The Organic Orgasm Jen Cross

I was somewhat obsessed with carrots as a kid—I ate them constantly (okay, often), truly convinced they'd improve my eyesight. All these years later (after innumerable nights spent squinting in weak light to finish "just one more page") and I'm still the only one in my family who doesn't wear glasses. Go figure.

Anyway, in high school, when I packed my lunch, along with a thermos-full of mushy ramen noodles or a turkey-and-lettuce on wheat bread, I'd usually bring a great big carrot—the biggest one in the bag, often just washing it off and wrapping it up in damp paper towels and aluminum foil to keep it moist. Now, to my mind, I was more provocative than the average hypersexualized teenager, given my stepfather's ongoing sexual abuse. So at lunchtime, armed with this phallic vegetable, I had an object with which to not only make sexual innuendo but also to display some latent, shall we say, irritation with men and the male member. I'd joke about the dildo-like qualities of the vegetable, then bite it's head off. Loudly. You know. And I was as serious about the innuendo, the sexual possibilities, as I was about the consumption and destruction. I just didn't know how to untangle it all—who does as a sixteen-year-old?

This is all to say that the stage was set for my vegetable deflowering long before I met D. Little did she know how my memory of our short tryst would be anchored. Rooted, as it were.

In 1994,I was young, out, and often in Boston for some political organizing event or another. Because why? I wanted to meet girls—and the dyke community at my little northern college was just too insular. During one of these ostensibly activist outings, I met D., upon whom I became obsessively crushed for a good long time—like six months. After I met her, I found a whole lot more reasons to visit Boston. Organizing, of course.

D. was somewhat shorter than I am, with fair skin and dark, dark hair, and her half-closed eyes burned through me when she slid, snakelike, up and down in front of me on the dance floor. She was, to me, the epitome of queer womanhood (of course, every queer woman I met at the time became the epitome of queer womanhood, so take this statement for what it's worth): bold, confident, and seductive. She moved so smoothly through her life that I constantly felt like an ox around her.

I can't remember how I came to be staying at her home that night, but I remember that we fell asleep without having sex, just stretched out against each other in her twin bed in the small narrow bedroom of her shared Jamaica Plain apartment—I remember wondering if her roommates were around, aware of us, able to hear us. I probably fell asleep trembling with desire. Seriously. You know how coming out brings on a whole second adolescence. D. made me feel like a teenage boy with a constant, looming hard-on tenting his pants. It's amazing I slept at all.

We woke—well, I woke and didn't know if she was awake or not. Carefully, I traced my fingertips over her skin: on her arms, along the dark hairs shading her there, along her back, her shoulders, her neck, as far as I could reach without moving any part of my body besides my arm. I wanted to make her feel good. I hadn't been with that many women and I remember how she (and ever other woman I had sex with at the time) seemed very worldly and experienced, as compared to my incest-inflected perception of desire, need, and fear when it came to sex—I'd overcompensate by being somewhat forward. She just lay there for awhile, feeling my fingers. Then she reached back for me, grabbing my hip with her hand and grinding her ass back into my crotch. Oh, yeah. Now we were getting somewhere. Soon I was kissing down the length of her body, running lips and tongue (and palms of hands) over her flat belly, her strong thighs, everything but the most erogenous of zones—I wanted to build her lust, so we'd both be shaking with desire.

This is what happens with memory: I don't remember if I fucked her or not, but I think I must have. Soon enough, though, there I was with my crush, in a tiny J.P. bedroom, not getting fucked because we were out of gloves. It was the mid-90s and we, the queer girls of the Northeast, at least the handful I knew, were incredibly attentive (at least verbally, intellectually, politically) to safer sex. We educated, we compared dams and lube types, we proselytized. It was kind of obnoxiously self-important, but we were righteous in our desire to have lots of sex while not also contracting HIV. More than that, there was a sense (for me) of showing solidarity with the gay boys. Those pockets full of gloves and squares of latex and little plastic bulbs of lube became a kinky badge of honor—they were testaments to our queerness, cause god knows straight people didn't proclaim their sex-protective readiness that way. We were here, queer, and ready to bag it up and take it in.

Now, I didn't like the latex any more than anyone else—and wearing a glove the first time I fisted someone, I learned why so many guys didn't want to wear condoms: it was an object lesson in sensation loss. But I was nothing if not somebody who'd go along with the crowd, if it seemed like the crowd could offer me home—and the sex-radical queer community gave me that. So I preached the important joys of latex, and was careful that morning to only touch D. on mucous-membrane-less skin when my hand was naked, lest I engage in some untoward bodily-fluid exchange. Later, I understood her not touching, or more to the point, fucking, me once we'd run out of gloves.

