Faw's ULTRALUMINOUS: A Teen Bartering Sex

Some of the books that we review are focused on nympholepsy (e.g., Emily Prager's Roger Fishbite) while others are peppered with nympholepsy (e.g., Lauren Myracle's ttyl). Katherine Faw's Ultraluminous is of the latter sort but very much worth a post.

Here's part of Alexandra Schwartz's description of Faw's Ultraluminous that was posted on The New Yorker:

[...] the novel’s narrator is chiefly motivated by heroin. She’s a high-end prostitute who has just returned to New York after ten years in Dubai, and quickly establishes a roster of clients: “art guy,” who lives in a luxury condo in Williamsburg and takes her gallery-hopping; “calf’s brain guy,” who takes her to exotic dinners at trendy restaurants; “junk-bond guy,” now retired to the apartment he shares with his unsuspecting wife on the Upper West Side; and “the guy who buys me things,” who takes her shopping at Prada and Hermès. [...] “Ultraluminous” is a sort of “American Psycho” from the prostitute’s point of view, a damning, often hilarious account of toxic masculinity and Wall Street money culture.

And here are the relevant excerpts:

K, the narrator, shared that she began prostituting as a teen:

I was terrified of the first man who paid me. I was eighteen. It was my first time overseas. He took me to a restaurant that I would learn to make fun of but only later. I was convinced they could tell, the driver, the waiters, the hotel staff, him. I wanted to appear professional [...] 

But K exchanged sex in a bartering transaction before she was 14:

The first man I ever had sex with was British. He didn't pay me but it was an exchange. He was the manager of a club I wanted to get into [...] It was on Bleecker and Thompson. I lied and told him I was fourteen [...] 

But K first learned of her (sexual) power when she was 12:

I was twelve. It was the first warm day after four brutal months and I walked down Avenue B, all arms and legs, and suddenly I had this power. Since then it hasn't stopped.

This is how K was enticed into prostitution:

I was dumb like any eighteen-year-old. This girl told me her friend's sister did it. She said she went over there for one year and made enough money that she wouldn't have to work for five. 

"You have to do all the pervert shit, not just fuck them. You have to do whatever they want. Like old men, like with harems."

"I get it," I said.

"They buy you stuff, too, whatever you want," she said.

We were doing coke in the bathroom at a club in Chelsea where we were both bottle girls. 

Interestingly, when K was 10 or 11, a man inappropriately assumed she was a prostitute:

I was on the subway without my mother and in the crush before the doors opened a man stuck his hand up my skirt and grabbed my crotch and asked how much I cost. I was wearing one of my outlandish outfits but in an instant all my confidence disappeared. I knew it was my fault. I had rolled the waist on the skirt, twice. I remember his hoarse, bossy whisper in my ear. I remember it being a new sound. I was ten or eleven. 

Schwartz started her New Yorker piece by sharing that she devoured - no “inhaled” Ultraluminous.

Marie Howe's "Practicing": Pre-Teen Lipstick Lesbians in THE NEW YORKER

In preparation for a post, we're reading Sharon Lamb's The Secret Lives of Girls: What Good Girls Really Do--Sex Play, Aggression, and Their Guilt. Lamb writes that the purpose of The Secret Lives of Girls is to: 

"[...] to expose all of these acts that are going on in secrecy so that girls and women can feel less guilty about their sexual desires as well as their aggressive impulses, can learn to accept these as part of themselves and still love and honor themselves for them."

To give an example of what some girls do in secrecy, Lamb shared Marie Howe's poem "Practicing". But before sharing the poem, Lamb wrote:

Marie Howe [a State Poet for New York and National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Fellow], in her poem "Practicing" [...], writes of the power of the erotic, even in seventh-grade girls. In this poem, [...] we learn that what might have been called "practicing" was more than "just" practice. In somebody's "parents' house," [...] there are some things that go unsaid. And what remains unsaid is not a story of lesbian romance [...] It is a story of girls' bodies and girls' pleasure, their sense of power in that pleasure, a story rarely told [...]

"Practicing"

by Marie Howe

I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,

a song for what we did on the floor in the basement

of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought:

That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each other’s mouths

how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and

one was the boy, and we paired off—maybe six or eight girls—and turned out

the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our

nightgowns or let the straps drop, and, Now you be the boy:

concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry.

