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It was a long, sweaty summer in the Northern Hemisphere, but we aren’t here to cool you off. We’ve been busy watching Erika Lust’s chocolatier and hotpot porn, putting clips of the Milkshake music video in our reels, and critically evaluating the vulvic aura of watercolour oysters. After months of brainstorming, writing, editing, podcasting, and illustrating to a soundtrack of Pony, our SEX issue is hot off the press and ready to land with a sizzle in your inbox. 

There’s a lot to take in, with seven written and audio pieces, including, for the first time, a photo essay (in French, no less) and a work of autofiction. So where to start? Whet your appetite with a visual feast of dinner parties in Paris. Go all the way with our longer-form stories grounded in locales as diverse as widow’s ashrams in eastern India, coffee houses in Ethiopia, the gay scene of Chicago, a pig farm in rural Denmark, a college dorm room in Canada, and the New York of late 90s TV. 

We’re talking a horny game, but this issue offers serious, and often disquieting, explorations of the interplay between food, gender, sex, and power. We ask: what does it mean to serve, or be served? How do we perform, or un-perform, gender through food and sex? What does it mean to be someone who consumes? How is food used to censor certain kinds of bodies, and certain kinds of sex? What does it mean for our food system to rely on unsettling the boundaries between species and sexualities?

These are big questions, and like all big questions, there are no straightforward answers. Therefore — perhaps most fundamentally — this issue also dives deep into the complexities of the human heart, digging into the desires, fears, questions, and idiosyncrasies that we keep close to ourselves.

The pieces in this issue include: 

• An Oyster’s Burden | Megan Jones

• Be the Boar | Katy Overstreet

• Breaking Coconuts | Shirin Mehrotra

• Food and Flesh | Isabela Vera

• Just Because I Bottom, Doesn’t Mean I’ll Make You a Sandwich | Jay Gee

• Meanwhile in Paris | Thomas Jaspers

• The Sexualization of Servitude (audio) | Zoë Johnson & Isabela Vera

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This time, we’ve taken a stab at reproducing several written pieces as audio readings: An Oyster’s Burden, Be the Boar, and Just Because I Bottom, Doesn’t Mean I’ll Make You a Sandwich all have podcast versions, so please indulge in whatever format your eyes and ears prefer. The last one is available to all listeners, and the first two are for paid subscribers only. Paid subscribers can also listen to Shirin reflect on Breaking Coconuts.

As always, we were impressed by the thoughtful and compelling work brought to us by our authors. One thing that amazes us every time we put together an issue is the resonances that emerge across pieces with seemingly disparate themes. In Jay Gee’s personal essay they explore the connections between their preferences in the bedroom and their performance of feminized labour in the kitchen. They reflect on how this labour makes them subject to gendered perceptions, brewing feelings of discontent and disempowerment vis a vis their cisgender male partner. Similarly, in her interview with Isabela, Zoë discusses the ways that young women’s performance of feminized forms of work in Ethiopia’s coffee houses serves to perpetuate their objectification and their vulnerability to sexual advances from their mainly male clientele. Again, the sexualization of servitude in this context is often disempowering, which Zoë argues, calls into question simplistic narratives around entrepreneurship and empowerment. 

Megan Jones and Shirin Mehrotra both write about the ways that food is used as a tool of sexual oppression, but from very different angles. Megan looks at how the film and TV industry reinforce misogyny by failing to show anything other than male genitalia engaging in “mainstream” male-centric sex on screen. Meanwhile, instead of depicting real female and queer body parts, desires, and experiences of pleasure, directors and scriptwriters often use food as a stand-in. Shirin’s article explores how in India, food is weaponized to control women’s sexuality, in turn limiting their reproductive choices and maintaining caste hierarchies. Here, dietary restrictions form the parameters within which one can be considered a good, respectable Hindu woman. 

The politics of consumption and consent are addressed, again in unique ways, by both Isabela’s work of autofiction and Katy’s anthropological piece. Food features prominently in the vignettes on sexual exploration, trauma, and discovery in Isabela’s story. Set against the backdrop of a culture that prioritizes pleasure and sexual liberation, Isabela explores the way you can lose yourself — in good ways and in bad — in the rush to consume all of the experiences that life has to offer. Katy’s piece illuminates the ways in which our drive to consume a very different kind of flesh requires boundaries between species, desire, and consent to be blurred in the name of putting bacon on the table.

When we’re deep in an issue, we also begin to see reflections of its ideas on other pages we turn. For example, we see similar reckonings with the complexities of consumption, consent, and our animal nature reflected in Amia Srinivasan’s excellent essay collection, The Right to Sex. In an essay titled “The Conspiracy Against Men”, she describes the response of Brock Turner’s father to his son’s sentencing for the sexual assault against Chanel Miller. She explains how, in his letter to the judge, Dan A. Turner bemoans the loss of Brock’s virile appetite and his love of steak, which, he says, have been so significantly diminished by the ramifications of his crime that Brock “eats only to exist”. Here we see our society’s tendency to associate voracity with masculine power because of the ways in which men are encouraged to consume — both literally (food) and figuratively (bodies) — as they please.

Srinivasan observes how the language Turner uses to describe his son is reminiscent of how one might talk about a golden retriever, rather than an adult human.

In a sense Dan Turner is talking about an animal, a perfectly bred human specimen of wealthy white American boyhood… endowed with a healthy appetite and glistening coat. And, like an animal, Brock is imagined to exist outside the moral order.

But unlike the pigs in Katy’s piece, whose animal-ness strips them of their rights to sex only with consent, in Brock’s case being animal frees him to strip others of that right. Animalness, then, is a tool that can be used to frame both the sexuality of the oppressor and the oppressed, justifying the former’s behaviour and enforcing the latter’s servitude. We see this in the artificial insemination of sows on farms, but also in our treatment of deviant bodies — those of women and femmes, those who perform sexual acts considered outside the norm — that are similarly marked as animal and therefore considered ripe for subjugation. And we see how food frames it all.

Coming up next we have EARTH, CITY, and SEA. As Feminist Food Journal rounds out its first full year of life, we’re still working on figuring out what is our ideal model, and we’d love to hear what you’ve enjoyed so far and would like to see more of. If you’d like to get in touch, our inboxes are always open at hello@feministfoodjournal.com; all readers are also welcome to leave a comment here on Substack. Finally, if you’re not yet supporting us, please consider doing so. Paid subscribers keep Feminist Food Journal going, and we couldn’t do it without you!

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In this in-house interview with FFJ’s founding editors. Isabela talks to Zoë about her master's thesis research on bunabéts, otherwise known as coffee houses, in Ethiopia and the links between serving coffee feminization and the sexualization of feminized labour.

Zoë's research went on to be published in the Journal of Gender and Research. You can read it here.

This podcast features writing, research, and sound editing by Isabela Vera and Zoë Johnson and original music from the Electric Muffin Research Kitchen. You can also listen to it on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.

Further reading

• Bhopal, K. (2010). 'Gender, Identity and Experience: Researching Marginalised Groups.' Women's Studies International Forum, (33, 3: 188-195).

• Campbell, R., & Wasco, S. M. (2000). 'Feminist Approaches to Social Science: Epistemological and Methodological Tenets.' American Journal of Community Psychology, (28, 6: 773-791).

• Cornwall, A., & Anyidoho, N. A. (2010). 'Introduction: Women's Empowerment: Contentions and Contestations.' Development, (53, 2: 144-149).

• Cornwall, A., Harrison, E., & Whitehead, A. (2008). 'Gender Myths and Feminist Fables: The Struggle for Interpretive Power in Gender and Development.' In A. Cornwall, E. Harrison, & A. Whitehead,(Eds: pp. 1-19 ). Gender Myths and Feminist Fables. Malden. MA: Blackwell Publishing.

• Devault, M. L. (1990). 'Talking and Listening from Women's Standpoint: Feminist Strategies for Interviewing and Analysis.' Social Problems, (37, 1: 96-116).

• Gregson, N., & Rose, G. (2000). 'Taking Butler Elsewhere: Performativities, Spatialities and Subjectivities.' Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, (18, 4: 433-452).

• Hoppe, K. (1993). 'Whose Life Is It, Anyway?: Issues of Representation in Life Narrative Texts of African Women.' The International Journal of African Historical Studies, (26, 3: 623-636).

• McRobbie, A. (2009). The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. London: SAGE.

• Peacock, J. L., & Holland, D. C. (1993). 'The Narrated Self: Life Stories in Process.' Ethos, (21, 4: 367-383).