Here was the strange thing, though—here's why all that matters: I'd gotten so turned on, touching her, that I wanted to come after she did, and said so. This was unusual, as, at the time, I rarely asked long-term lovers to take the time to get me off, and never even considered putting the possibility before a casual fuck. Getting me off is only slightly more complicated than, say, putting the space shuttle into orbit, requiring the proper placement (and extended stay) of hands, mouth, toes, utensils, office supplies, and so on. I'm only sort of exaggerating. For whatever reason, though, I felt comfortable enough with D. to ask for this attention, and she was game. So we got her mouth here, that hand there, the other hand there, her body just right against me and things were going pretty good for awhile. However, as I got closer, the one hand was, ideally, supposed to move right up inside me. But, as I've already said, we were out of gloves, so this became a problem. We did have condoms, but they were a bit large on her small fingers, and...

Wait! Now I remember. I was bleeding at the time. Thus the overcaution. I was ready to give up (being used to doing so), but (goddess bless her) D. was tenacious. We did some quick sex brainstorming. She said, what about a substitute? and went off to root through her fridge. Now, I liked this idea—I was all about adding new experiences to my sexual repertoire at the time, and, like I said, I'd never been fucked with a vegetable before. It wasn't like I hadn't already fantasized about crudites: not only is it standard, if cliché, girl-on-girl porn fodder, but there was the aforementioned large-carrot fetish/fascination. I was getting all ready for a nice fat organic something.

You know how when you buy a bag of carrots, you use some of them right away and then most of the rest soon after for soup or something cooked, but there's always one left over, the one standing still in the bag, the smallest one? You planned to eat it one day after work but you never got to it, and then it got kind of old and reddish and a little soft and bendy and covered with little white hair-like roots. You know that carrot in a wet, broken-down bag in the crisper of your fridge right now?

That's exactly the carrot she brought into the bedroom to show me after making noises of frustration and frantic searching for anything else. Now, by this time, I was pretty fucking worked up. My body had a whole lot of attention, and I was right there on that fat edge of plateau that promises to slam into a good hard orgasm if only you can just get things right.

I said yes to the sad, wrinkled carrot.

The condom fit even less well over the carrot than it would have over her fingers, although there was more length to work with. D. had to pinch the condom closed so it wouldn't slip off in me, and she had to hold the carrot stiff, so she could move it in and out of me. I remember thinking it was ridiculous, that carrot, and us there working so hard for my orgasm. But I didn't tell her to stop. She held on as tightly, as gingerly, as she could, given she was trying to fuck me through to a very wet place without getting a whole lot of danger on her fingertips.

Today, I can't really tell you how it felt to have that wilted vegetable inside of me. All I really needed was something to push against those nerves and tightening muscles inside my cunt. Really, a finger or two would've been fine, and too much bigger would have been a distraction from coming—probably if she'd found a Japanese eggplant or something in her fridge, I would've just wanted to get fucked blind (not that that would have been a bad thing). As it was, the little-carrot-that-turned-out-it-could felt, you know, like something sort of stiff, loosely bagged in a condom. Combined with all the rest of the stimulation she was giving me (and I was helping with), plus a little bit of humiliation and embarrassment as an added bonus, my face flushed hot and every muscle in my body tensed, and I raced off the plateau and smack into a solid, exploding wall of stars that was my orgasm.

Okay, it probably wasn't that big. At the time, I was still regulating my orgasms, trying to keep them tight to my body. I didn't want to go too crazy; who knew how that would look? But it was good anyway, and then there we were on her bed, a little bloody and wet but mostly clean and uncontaminated by one another's fluids. She carefully carried the carrot, tucked up in latex that was now covered with stringy threads of bloody cum, to the trash in the kitchen. Yeah, it definitely wasn't the hot, big-fat-carrot-up-the-pussy scene I'd been vaguely envisioning all those years. It was much, much simpler, and a whole lot more real.

I don't remember if we had sex again after that time—so much work, only to be left with the sad, bloody beginnings of a salad. And I was embarrassed by my need, what I'd done to have it met. And, at the time, coming didn't even really feel all that good to me—so much residue still ran over my body after every contraction. But here was something, anyway, something it would take me years to properly integrate: I could want to come, and someone, a lover, would care enough—be turned on enough, even—to help me do just that. You know? For a girl just one or two years out of an incestuous, controlling situation, that realization is pretty fucking big stuff.

What did I see that morning? I'd thank D. for the gift of this memory, if I knew where she was. Something that was a hysterical party story told at my own expense for years has transformed in my consideration into something less ridiculous and humiliating and more truly beautiful. If I remove the protective blinders of shame and visit what I gave me then, I find it was a yes sheltered in anonymity, something I didn't have to (couldn't, really) take home with me. She held my risk in her hands, in the bloody condom, in the empty crisper. She held it when I couldn't. It's why, probably, we didn't talk much longer. Unless you're ready for the slippery weight of your joy, yes is a hard thing to hold onto.