Linda’s basement was like a boat with booths and portholes

instead of windows. Gloria’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun,

plush carpeting. We kissed each other’s throats.

We sucked each other’s breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs

outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was

practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost

in someone’s hair . . . and we grew up and hardly mentioned who

the first kiss really was—a girl like us, still sticky with moisturizer we’d

shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song

for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire,

just before we’d made ourselves stop.

Interestingly, "Practicing" was published in the August 25, 1997 issue of The New Yorker.

[UPDATE] MARGARET (2011): A High School Student Performs Oral Sex on Teacher

The current issue of the New Yorker (Jan. 8, 2018) has a review of Margaret (2011). The review mentioned that the film is: "[...] romantic yet scathing, lyrical with street life and vaulting skylines, reckless with first adventure, and awed by the intellectual and poetic abstractions on which the great machine runs." And that the film: "[...] stars Anna Paquin as Lisa Cohen, a headstrong private-school teen-ager [...]" However, the review strangely failed to mention that Lisa was an aggressive teleiophile. Below is my original May 8, 2013 post:

Margaret (2011)

I wrote in The Allure of Nymphets that nymphets do not want to be treated like children, and they do not want ephebophiles to act like children. 

For example, in the film Margaret (2011), high school student Lisa (Anna Paquin) went to visit Mr. Aaron (Matt Damon), her high school teacher, at his Manhattan sublet to get advice, because she: "[...] didn't have anyone else to talk to." 

However, Mr. Aaron became distraught after Lisa performed oral sex on him, but Lisa was unsympathetic. 

She said, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to tell anybody. If that’s what you’re worried about. I totally initiated the whole thing. Anyway it’s just sex. You’re acting like a little kid. I’ll see you in [high] school.” 

The portrayal of Lisa as a sexually aggressive high school student is an accurate one; thus, Mr. Aaron should have been just as aggressive in rejecting her advances.

THE NEW YORKER: How to Seduce a Nymphet

We wrote an entire chapter in The Allure of Nymphets on how to marry a nymphet. For example, we wrote about the importance of having the proper mindset (e.g., not being needy and being mentally powerful (i.e., having extreme self-control)).

The ephebophile in "Down in the Reeds by the River" by Victoria Lincoln sets a good example of what it takes to seduce a nymphet. In the short story that appeared in the September 28, 1946 issue of the The New Yorker, Connie, a 14-year-old "[...] wiry, red-headed" girl, shared a romantic moment with Mr. deRocca, an approximately 50-year-old carpenter from Italy, whom she met after she moved to a small city in Kansas from California.

Typically, stories and movies about ephebophiles have the men go about approaching nymphets in the wrong way, but Lincoln has Mr. deRocca make all the right moves. For example, as Connie watched Mr. deRocca, as nymphets typically do, from the corners of her eyes, she noticed that despite his age, "[...] the flesh under his skin was firm and didn't hang down [...] He looked harder and nicer than other older men." (That is why we shared in The Allure of Nymphets that R. Don Steele advises that middle-aged men should be fit. But we would caution that a middle-aged man doesn't want to be fit to attract nymphets, but he should want to be fit, because it's healthy. Otherwise, he may come off as being needy.)

After Mr. deRocca cordially asked Connie to please sit and offered her bite to eat, she said, "[...] it was lovely being treated like a lady, that I could not disappoint him." Lincoln's Mr. deRocca obviously knew that one of the best ways to seduce a nymphet was to make her feel like a lady.

In addition, Mr. deRocca sincerely complemented Connie on her young beauty. He said, "Pretty name for a pretty girl," to which Connie thought, "No one had told me I was pretty since my mother died. I was grateful to him [...]"

Lastly, Mr. deRocca knew to have patience and take things slowly with the nymphet. After he slipped his hand down Connie's back and around her waist, he paused. Connie related that, "[...] if he had hurried, if he had let me see his eagerness, I should have run away crying. I should have run away full of fear and hate [...]"

(We must reiterate that men must follow the age of consent laws in their respective states or countries.)