• Shain, F. (2012). '"The Girl Effect": Exploring Narratives of Gendered Impacts and Opportunities in Neoliberal Development.' Sociological Research Online, (18, 2: 181-191).

• van Stapele, N. (2014 March). 'Intersubjectivity, Self-Reflexivity and Agency: Narrating About "Self" and "Other" in Feminist Research.' Women's Studies International Forum, (43: 13-21).

By Isabela Bonnevera

Your first memory of food and sex has the kaleidoscope filter of early childhood. You’re sitting cross-legged on the thick carpet of your living room in the second house you lived in. Something in that house was pink. Was it the exterior, the walls, or even the carpet itself? It’s hard to say now, and you certainly can’t ask your parents for the sake of writing this memoir. What you recall with clarity is a white plate full of orange slices. It sits between the three of you, and as you reach out to grab one, your parents start talking about sex. The penis goes into the vagina, healthy and natural. You stare at the oranges even though you know your parents are trying to look at you. Something heavy keeps you from looking up to meet their gaze.

Food and sex. As two essential elements of our messy human lives, it’s no surprise that they often intertwine in the material, in memory. For many of us, they are bound together by their shared role in our pursuit of pleasure. In these overworked and overstimulated times, we are told that in finding pleasure and savouring it, we become closest to ourselves. And yet, food and sex are so often used as tools of performance: as smokescreens we hide behind, or as costumes we try on. These days we are encouraged, expected even, to enjoy life’s pleasures — to eat good food, to fuck — with abandon. There is so much pressure to consume, and so much pressure to consume authentically, in a way that brings us joy, sets us free. In this rush to gobble it all up, to take up the space we’ve been granted, where does one’s self end and performance begin?

Valentine’s Day 2008 was a wild one. You recently lost your virginity, graduated from teen magazines to Cosmopolitan, and know exactly What Men Like. Armed with this information, you take advantage of an empty house to tie your boyfriend up, douse his chest with chocolate sauce, and hit him with a stick you found in the yard.

Shut up and take it, you admonish in response to his increasingly fearful facial expressions. It’s only when he goes completely soft that you give up and start wiping the sauce off with a paper towel and hand soap. You feel embarrassed, but you’re not sure why. Things implode later that year shortly after a blowup you have while kayaking across a lake. Triggered by his refusal to splurge on a Eurotrip after graduation, all the years of eating pepperoni pizza and talking about hockey suddenly feel too much. The words spill out of you.

You’re so boring, you say. I need you to start reading the newspaper in the morning and ordering more adventurous dishes at all-you-can-eat sushi.

It doesn’t go down well, and you both end up paddling furiously in divergent directions until you have no choice but to land your kayaks at the same point. 

***

It’s your second night on campus as a freshman, and you’re with a family friend at a party full of sophomores. Your parents suggested you get in touch with him to have him show you around. What was likely a pity invitation brings you both back to your dorm room, which had been yours for just 48 hours and is flush with non-perishables and fresh linen. Suck my cock, he says. You’re just learning this script, but it’s easy enough to follow. Your brain is damp with Smirnoff and it doesn’t feel like this room is yours. He has the biggest penis you’ve ever seen.

In the quiet darkness, you suddenly come back into your body. The awareness activates your gag reflex. I think you should get out, you hear yourself say. Here, I’ll give you a juice box. You weren’t raised in a juice-box family, but the usual dietary parameters seemed to fly out the window when your parents went to Walmart to stock up on dorm room essentials. There are dozens glued together in little packs in a box next to your bed. Your guest is quiet for a moment before you hear the pop of plastic piercing plastic, followed by a heaving swallow. What the hell, dude, he finally says.

The following day while rushing out to class, you find the crushed juice box in the stairwell. It stays there until the winter holidays. Upon your return in January, you wonder who finally took it away.

***

A year later, you run into Juice Box Boy and find yourself tongue-tied and blushing. You’re in the middle of biking up a hill to campus in September and very conscious of your sweaty upper lip. By this time, you’ve left campus and moved into a total dump, along with five girlfriends. Hey, you say, not sure if it’s best to wipe the sweat off your lip (and therefore draw attention to its existence) or let it pool. Almost immediately the tingle becomes too much and you find your wrist against your mouth.

Hey, he says. You ruminate on the redness of your cheeks all day until it’s time for Thirsty Thursday at a run-down club in the city. The keyboard notes of S&M pulse as you down discounted vodka crans as fast as the bar line will allow. By midnight it feels like most of your friends have a love interest locked in. You jump in the nearest cab and ask the driver to drop you off at the McDonald's behind your house. As you teeter on splintering high heels to a table where you sit down and eat your Kid’s Meal, you see Juice Box Boy at the booth right next to you, eating with a friend. No luck for them tonight either. 

When they come back to your room, the air is sweet with the scent of a mango that you’ve left ripening on your night table, away from the sticky fingers of roommates who would surely scarf it down if given a chance. The boys refuse to touch each other. You don’t much want to touch Juice Box Boy’s friend but it’s hard to extricate yourself now. Your house is teeming with returning roommates and peripheral friends, and you’re in too deep to cause a scene. Both men have parched scratchy mouths but you make the right noises anyway. 

In the morning, your mango and its thick perfume are gone. You’re half-incensed, half-relieved to have an excuse to text Juice Box Boy.

Am I always going to be feeding you?

Dude, chill. My friend took it. 

It’s precisely sex’s slippery quality that makes the pursuit of sexual pleasure such a tricky political project. It’s a moving target, often obscured by the clashing expectations of both the patriarchy and feminism. Grappling with our true desires can feel like an epic, often lonely journey.

– Nona Willis-Aronowitz, 2022

There’s a sense that everyone is doing it, but nobody wants to dig any deeper into how it’s going. Uncovering feelings, revealing bruises, hurts, and wrongs feels taboo. As if doing so could have you labelled as overdramatic, oversensitive, unreliable, even dangerous. 

In this moment, sex feels symbolic of freedom. To renege on it would be akin to backsliding. Freedom is something that should bring us happiness. But it’s confusing to only feel powerful when deciding whether you want to spread your legs. 

Later in college, you find yourself on what feels like your first adult date. He’s clever, cultured, and cute, if a little on the short side. His Facebook profile photo shows him at a bar mitzvah wearing a bow tie. 

He lives in a sleek one-bedroom downtown. You’re still in a dump near campus with a bunch of roommates. No one has ever taken you out for wine before. He skims the list with confidence and knows what bottle will go well with nduja. At home, you’re still eating chickpeas out of the can and drinking vodka with coke.

By the time the bar closes, it’s too late for you to get the last bus home, and since he lives right around the corner, he graciously offers for you to stay over. You refuse to let him touch you, and he concedes quickly. You lie awake for half the night, listening to his soft breathing and the cars rushing by under the window, jarring to your suburbia-tuned ears. Being in that bar felt nice, like the kind of place you should be spending time. You imagine yourself there with someone else, this time with the wine list down pat. Tonight, you couldn’t quite get it.

***

You’ll be put on the spot with drink pairings a year or so later in an open-plan house in the jungle, somewhere in South Asia. Glasses are being poured, and the mood is heavy with unspoken designs. The pressure to perform feels high. You profess to love high-end whisky but can’t name a single brand you want when pressed. He is 13 years older; she is three years younger. This time everyone did want to touch. In the morning, you open your eyes with a start. You should’ve left hours ago. Three whisky glasses, puddled with the memory of ice, sit outside the mosquito net. You pick them up as quietly as possible and tiptoe downstairs, intending to slip out unnoticed, only to find that a stray dog has stolen one of your shoes.

***

On that same trip, you have a horrible experience, even worse than arriving back over half a day late for your hostel’s 10-pm curfew without only one shoe. It starts innocently enough, with a head of blonde curls that you keep getting a quick eyeful of out the side of your rickshaw. The town only has one road, so it isn’t hard to get a full picture as the days go by. He’s definitely your goal of the week. You’re getting bored with surfing anyway, probably because after ten days you haven’t managed to stand up once. Then, one night you’re out at a beach bar and see the curls bobbing in the crowd. You set your eyes on them, and it’s not long before they’re on your stained hotel pillow. But something about it feels empty, and before it even starts, you wish that you could take it back.

The next morning, you take him to meet some friends at a café you have all been frequenting for weeks. The papaya salad is delicious and cheap. You weren’t exactly subtle about your ambitions last night, so all your friends smirk as you sit down. Everyone is buzzing with stories of the night before, but you’re barely present. The surrounding chatter might as well be ocean swell. Last night, the condom broke, and your mind is running a marathon with the potential consequences. Chlamydia, HIV, death. You’re too scared of needles to get a blood test done, so you’ll surely be dead before you dare to figure it out. 

