Summer in the City, Sex in the City

What is it about summer and sex? It is everywhere it seems, that is, summer and sex. Is it the clothes, the slim hips and the exposed wrists, those bare clavicles taut and shiny? My friend Sharon just sent me a link to a fashion blog, The Sartorialist, and man, do I love that site. What is not sexy about this, pictures he takes of the eye-pleasing people in New York and Milan?



or this



Every morning I've had this really good honey from the Farmers Market, raw and unprocessed, a cliche on summer sex if there ever was one, but this morning I was in a rush and spilled a big dip of it on my freshly ironed shirt. So I had to quick grab another, a newish cotton blouse. It's one of those breezy blouses with buttons that don't start until halfway down your chest. Cleavage is the new accessory, I see, but this is out of character for me.

I was hitching a ride with a colleague so I didn't have time to change again. As I waited for her to swing by I walked out in my flower garden and tried to push a safety pin through the open V but it wasn't working. I looked around at my neighbor's houses, wondering if they were chuckling and watching me, placing bets on whether or not I would succeed in hiding the decolletage. And then I remembered a line from Kevin Kling's forthcoming book , "Sometimes you look in the mirror and think, 'Oh no! I look like that?' But when you look in a mirror and your love looks over and says, 'You're hot,' you're hot. And it's true . . . you are hot. Same mirror."

I unhooked the safety clip and tossed it into my bag. And now I'm not fooling you, I turned on my cell phone and saw I had a message from my traveling husband and it read simply, "UR Hot." Oh wait, I just checked again. It reads, "UR Hot Stuff." Works for me.

So it should be no surprise to me that in a house full of teenagers, specifically Teen Boys, that a river runs through those veins, too. Those boys are prime real estate for the gnawing of desire, yes? Hell, they wear long shirts over their shorts so they can cover up in an instant.

When I got home last night (thanks Sass for a swell time!) my daughter brought me over to the desktop computer, the one front and center in the reading room, the only one we all use, and she clicked on a jpg with the header "Anna Nicole Hot Stuff." There it was. Well, there she was. I had let the boys have a sleepover the night before and I know they stayed up past two because I had to walk down in my pjs and tell them to get to bed.

"Whose is this?" she asked.

"Ten bucks it's your brother's," I say.

"Mom, this is gross. You can practically see her vagina."

It was basically a Playboy-style pose with hands over breasts and legs crossed tightly at the knees, the sex kitten. Well, the dead sex kitten.

"How are you going to handle this?" she asks. "You shouldn't yell at him. You should just try to make him feel guilty. Tell him it's degrading to both me and you." This the daughter who has been reading Andrea Dworkin.

All I really want to say to the boy is "Anna Nicole? That's just pathetic."

I wait until she leaves for the night and my son and I are alone. We've got the last innings of the Twins on the TV.

I say, "So I saw the picture of Anna Nicole on the computer."

He does the alert face, the one like our neighborhood rabbits. They know you see them and they freeze, looking dead straight ahead, their eyes catching you only so slightly out of their periphery.

I can tell he's weighing his options.

He says, to stall for time, "What picture of Anna Nicole?"

I say, "The one on the desktop."

I see he's decided not to fight this one.

"Did you put it there?"

"Yeah."

"Don't do that, okay? Don't cruise online and look at pictures and download them on to ours. It's not cool and it's certainly not something your sister and I want to see. It's degrading. Really. Do I need to get an Internet blocker or can you stay off of this stuff?" Was I covering all the bases? It was 10 o'clock and I didn't want to get into all the reasons why Anna Nicole as sex object was probably the reason she was dead now.

"Nah. You don't have to do that. Sorry."

Then we sat uncomfortably together watching the Twins lose another one against Detroit.

I remember as a kid my older brother came racing into my bedroom saying, "Look what I found, look what I found!" We ran into my parents' bedroom and he slid open the double closet doors and there in plain sight was the blue bicycle I had asked for for Christmas. It was December 15. I was seven. While I wrestled with the confusion this brought on--Did Santa deliver early? Did my parents pick things out for him to save him time and sled room?--my brother was pointing to a small stack of Playboys in the corner. A few years later I remember my mom finding one of them under the mattress in my brother's room.

I recently bought a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover, originally priced at 35 cents and carrying the tagline "Including the complete text of Federal Judge Frederick vanPelt Bryan's precedent-setting opinion on the censoring of this modern classic." This is where the judge said the novel is not obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent or filthy. He agreed that the novel "is a story symbolizing the basic superiority of natural impulses to the sophisticated immoralities of an inbred society."

I could leave a copy on my son's nightstand. I don't suppose the new Potter is going to cover this stuff.

In light of all this summer steamy, take note of a new Poetry event at the Artists' Quarter in St. Paul. The Erotic Poetry Slam is August 5. "Poets break out their best poetry about love, sex, and all things from sweet to naughty to downright perverse. Our side event will be the every popular ‘Dirty Haiku Battle’ and our features (from SlamMN) are Wonder Dave and Rhe. For info call (612) 207-7991."

Summer in the city. Enjoy the birds and the bees.