilted a mountain of baby spinach with diced shallots in salted butter, squeezed half a lemon over the steamed leaves, and wolfed them down hot from the pan. It was delicious and decadent, and I’ll probably have it again for dinner tonight.
GIF from Julie & Julia. Julia Child (played by Meryl Streep) picks up Paul’s (played by Stanley Tucci) plate from the dinner table only for him to grab her around the waist and pull her onto his lap for a kiss.
Cooking again — after ages — whetted a different sort of appetite. I was suddenly gripped by a desire for a pan of my own. I had made the spinach in my flatmate’s nonstick skillet, which works well for most dishes. I hadn’t owned a pan in over a year. With our shared kitchen, I technically don’t need to. And yet, I wanted a pan of my own.
I did my research — the internet has made comparison shopping easier but is also a quicksand pit of information and opinion. There are forums devoted to comparing the properties of stainless steel, carbon steel, aluminum, copper, cast iron (bare and enameled), ceramic. I read reviews of established brands and delved into the specs of Instagram-driven cookware startups. I now have opinions about domed lids (good), phenolic knobs (dodgy), interior rivets (to be avoided at all costs).
I struck off some options for price and others for size, rivets, and delivery date. I struck Great Jones off for sheer idiocy — one of the co-founders admitted that the metal handles of their pots and pans get hot and when questioned about it said, as if this were any justification, “That was a design decision.” [12]
Even as I read reviews and made notes, I was puzzled by my fixation. I don’t eat much. I enjoy good food but not with the fervor I’ve witnessed in others. Friends make fun of me for not owning a spatula or more than two of any basic utensil. Given how frequently I move, I think it makes sense to minimize home goods acquisitions.
On Sunday, I told my friend Peter about how strange it felt to be possessed by the spirit of a suburban housewife straight out of the 1950s. He couldn’t believe it, either. I thought telling him might have exorcised the culinary spirit but that night, after ordering the pan, hunger still preoccupied me.
I made two lists in my pandemic diary: all the dishes I want to make, and all the people for whom I want to make them. As I did, I was reminded of a few lines from a blog post that I had read while an undergrad. In the post, a student in my program had written about her own newly acquired skillet [13].
I am going to cook you some beautiful meals in this skillet. I am going to cook a meal for someone I love, a meal for someone I hate. I am going to cook in this skillet when I am angry, sad, blue, hurt, happy, hopeful, joyful, in love, in loathe, in sickness and in health. This skillet is for good times and for bad times. This skillet is the future. But it is also the present.
She titled that post Life Gets Better. Let’s hope so.
the main post
Sex and Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
Coronavirus and Sex: Questions and Answers by Jen Gunter at The New York Times
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Constance Garnett, at Project Gutenberg
Being Single Really, Really Sucks Right Now by John Paul Brammer at ¡Hola Papi!
Since I Became Symptomatic by Leslie Jamison at The New York Review of Books
5 People On Being Isolated With Their Exes by Anna Silman at The Cut
Of ‘Covidivorces’ and ‘Coronababies’: Life During a Lockdown by Dan Bilefsky and Ceylan Yaginsu at The New York Times
The Cookware Startups That Could Topple the All-Clad Establishment by Daniela Galarza at Eater
from pillar to post
the best of my bookmarks
In the spirit of TAK — a series of tweets by comedian Laura Lexx, who apparently finds Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp’s sensible nature irresistibly sexy. The whole, deeply thirsty, thread is delightful.
If you’re feeling more than a little parched, consider perusing James Joyce’s — very, very NSFW — erotic letters to Nora Barnacle at American Vulgaria.
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