You only tune back at the end of the meal when you hear the conversation suddenly getting heated. A shrieking sound is coming from the guy you brought here. A vein bulges in his forehead as he pushes his chair back and springs up. Suddenly, he’s nose to nose with the restaurant owner, a spindly man with a greying mustache who has come over to bring you the bill. Until now, he’s greeted you each morning with a soft smile and an offering of smoothies on the house. At the moment, though, that smile is nowhere to be seen.

These prices are way too high, last night’s guy yells at him with nearly comical vitriol. I’ve been here for months, so I know this. I’m not going to pay. The owner looks crestfallen. A calculator showing a grand total of $8 for all six of you dangles from his hand.

You reach up and yank your plus-one to the table by his wrist. You’re embarrassing yourself, you hiss, in front of everyone. Most importantly, he’s embarrassing you. In response, he throws some tattered bills down and stalks off. You and your travel friends stay sitting in shocked silence. You can feel the unspoken verdict on your taste in men like you sent them to a lousy restaurant after waxing lyrical about how that dinner had changed your life. You can just imagine the Yelp reviews: one-star, hostile service, must have eaten there out of some need for punishment.

The twilight zone of ambivalence, of not yes but also not no. It’s easy to dwell there too many times, even as you say each one will be your last. Next time you should do better. It will be years before someone publishes Cat Person.

Back home, brunch is getting trendy and seems like a well-to-do activity post-coitus, no matter how detached the act is itself. Unfortunately, amid a slow-burning heartbreak, disconnected acts are your modus operandi, so you’re having a lot of overpriced toasts.

One grim morning, you empty the wallet of one particularly lacklustre lay on a plate of duck eggs poached for two days at 60°C. Any possibility of meaningful conversation has been vacuumed into the chasm that opened in your soul the night before when you saw the jet-black star tattoos he has inked on each of his bony hip bones. It’s not too early for an espresso martini. Who is this person, really, and why are you here? You wonder glumly what the one person you want to be brunching with is doing right now.

***

As things stand, that person just wants to be friends. His commitment to that ideal, however, constantly peaks and troughs. It’s complicated: It started off complicated, stayed complicated, and will inevitably come to a complicated end. You’ve never loved someone so desperately nor been so frequently rebuked. It’s an intoxicating and soul-crushing game. You met abroad a few years ago, back around the time when other boys were still stealing your mangoes, and you were awestruck. He wore rings, played guitar, had favourite recipes for lamb shoulder, and spat in your mouth while you fucked in a packed hostel room. The sex made you feel alive. One time he pulled your hair and slapped you so hard you were left with a bruise under your eye, no bigger than a grain of rice but noticeable nonetheless. Nobody believed you when you said you slipped in the shower. 

These days, your relationship festers like a gangrenous wound. You meet every few weeks for awkward dinners preceded by cold, patronizing text messages, which he sends claiming that you won’t be sleeping together afterwards. Usually, he means it. Usually, you’re left bereft. You always agree to meet again anyway.

Tonight, you take him to a new restaurant. By this time, you have the disposable income to dine out frequently and do so with gusto, although your obsessive monitoring of the number on the scale always limits how much you indulge. Regardless of whether you’ll let yourself order dessert, you want to impress him with the handle you’ve got on the city’s gastronomy scene. The place doesn’t disappoint. The music is good; tasting dishes, meticulously presented, come out one by one. But you don’t taste what you’re eating. The conversation is spiky, each of you painting impossibly rosy versions of your lives. You feel yourself slipping behind an alternate persona, the more arrogant and acerbic veneer you put on when you’re on edge.

In the end, an exorbitant bill comes, and you’re quick to swoop it up, tipsy on the new 0s in your bank account and the possibility of clawing back a shred of control. But, a lump is growing in your stomach, sprouting the first tendrils of the emptiness you know you’ll feel when you shut your front door tonight. As you look for your wallet to pay, you realize you might need to move some money between accounts and go to open your banking app with twitching fingers.

You know, if this were an actual date, doing that would be highly embarrassing.

You look up from your phone. You want to remind him of the $700 he owes you for the flight tickets you bought him two years ago. You never followed up on it, even though you were still a student, and he had already graduated into a high-paying job. Tell him off, a voice says in your head. Fuck that. But some everlasting sense of loyalty to him holds you back.

Thanks, you say with a sarcastic smile, tapping a thumb to finish the online transaction with one hand while putting your physical card down with the other.

***

Your roommate has been there for you throughout all this heartbreak, even if his version of picking up the pieces looks less like a platonic pep talk and more like sliding his fingers inside you while you wallow in bed. It feels so vindicating to be wanted that you don’t push him away, although afterwards, you wish you could shower out of your skin. 

On the last night of living together, you go out with mutual friends. Around midnight a fork appears in the road. You want to go to another bar. He wants to go to an underground techno club. That is the last place he should be, in your opinion, given his poorly concealed cocaine problem. As you both begin to hurl words at each other with increasing intensity, an oblivious reveller stumbles past with a large box in his hands. Hey mate, want a donut? He is so drunk that only his eyes react to your roommate grabbing one and jamming it into your face. You blink at them both through jam-globbed eyelashes. 

The night ends quickly after that. But it is the start of the month, and a new tenant is already in your room. You’d planned to stay in bed with your roommate, resigned — although you can’t quite explain why — to the inevitable sexual advances you knew would come your way. For better or for worse, you instead sleep in the garage, curled up on a tattered couch with exposed springs, and refuse to come up when he stumbles in begging for forgiveness at dawn.

Do we owe each other decency? Does sexual freedom trump social contracts of care? Are we anywhere close to a world where the two can co-exist? As Nona Willis-Aranomowitz suggests, we can’t really have a sexually liberated society when women aren’t liberated — despite all that rah-rah go-girl messaging on sex from the last decade or two that would have you think otherwise. Don’t get me wrong, it’s imperative we have the room to search for our authentic sexual selves. But amidst all the cheering on of sexual freedom and venerating of pleasure, somewhere along the way the recognition of power dynamics, and the room for choice, got lost. In their place, feelings of shame began seeping in. Shame for not doing it enough; shame for not enjoying it when you did; and shame for not having more of what felt like a backbone, but was actually a mandate, to do it on your terms. 

In September, you go away for the weekend to fulfil a long-standing promise to meet a brief travel flame. He licks you to orgasm in the span of a single dishwashing detergent commercial playing on the hotel TV. It’s the first time in a while you haven’t had to fake it, and then wallow in bad-feminist guilt over doing so. But those are the only seconds in which you aren’t painfully aware of his earnest yet insipid personality. 

To distract from the feelings of revulsion creeping into your chest, you take him out for pho but can go on no longer when you see him twirling his rice noodles around a fork and spoon as if seated at a piazza in Firenze. You decide to flee to a friend’s house in an adjacent city. When you tell him you’re leaving, he cries for three hours straight. 

Three weeks later, you meet your future husband. You know he’s the one when you both hate the ramen on your first date. You’ve cycled through enough dunces to know that relationships make or break on food. Given the fresh horror of the recent unromantic weekend, it’s an immense relief to find someone who can not only deftly use chopsticks but point out that the yolk of the ajitsuke tamago isn’t soft enough. For those reasons and innumerable others, you find yourself falling head over heels and not even worrying about it.

It’s perhaps the tensions inherent between sexual liberation and superficial empowerment that leave us confused about why we want certain things, why we do certain things. Why we concede to impulses our brains say are wrong, why we ignore longings our hearts tell us are right. Why sometimes it feels easier to leave our bodies than to grapple with the ways politics manifest in our bedrooms (or bathrooms or cars or kitchen tables). It takes time to realize that this incessant tug-of-war is not a product of your own fallibilities. At least, not fully. 

But even the “security” of marriage can’t save you from trials at the table. After a few years of sitting through brutally banal meetings together, you realize you have feelings for one of your coworkers and find yourself daydreaming about his deep voice and dark hair. Curious, restless even, you start to forge an even deeper friendship, despite the constant angst it brings. Why you pursue it so doggedly, you can’t say. Perhaps it’s because you finally feel at home enough in yourself to dream of stretching the limits that others went ahead and snapped in years gone by. Maybe it’s because he reminds you of the kind of person you could’ve been very happy with in another life, in another place. Whatever the reason, you’re suddenly the captain of a ship steering a cargo load of feelings, complicated by the fact you never got your boating license.

From the beginning, you work, however unintentionally, to collapse your two lives into one. You rabidly curate lists of restaurants to try out together, with the less-than-subtle intention of turning him into your dream epicure. The irony of having a perfectly eager gourmand who would love to try those places waiting for you at home isn’t lost on you. But you forge on in pursuit of a wholeness you’ll never have. The list of restaurants shrinks quickly, and when you go out with him, you posture. You don’t know this ingredient? You don’t know this wine? You feel like you’re in control. But are you? This version of yourself chafes you to your core, even if you don’t know how to switch it off when you’re with him. Maybe it’s because you know you both deserve better. 

As the months go on, you have more and more moments together where you feel like yourself, but it’s ill-timed. By then, he starts getting into the swing of things, cooking curries and mixing Negronis for an endless loop of Bumble dates. Seeing that gives you the feeling that you made him. But he, in many ways, made you, as did all the others that you let in, and maybe even the ones you didn’t. 

Isabela Bonnevera is a founding editor of Feminist Food Journal.

Further reading & listening

Coaston, J., Willis Aronowitz, N., Goldberg, M. ‘After Dobbs: What is Feminist Sex?’ The New York Times: The Argument. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/28/opinion/after-dobbs-what-is-feminist-sex.html? 

Dee, K. (2021, March 15).' ‘The Coming Wave of Sex Negativity’. Substack. https://defaultfriend.substack.com/p/72-the-coming-wave-of-sex-negativity/comments?s=r

Goldberg, M. (2022, March 3). ‘A Manifesto Against Sex Positivity’. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/21/opinion/manifesto-against-sex-positivity.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

Khazan O. (2017, December 11). ‘A Viral Story for the #MeToo Moment’. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/12/a-viral-short-story-for-the-metoo-moment/548009/

Konnikova, M. (2016, June 25). ‘Casual Sex: Everyone is Doing It.’ The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/casual-sex-everyone-is-doing-it

Srinivasan, A. (2021, September 6). ‘Who Lost the Sex Wars?’ The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/who-lost-the-sex-wars

Willis Aronowitz, N. (2022, August 16). ‘I Still Believe in the Power of Sexual Freedom.’ The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/16/opinion/sex-women-feminism-rules.html

From our SEX issue

Industrial meat production seeks to turn sows into reproductive bio-machines, but the process of artificial insemination unsettles the boundaries of interspecies desire.

Paid subscribers can listen to an audio version of this piece here on our podcast.

By Katy Overstreet

We arrived at the pig farm in a rural area of western Denmark at precisely nine o’clock in the morning, just in time for kaffepause (coffee break). Having left the world of flat whites and croissants behind in Copenhagen, my colleague Inger Anneberg and I brought more traditional morning fare: bread rolls, cheese, butter, and jam. After introductions, the farmer, a middle-aged blonde-haired Dane with a friendly manner who I will call Mads, made coffee. He set it out on the kitchen table with a package of leverpostej (a widely eaten paste made from pig liver) for us to share. 

Mads and his employees sat around the table, looking at us expectantly, clearly curious about why two anthropologists had come to visit their pig farm. We explained that we had come to study how Mads and his team handle female pigs during breeding, to inform our work on animal welfare. Denmark, where pork is revered as part of traditional foodways, makes for the perfect case study for this kind of work: the country prides itself on maintaining a “gold standard” of pig production based on its comparatively stringent animal welfare regulations, high productivity, widespread use of cutting-edge technologies, extensive research infrastructure, and strong public support for the industry. And the industry is booming: Denmark produces more than twenty-eight million pigs, largely for export, which is impressive for a country of under six million people.

After we’d had our fill of bread rolls and coffee, we set off for a day with Mads and his workers. We were soon invited to participate in artificially inseminating sows. As an anthropologist who has been studying industrial agriculture for more than ten years, I have participated in many different farm chores and activities. But this brief encounter with breeding sows at Mads’s farm raised new questions of ethics that I had not encountered in my previous work. Our experience that day illuminated the ways in which the boundaries between species, desire, and consent are blurred in the name of agricultural efficiency, and what this interplay can reveal about human-animal relations in industrial food systems.  

***

The stalls of the breeding unit stretched from one end of the large barn to the other in rows of fifty. With four rows in this breeding unit, the barn contained around two hundred sows. Each stall was a bit wider than the large sow standing in it but not large enough for the animal to turn around. The sows all faced a pen in the middle of the unit, accessible through a series of gates. We followed behind Ana, a farm worker from Romania, who had been charged with leading us through the breeding process. Usually, on pig farms, female farm workers focus on more “nurturing” tasks, like caring for piglets, but Mads had proudly told us that Ana was willing to do it all.

As Ana prepared her breeding tools, three large, gregarious boars — distinguishable from the sows by their fur, their larger size, and their prominent testicles — were herded into the pens in the centre of the breeding unit. While scientists have done numerous experiments around sow arousal, nothing excites sows quite like the presence of live boars, so they’d been sent in to get the party started. The effect was immediate: the sows strained their noses through the bars of their pens trying to get a little closer to these potential mates, and the barn soon filled with the guttural grunts, barks, and squeals of the sows and boars calling to each other.

While the sows and boars touched noses and conversed, Ana started the breeding process. She entered the small gate behind the first sow and confirmed that the sow was in “standing heat”, meaning fertile and ready for breeding. She pushed and rubbed the back of the sow, watching as the animal locked her legs and stood rigidly. Ana then checked for other signs of heat, noting the perkiness of the sow’s ears and the swollenness of her vulva. The sow was ready.

Ana rubbed the sides of the sow, pulled at the top of her back legs, and pushed on her back. She pulled a cloth from the pocket of her coveralls and cleaned the sow’s vulva. Grasping the lower portion of the vulva, Ana pulled it down and carefully inserted a straw with a lubricated foam tip up into the sow’s vagina. She pushed until it met resistance and then pushed a little more firmly until it entered the sow’s cervix. Once the straw was inserted, Ana attached a small plastic pouch of sperm suspended in liquid to the other end of the straw. She hooked this pouch to a clip hanging from the ceiling by a string. Ana worked her way down the row of stalls, quickly connecting one sow after the other to an individual bag of sperm.

For now, the milky liquid stayed put in the bags. Ana explained to us that the sows needed to be encouraged to take in the sperm. When she had several pouches of sperm hooked up, she turned to Inger and me: “Be the boar,” she said. 

Climbing onto the first sow and facing her rear, Ana explained that it was our job to imitate the weight and movement that a boar might make when mounting a sow. From her seat atop the sow’s back, Ana began rubbing the sow with her arms and legs. Her skilled imitation of a boar was quickly rewarded. The sow experienced uterine contractions that sucked the semen into her body, leaving the attached pouch empty.  

Ana dismounted, removed the straw from the sow’s vagina, and opened the next stall, motioning me forward. My turn. I had never seen a boar mount a sow, but not being entirely new to sexual acts, I could imagine the scene. Nevertheless, I struggled with the idea of being the boar and found myself thrown into a moment of crisis. It was not the visceral nature of the task that put me off. As someone with extensive fieldwork experience on farms, the bodily demands of farm work and the intimacy of working with animals in these contexts were not new to me. What struck me instead at that moment was being asked to imagine myself in the position of a sexual partner and to perform a sexual act with a nonhuman animal in a system specifically designed to exploit the generativity of female bodies for profit.

***

Increasing generativity in the name of profit has been an ongoing project in Denmark for at least 150 years. Since the establishment of the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University in Copenhagen in 1856, there has been a focus on the application of scientific techniques for agricultural optimization. Concerted efforts in breeding resulted in the creation of the Danish “bacon pigs”, famous for their extra set of ribs. Other improvements in bacon pigs were their increased litter sizes and leaner meat. These developments were heralded by breeders and farmers as a major success of Danish ingenuity in breeding. Building on this “breed wealth”, farmers continued to breed for litter size, eventually leading to what is now referred to in industry-speak as the “hyperprolific sow”.

This engineered line of pigs produces some of the largest litter sizes in the world: some birth as many as thirty piglets at once, more than double the average litter size of even a few decades ago. In these excessively large litters, piglet mortality is extremely high, both before birth and during the first few days of life. Many are born as “dolphin-pigs”, with sloping foreheads, bulging eyes, and low birth weights. This is caused by running out of space to grow in the womb. Sows have only fourteen nipples, meaning that large and very large litters outstrip their ability to nurse their young. Piglets on Danish farms, therefore, have to be regularly redistributed to other sows, either replacing offspring who have died or sent to “nurse sows” kept in lactation through continually nursing piglets from other litters. 

Large litters also mean that sows must endure prolonged births and often end up with immune disease or other ailments. Once with a litter, sows are kept in pens that include metal bars to prevent them from lying on and thereby killing their piglets, designed to protect their marketable young at the expense of their freedom of movement. The hyperprolific sow is truly a haunting figure of what “improvement” has come to mean in agricultural science. 

Another key development in the field of pig breeding has been artificial insemination. Experiments with artificial insemination were recorded as early as the 1600s, but it was not until the mid-20th century that dairy farmers began to use it regularly. On pig farms, artificial insemination has only become common practice in the last couple of decades, gaining popularity as a means of increasing control over genetic lines and making breeding more efficient. This is in part because artificial insemination is often faster than “natural service” by boars, who are also considered expensive to feed and dangerous to work with. The move to artificial insemination required breeders and farmers to develop a better understanding of pig courtship rituals, because, without some form of stimulation, sows fail to have uterine contractions. These deep, pulsing movements are vital for increasing the chances of conception as well as litter size.

In his extensive ethnography of mass pig production in the Midwestern United States, Alex Blanchette shows how workers’ efforts to “stimulate” sows are often standardized according to the logics of efficiency and managers’ interpretations of those logics. Stimulate is a term used in the pork industry and in textbooks on pig reproduction. Blanchette adopts it to describe how a choreography of workers, sows, and technologies standardizes the sow — distilling her into a particular pattern of instinctual responses — as well as the worker — into an efficient and reproducible employee. Stimulation, then, imagines the sow as an instinctual biomachine and the worker as her operator. 

Yet, on Mads’ farm, Ana’s careful tactile communication and her mimesis of an imagined boar seemed to me to be not only about domination and standardization. Although breeding takes place in a space designed for the mass production of pig flesh, which provides pigs with only the bare minimum of what they need to live, Ana showed us that the sows in this setting are also able to make demands on the humans who care for them. In the aforementioned ethnography by Blanchette, a worker named Felipe takes his time to learn the individuality of each animal. He approaches his work with gusto, pulling hair and tweaking tails, comparing the experience to being a responsive and inventive lover with human women. Perhaps, Blanchette argues, Felipe’s improvisations were also a refusal of the standardization of labour and an attempt to find dignity through the exercise of skilled work. Similarly, Ana appeared to respond differently to individual sows. She did not touch them all in the same way. Sometimes she would remark, “Oh she likes this,” while stroking a sow’s udder or scratching another’s back. 

These acts of courtship show that arousal, rather than the stimulation imagined by agricultural scientists, might be a better term to describe what is happening to the sows in these interactions. Although it might be possible to imagine animals as machines in textbooks or among managers seeking to “stimulate” efficiency and profit, the workers touching the sows and interacting with them seem to know that whatever term the textbooks use, successful breeding depends on their ability to arouse the sows. Sows demand that if they are to be bred, they must at least be given a minimal courtship experience. The moment in which the human breeder is “being the boar” then, is a moment in which a sow asserts her subjecthood, even as the industry seeks to flatten that subjecthood into the lowest common denominator. 

***

Even after more than fifty years of concerted research on stimulating the sow, successful artificial insemination still depends on getting the sow “in the mood”, so to speak. And while I cannot find any scientific literature on this point, it seems possible that the goal may actually be for the sow to orgasm. The curious absence of this term could be due to the taboo in animal science of using anthropomorphic terms to describe animals. Or perhaps it is avoided because being the boar is already dangerously close to bestiality, another very strong cultural taboo in Denmark as in most Euro-American contexts. 

But I am not the first observer of human-animal social relations to notice that nonhuman desire shapes human action. Based on ethnographic research with falconers who engage in elaborate courtship rituals with falcons in order to collect semen and to inseminate female birds, Sara Asu Schroer argues that “bird desire… can be understood both in terms of a sense of sexual longing and lust and in terms of having (at times quite high) demands and expectations of their partner,” be they avian or human. In other words, falcons, who are notoriously difficult to breed shape social relations beyond simply refusing or cooperating. Courtship, instead, depends on improvisation in a varied and extensive repertoire of movements, offerings, and vocalizations. So fully do the falconers participate in these courtship rituals with birds that one falconer’s wife says to Shroer that “during breeding season ‘James was all bird’”.

In her ethnography of a Danish research clinic that uses piglets as model organisms for extremely preterm human infants, anthropologist Mette N. Svendsen invokes “substitution” to describe how different actors come to stand in for those of other species. For example, the researchers who care for the piglets (and later kill and dissect them) strive to care for the young animals as they would for their own children. The researcher responsible for giving the preterm piglets their food was, perhaps somewhat in jest, referred to as the madmor, or “food mother,” referring to a historical practice whereby the wife on a large farm would cook for the servants who were also part of the household and to some extent, a kind of kin. Svendsen argues that these kinds of substitution practices “unsettle and settle boundaries between humans and nonhumans, life and death, and belonging and not belonging”.

Being the boar similarly unsettles species boundaries because it implies an act of substitution, a mimicking of a sexual partner; mimicry which means becoming a little bit more porcine, at least for a time. 

***

Back in the breeding unit, Inger and I were up to bat. Inger had far more experience with artificial insemination on pig farms than I did, and upon listening to Ana’s instructions, she confidently entered a stall to sit on the back of a sow. Somewhat more tentatively, I joined a different sow in her stall and gingerly sat on her back. I was worried that my weight would be too much for her, but Ana pointed out that my full weight and some firm pressure from my hands on the sow’s back would be more “boar-like” than my tentative and partial position, which had led only to the semen remaining placid in the pouch. I watched from my perch as Ana and Inger moved from stall to stall, clearly more adept at arousing the sows than me. 

Finally, I began rubbing the animal firmly with my hands and tried again to put my full weight on her back. Apparently, the sow found me-as-the-boar adequate, and suddenly she sucked the semen out from the pouch and into her body. Perhaps she had an orgasm. Perhaps it was a moment of pleasure in her grim life, which was characterized by conditions of confinement and the demands of being kept constantly pregnant or lactating for human profit. Regardless, it was not an act that I felt justified in doing and not one that I came to innocently. I certainly do not feel comforted by a discourse of human exceptionalism but I “stayed with the trouble.” And through unsettling the boundaries between species and becoming a little bit boar-like, the sow showed me that, try as humans might to turn her into a piglet-popping biomachine, they will never fully succeed.

Katy Overstreet is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Sustainable Futures at the University of Copenhagen. She conducts research on human-animal relations, food and agriculture, and landscapes. 

Acknowledgements 

Thank you to the Feminist Food Journal editors, and to Inger Anneberge, for your thought-provoking comments and feedback. And of course, thank you to “Mads” for allowing us to visit his farm and to “Ana” for sharing her work with us. 

Further Readings: 

Anneberg, I., Vaarst, M., & and Bubandt, N. (2013, November 20). Pigs and profits: hybrids of animals, technology and humans in Danish industrialised farming. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale, (21.4: 542-559).

Blanchette, A. (2020). Porkopolis: American animality, standardized life, and the factory farm. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Foote, R. H. (2010, January 1). The history of artificial insemination: Selected notes and notables. Journal of Animal Science, (80: 1-10).

Franklin, S. (2007). Dolly Mixtures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Oliviero, C., Junnikkala, S., & Peltoniemi, O. (2019, September). The challenge of large litters on the immune system of the sow and the piglets. Reproduction in Domestic Animals, (54: 12-21).

Schroer, S. A. (2018, September). Breeding with birds of prey: Intimate encounters. In H. A. Swanson, M. E. Lien, & G. B. Weenns (Eds, pp. 33-49). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Svendsen, M. N. (2021). Near Human: Border Zones of Species, Life, and Belonging. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Listen to an audio version of this piece above or on our podcast (and in your usual podcasting app).

By Jay Gee | Narrated for audio by Pericles Santis

I’m new to bottoming. As a self-identified slut, it surprises me that I’m only now learning how to bottom, somewhat late in life – in my oh-so-dreaded thirties. In gay years on the Chicago scene, I’m now An Elder. It’s like I’m learning a new language, one peppered with references to douching, poppers, fibre supplements, toys, and specialty diets. But beyond following prescriptions to avoid dairy and drink enough water, I’m also seeing myself in a totally new light. 

In my twenties, I spent my most promiscuous years identifying as a vers top: I would bottom on occasion but never really enjoyed it. I indulged in regular hookups with a mix of guys where we would explore what turned each other on, but I tended to go for guys who preferred bottoming. That was just what got me off. In those years, I never really considered my gender identity: I thought I was cisgender at the time. I was a homonormative cis-gay vers-top. I enjoyed frequent hookups with guys in the Chicago area. I exclusively topped with my most recent ex and the other guys we would mess around with. I prided myself on being the one others thought to be in full control.

Everything changed when I met my current partner. We encountered the usual way — via the apps — and I was overwhelmed by his charm. His confident smile instantly won me over. He identified squarely as a top and knew what he liked. He had never been penetrated and certainly wouldn’t be any time soon. When we started talking, we laughed about both being tops, joking that we would endure taking turns bottoming or saying we would need to invite in a third to make it work. 

But as our relationship deepened, something shifted within me.  I felt comfortable relinquishing power to him and allowing him to take the lead. To take control. My sexual preferences, my world, flipped upside down.

***

To bottom is to let go entirely — physically and mentally. For me, though, letting go has never before been an option. Until now, the contours of my selfhood were always defined by control and restraint. Even my own emotions were no match for the dominion I had over myself. I ignored or reigned in inconvenient feelings of remorse, jealousy, and grief. I steered conversations so that the spotlight would shine over my head. I manipulated, and I hurt those closest to me. To let go, then, would be to lose myself.  

I remember it well. On the pallet-supported bed in his spacious but bare-shelved studio, face dug into a pillow, knees flush to the chest, hands clasped, arms extended along my back. A position reminiscent of the amateur porn littering the seedier corners of my Twitter feed – motel cumdumps, darkroom gangbangs, winsome college lovers. Except I didn’t have the bird’s eye view. I was the one who now lay writhing, self-consciously adjudicating whether the wetness I felt was lube or shit, feigning moans on a cacophonous scale climbing from minor pain to — dare I say — major pleasure?  Here, balled up in a reverse fetal position, fumbling in the dark trying to align his cock with my asshole like a mid-air jet refuelling operation, in total awe of his girth and my asshole’s elasticity, I learned to unfetter from my reign of self-imposed control. I’d always imagined it happening differently.

***

With my current partner, I'm now only bottoming. And I’m loving it. I’m revelling in the feeling of releasing, of letting someone else take the wheel. It’s the feeling of every cell in my body suddenly vibrating at the same frequency, a sensation so powerful that my mind, which never shuts the fuck up, finally falls silent. All I feel are the corporeal markings of pleasure. Have you ever been dicked down so good that you question your very existence?  This is essentially what happened. I’ve experienced my first anal orgasms and even hands-free orgasms. It’s been so good that I haven’t wanted sex with anyone else, and I haven’t wanted to top either. 

But giving myself up has changed how I show affection outside of the bedroom. Despite the veneer of effortless, almost irreproachable, fortune and charm I use to cloak it in everyday interactions, I have a softer side. In particular, making and sharing food is my love language. I'm someone who would give you a take-home bag of cookies after a threesome. Not only am I the kind of person who would do this, but I have done this. I remember discretely placing Ziplocs of freshly-baked chocolate macadamia nut cookies in the backpacks of two Russian gymnasts, just beside the bottle of poppers. I always ensured that my special guests left with a full belly, one way and the other. That’s what I consider being a good host.

When I started dating my current partner, I spent lots of time in the kitchen — as I always had — making us food. After he would toss my salad, I’d toss a literal salad for him in return. But after about two months of getting railed exclusively, I started feeling uneasy. Why did I feel so compelled to cook for him after sex? He would blissfully gorge on whatever I made him as I grappled with not feeling the same joy providing nourishment that I used to. With every post-coitus meal, I was filled, inch by inch, with equal parts spunk and irritation. 

Is he just asking me to do this because I’m taking the more “feminine” role in our relationship? I’m sure it’s fine. He would do this with anyone, right? I should be fine with it. 

I unpack discomforting and vexing situations to death and ruminate helplessly for inordinate lengths of time, as is my wont. Outwardly, I suppressed revealing these feelings, thinking that maybe I was just being dramatic. But with my mind on spin cycle, I lurched and bucked through endless mental reruns looking for a sign, a clue, an inkling as to the crux of my resentment. Why had I become so sensitive to associations with care work and the feminine after bottoming? 

Eventually, the seemingly endless rounds of mental acrobatics unveiled what lay buried for the better part of my life: shame. Steadily and potently distilled from my fear of being perceived as feminine, weak, and not in control. My partner identifies as a cisgender man, and even though I’m somewhat masculine-presenting,  I now identify as non-binary. I grew up with traditional gender modelling from my cishet parents and didn’t want to repeat the same “the masc is the head of the household” bullshit that I had grown up around. But somehow, I was clinging to remnants of a brittle masculine artifice. 

Theologians, social economists, sociologists, political scientists, and psychologists alike have written extensively on the intersections between sex, gender, and power, and how traditional gender roles are perpetuated in queer relationships. Queer people live in the same society as our cishet counterparts, and we are subject to the same patriarchal and misogynistic maladies, including those related to positioning within sexual acts. One historian notes that the legacy of bottoming as taboo dates back 2,500 years and is steeped in thinking that equates sexual passivity to feminization and, therefore, inferiority. We inherit these taboos from the Greeks and Romans, who chose to imbue sex acts based on position with no regard to one’s selfhood. Topping was an act of masculine domination, whereas bottoming meant being feminized into submission. Only a top could desire someone else, their desire pushing them to take an active role. Meanwhile, a bottom was to be desired, passive, and dominated. Powerless. To ancient civilizations, it wasn’t “gay”. It was just sex. But it was — and still is — about power.  

In ‘The Long, Deep, Surprisingly Versatile History of Bottoms: From Ancient Greece to Modern Misogyny,’ João Florêncio gathers that “all homophobia is inseparable from the patriarchy because homophobia is a form of misogyny. You hate gay men because they are closer to women, as if they betray masculinity by being penetrated.” And so-called bottom-shaming is just an extension of this internalized homophobia, a hatred of the perceived femininity within. This implicit misogyny runs rampant in queer circles as it does in heteronormative relationships. Queer relationships operate in a binary frame because much of our relationship playbook came from the dominant heteronormative culture, which finds comfort in binaries and punishes those who fall outside them. In many ways, the fight for queer recognition and equality has engendered assimilation into these regressive structures to achieve progress.

When left unaddressed, internalized and externalized misogyny can be a source of contention, rotting the foundations of queer and cishet relationships alike. These binaries of male and female; masculinities and femininities; dominant and submissive; tops and bottoms: we can choose to reinforce or reject them as we see fit. In previous relationships where I showed up as a top, I’ve been cautious not to perpetuate these harmful norms, and tried my best to subvert them. The dynamics of this new relationship helped to accelerate the stripping away of decades of learned shame, bringing me closer to a more authentic version of myself. Yet insecurities are durable. 

***

I make great sandwiches, which unsurprisingly became my partner’s recurring cravings to recharge after a romp. But after a few casual requests to make him one, I could no longer ignore the gnawing feeling in my stomach. I didn’t want him to feel that just because I would bottom for him, I would cater to his every whim and put myself in a position of servitude. What role model would I be for other people more femme than myself? Should they resign themselves to traditional roles and succumb to society’s expectations of mascs as providers and femmes as caretakers? 

So, I brought my feelings up with him. It wasn’t easy for me, the once-unflappable vers top coming into vulnerable layers of himself. Still, I told him about the new and uncomfortable thoughts that I was having, the midnight ruminations, and how I associated these discomforts with our sex life. I told him that if he expected me to cook for him and clean up after him, I would come to resent him. 

It was a challenging conversation, but he listened. And he cared. He reassured me that it wasn’t his intention to make me feel compelled to care for him just because he stuffed me with cum. He said that he didn’t want to put me in an uncomfortable position or for me to feel compelled to do anything that I didn’t want to do. After all, he assured me, consent is essential in every aspect of a relationship, and certainly within ours.  

In the months since then, I’ve noticed a concerted change in his actions and my thinking. He asks whether he can make me a sandwich or if I can make him a coffee. I know that when he asks me for something to eat, it’s not with any gendered expectation rooted in misogyny or an imbalance of power because I’m free to do the same. We’re free to ask for help, support, and food when we need it. Food once acted as a wedge in our romantic relationship, but now it’s a way for us to bond. We cook together. We wash each other's dishes after enjoying a juicy steak and cobb salad. Just because our sex life has a power balance where he is in physical control doesn't mean that this dynamic extends to other parts of our lives. We're partners. 

I’m changed by my new awareness of the nearly-fossilized shame that welled up in me upon penetration, conscious of how bottoming did away with the projections I had thus far believed to be true about myself. It confronted me with the naked truth of my own emotions and the social constructs that shape them. I’m disquieted by the shame I felt about being feminized — a reminder that this nascent balance we’ve found in our relationship is a choice, not a given. On a larger scale, I feel like living this equity is essential to advancing the politics of the queer community, sidestepping the hetero norms that have been laid out for us and forging our own ways of being and relating. (Power bottoming, anyone?)

In the meantime, I’m still learning more about bottoming. My partner and I have had our fair share of messy encounters (we may have even had some painting). But he has been as patient with my process of getting to know my body in this new way as he was with my inner turmoil.  

Maybe I'll get him to bottom next.

By Shirin Mehrotra (Paid subscribers can listen to Shirin discuss this piece at the end as an audio clip)

Growing up, Priyanka Bhadani, a writer from Gaya, a small town in Bihar, a state in the eastern part of India, remembers something odd about the way that ivy gourd was eaten in her family. While men were forbidden from consuming the staple vegetable, the women were heartily encouraged to indulge.

“For the longest time, I was told that the boys couldn’t eat it because it would stunt their growth,” says Bhadani. “Much later, I learned that people in my family believed that the vegetable controlled sexual desire. And that’s the reason women were encouraged to eat them.” 

In India, controlling women’s desires and sexuality is the constant obsession of many. In foundational Hindu texts, women are portrayed as untrustworthy owing to their sexual “power”, which is considered wildly dangerous to the social order and presented as something that needs to be tamed. Society has translated its fear of women’s supposed destructiveness into myriad tools to control them and their bodies. Food taboos, or popular beliefs that define what a woman can and cannot consume during different stages of life, are one such mechanism.

Ivy gourd, eggs, fish, meat, garlic — the list of forbidden fruits varies by region and household but the principle of suffocating control remains the same. India has undergone much change in recent decades, but these taboos stubbornly persist. Their roots run deep, having everything to do with caste, class, and sex and intertwining with the very structures that uphold the inequalities built into society’s scaffolding. 

Eating aachar

“Eating achaar (pickles) while you’re on your period will make your breasts grow bigger,” a housemate from my student accommodation in university once told me. To me, a late teen acutely aware of her changing body, this was distressing information. At the time, I was strangely ashamed of my body and would wear loose shirts, borrowed from my father, to divert as much attention from it as possible. It was my only defence against the harassment I faced in the streets.

But I still loved to eat pickles. They were my escape from the uninspiring food served at the student hall. After my housemate gave me the news, I again tried avoiding them on the days I was menstruating. It wasn’t the first time I had tried to hold back from pickle-eating; I grew up in an upper caste Hindu household in Gorakhpur, a city in Uttar Pradesh, where some food taboos were adhered to, despite my family not being overtly religious. When I was younger, I tried to copy my mother, who wouldn’t touch jars of pickles when she was menstruating; one popular belief dictates that the impurity of women’s periods can make the pickles go bad. But one day, as a curious teenager, I decided to not only touch the jar of pickles but to scoop a handful out of them. That was the end of my following the taboo. And this time, as a college student, I again quickly fell victim to my palate. I continued to devour pickles, period or no period, hyper-aware of the risk that my body might morph into a more sexualized version of itself. My fear of having to inhabit such a body was acute, because I knew that society would perceive it as a threat.

The perception of women’s sexuality as dangerous has its origin in pagan Indian traditions. In these, the goddess represented a positive force of nature. Femininity was a force to be celebrated, as were women in the material world. All of this changed, however, with the emergence of Hindu traditions between 500-200 BCE, which appropriated the use of the goddess while completely shifting the paradigm. Goddesses became symbols of a dangerous force that could threaten the social order, which was organized in part according to the caste system: societal stratifications of people based on notions of purity and pollution.

The idea of caste emerged in texts written by Brahmin sages in an attempt to present their visions of an ideal society. These texts were written in Sanskrit, a language that in those days, only Brahmin men were allowed to read and write. The ownership of these texts kept Brahmin men, in particular, higher up in the social hierarchy, which relegated women to second-class. The Manusmriti (Laws of Manu), written in the 2nd-3rd century BCE and considered the de facto book for the Hindu code of law, says:

By a girl, by a young woman, or even by an aged one, nothing must be done independently, even in her own house. In childhood, a female must be subject to her father, in youth to her husband, when her lord is dead to her sons, a woman must never be independent.

Goddesses in Brahminical practices became more compliant; they were married off to male divinities and their docility became a symbol of ideal femininity. In the profane world, a women’s duty became to serve her husband and his family, remain chaste, and uphold the moral code defined by men, who remained the purveyors of the religious realm. This tradition has continued: Today, it is considered auspicious for men to enter a Hindu temple and break a coconut. But women are forbidden from doing the same because it’s believed that the death of the coconut can have an adverse effect on a woman’s uterine health. Although couched in unease over reproductive futures, the underlying driver is to keep women away from the Brahmanical practices that allow upper caste men to remain religiously powerful, maintaining what has been termed the “Brahmanical patriarchy”.

The ‘invisibilizing’ of oppression

Brahminical fists maintain a tight grip on womanhood. They know that the caste system, upon which so many binders of Indian society are organized —  including the concentration of wealth and land ownership among upper castes — could crumble if women were to dictate their own romantic lives. It is for this reason that the legendary social reformer Dr. B.R. Ambedkar focused so much of his work on the liberation of India’s women in the second quarter of the 20th century. As Meenakshi Sharma writes in Ambedkar’s Feminism: Debunking the Myths of Manu in a Quest for Gender Equality: 

In a casteist society, the anxieties regarding caste purity are charted out on the body of the woman. The onus of maintaining the caste purity lies with the woman by dint of her reproductive potential and therefore she becomes a threat that needs to be subjugated and controlled for the very existence and proper functioning of the caste system.

The Hindu social order deals with this by charging women with the task of preserving men’s honour and respectability, ensuring that it is their men who suffer if they step outside the bounds of acceptable behaviour. This rhetoric is potent enough to justify absolute control of women’s bodies by the “men that they belong to”, including those in lower castes. In Representing Dalit Bodies in Colonial North India, Charu Gupta writes about how Dalit men in the Moradabad region of Uttar Pradesh announced that they would “allow their women less liberty of movement”, impose a strict dress code including a purdah (veil), in part to “protect” them from sexual exploitation at the hands of upper case landlords or communities. These limitations imposed by Dalit men on Dalit women amount to oppressive legal and social codifications which serve not to liberate them from the stratification of caste, but rather throw them fully under the wheels of the patriarchal Brahmin machine.

This machine snags anyone who stands too close to it, and it is not only men who impose its regressive rules. During my research for this piece, I took to Instagram to learn more about the prevalent food taboos that are still practiced. It was in my DMs that I connected with Bhadani, the food writer from Gaya. In addition to ivy gourd, Bhadani remembers other foods also being off limits in her household.

“When I took a liking to eggs as a kid, my mother was reprimanded by the elder women in the family for encouraging me to eat something that may lead to ‘bigger boobs’ and result in an early interest in sexual activity,” she says. In this instance, it was the elder women who were passing down patriarchal traditions to younger women in the family. No matter that these rules once dictated their diets too. 

In Seeing Like A Feminist Nivedita Menon explains why women uphold the patriarchal traditions that are created by, and benefit only, upper-caste men. “Women in virilocal [patrilocal] households derive power solely from men — their husbands, and then their sons who eventually become some other woman’s husband,” she writes. This structure leads to a power struggle between women and the only way women are able to exercise power is by holding on to patriarchal notions. Women are conditioned to believe that living by a moral code decided by men is the only way to gain respect.

The reverence for certain deities, too, plays a role. The portrayal of the temperate, docile, chaste goddess as the ideal vision of femininity — as the one form of a woman who is revered by men — manipulates women into “imposing fetters on themselves without realizing it”. This, in turn, “invisibilizes” their oppression and naturalizes the dominance of the Brahmanical patriarchy and its tools of subjugation, including restrictions and prescriptions related to food.

Dietary life cycles and the ‘surplus’ women

Food taboos shift over women’s life spans. While doing ethnography in Mangaldihi, a village in West Bengal, anthropologist and writer Sarah Lamb learned that young women and girls were taught by their elders to keep their bodies “closed” when around men, including by consuming a particular “cooling” diet. As per the principles of Ayurveda, this means less fish, meat, and garlic: foods which are believed to increase one’s sexual desire and propensity for aggressive behaviour. A cooling regime was believed to temper their desires during puberty and preserve them for the men they would eventually marry. 

On the other hand, brides-to-be are fed well and given “hot” foods like meat, fish, eggs, spices, and garlic to increase their sexuality and fertility. But once they fall pregnant, restrictions return. In the coastal regions of Andhra Pradesh in South India, lactating women are instructed to avoid eating foods like bananas, watermelons, tomatoes, yogurt, eggs, dal, nuts, peanuts, and chicken because of a pervasive myth that they are dangerous for infants. No matter that these foods are pivotal for female nutrition during and after pregnancy. In villages of Odisha, a state in the eastern coastal region of India, women are not allowed to eat large fish, okra, mushrooms, pumpkin, and even eggs and meat during and after pregnancy due to similar concerns for infants’ health, despite the fact that all these foods are staples in the region. 

The question of what to feed women over the course of their lifetimes becomes thornier if they are unshackled by force from the institution of marriage. Widows become what Ambedkar, the champion of Indian women’s rights, incisively defined as society’s “surplus” women. Given women’s roles as the guardians of caste, purity, and male honour, it is considered essential that widowed women are prevented from realizing their sexual “potential” outside of their original inter-caste union. For women, historically, this has been done one of two ways: through Sati, the practice of self-immolation on a husband’s funeral pyre, or the imposition of an austere, restrictive form of widowhood to ensure that widowed women are no longer a source of enticement.

In the Brahmin communities in West Bengal and other parts of Eastern India, women who have lost their husbands are supposed to live like ascetics. They shave their heads, wear only white, give up all kinds of bodily ornamentation, eat a diet of only cooling foods, and observe mandatory fasts every eleventh day of the lunar cycle, which keeps their bodies thin. Sarah Lamb, the same anthropologist who documented the food restrictions placed on young women in West Bengal, interprets these restrictions as attempts to transform widows into asexual and unattractive women. Lamb writes that in the community she visited, men and women, widows and non-widows, believed the widow’s diet in particular, “to ‘reduce sexual desire (kam)’, to ‘decrease blood (rakta)’, to make the body ‘cool (thanda)’, to make the widow ‘thin and ugly’, to keep her from ‘wanting any man’”. On most days in the community that Lamb visited, widows ate just one meal a day, consisting only of muri (puffed rice). These fleshly and aesthetic restrictions serve to keep the sexual desires of widows, who are not permitted to remarry, in check.

But widows have found ways to navigate the strict rules and regulations imposed on their bodies. Dr. Rituparna Patgiri, an anthropologist and Assistant Professor at the Indraprastha College for Women in Delhi, told me about the widows she met while doing fieldwork in Vrindavan. Vrindavan is a Hindu place of pilgrimage in North India where a large part of the population follows a sattvic diet, bereft of all kinds of meats, onion, garlic, spices and other “hot” foods, and most restaurants serve only vegetarian meals. Many of the widows in this area told her that they would trade chana, or chickpeas, that they received for performing devotional songs to pilgrims, for theoretically-forbidden eggs in the local market and cook them very discreetly at the ashram.

“Many times they also asked us to bring laal maas (mutton) when we visited them for our fieldwork,” Patgiri told me. “The desire for having tabooed food was very much present, and they would negotiate with us [in order to obtain it].” 

In Mangaldihi, too, Lamb writes about an elderly widow who enjoyed eating mangoes and cottage cheese — both forbidden food items — in spite of the villagers who muttered their disapproval in hushed tones. Her resistance was bolstered by the fact she was wealthy and generally well-respected in her community. For a less influential widow, such transgressions might result in being slandered by the community and abandoned by her own family, leaving her financially and socially vulnerable. Many women in this position are forced into sex work.

Break the coconut

The irony of the suffocating restrictions placed by men on women’s sexuality is that often, it is women who do the work of defending themselves from sexual advances. Women in public places — on trains and buses, in parks and the streets — have to be constantly aware of the men around them, always ready to protect their bodies from those who might try to casually brush against them and feel them up. For the longest time, I was haunted by the memory of a close family friend inappropriately touching me as everyone was busy celebrating the festival of Holi, which draws crowds that are often seen to give men a free pass to sexually harass women in the streets. I was a teenager and hadn’t yet made peace with my changing body, let alone someone else feeling entitled to access it. Being a woman in India is a ceaseless and exhausting act of vigilance. 

Yet each of these incidents is met with a prepackaged deflection of blame: “What was she wearing?”, “What was she doing there alone in the night?”, or worse, “Why didn’t she just decide to enjoy it, since she couldn’t stop it?” From meals to marriage, women are expected to show restraint, but men’s desires — to feel powerful, to sow fear — run rampant. Data shows that nearly 30 percent of women in India are subject to physical or sexual violence (and these are just the cases that are reported), and yet it’s the female body that is subjugated, whether through clothing or through food. Little better can be expected when women’s bodies are treated as social currency, when a family’s izzat (respect) is tied to a woman’s vagina. This is the manifestation of the absolute control dictated by the Manusmriti. And it is persistent.

The commonly-held beliefs around impurity that prevented my mom from touching the pickle jar when menstruating are changing, but food taboos and their links to sex are still not a part of everyday conversation in India. Casteism remains prevalent, as does the violent policing of inter-caste marriages and relationships by vigilantes. At their core, restrictions on (or prescriptions of) what women can or cannot eat are just another manifestation of these brutal anxieties. Ambedkar knew it all along: the only way to end the caste system will be to end the subordination of women. As long as women’s sexuality is controlled and suppressed, there will be no caste or gender equality. May we all break the coconut, eat the pickle, and negotiate for the mutton. The annihilation of the caste system depends on it.

Shirin Mehrotra is a food writer currently living in Delhi, India. Her writing intersects between food, culture and anthropology with a special focus on cities and their foodscapes.

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By Megan Jones

Who remembers Mr. Pussy?

Sex and the City, season two, episode three. One of the fleeting allegorical characters of which the writers were so fond, Mr. Pussy is famed across the New York dating scene for his affinity for going down on women. Sitting at the bar in a busy Manhattan restaurant, he conveys his desire to give Charlotte the goods by lapping seductively at an oyster, shucked and glistening. Because apparently, it is less ridiculous for a man to twirl his tongue inside an hors d’oeuvre in front of the city’s elite than it would be for him to say “Look, Charlotte, I really just want to give you head.”

The oyster is doing all the work here, saddled as it is with the responsibility of forever standing in for vulvic glory. Using food as a metaphor for body parts made sense in the past when implying sex rather than showing it kept producers on the sunny side of TV codes of conduct. But for a while now, the real deal has tended to fly, at least for mostly white, cis-gendered, heterosexual males. It might make headlines, but no one blows a gasket watching Harry Goldenblatt’s laughably large prosthetic penis in And Just Like That or Connell’s flaccid member lying slack against his thigh in Normal People. In 2022, shows like Naked Attraction — where contestants pick their prospective mates after their intimate body parts are revealed to them by a slowly-rising screen — are capturing the attention of vast audiences, and series such as Bridgerton are titillating viewers with their steamy sex scenes. Even in the late nineties, the scenes of women clearly and explicitly fellating men in Sex and the City were too numerous to count.

So why do we still see food standing in on-screen for certain body parts or sexual acts in so many mainstream films and TV shows in Western media? And whose sex is being censored? In the present day, this practice seems to persist mainly when the spotlight is turned on the desire of women and queer people, while cis men can have their cake and their uncensored sex on screen too. 

***

At the time of its release, Sex and the City was widely considered to be a revolutionary show for its portrayal of the sex lives of single women in New York. And yet, perhaps a symptom of its famously all-male writer’s room, most of the sex scenes take their cues from male-directed porn — Samantha reaching climax the second a penis is released from its cotton prison, for example — and suffer inexorably from being incapable of taking female sexuality seriously. Even after all those close-ups of the oyster rolling around in Mr. Pussy’s mouth, you would think we might actually get to see Mr. Pussy portrayed in the scandalous act of going down on a real woman. 

Instead, all we get in this regard are several panning camera shots of Charlotte enjoying his efforts while his head remains chastely under a bedsheet. Mr. Pussy and the enjoyment he receives from giving pleasure rather than just receiving it (a trait that should be celebrated, not scorned) is relegated to the realm of the ridiculous. It doesn’t help that the episode with Mr. Pussy is named “The Freak Show”, and that his character appears as a convenient cipher for Carrie’s theory that all men are “freaks”. The overriding message of the episode? Men who prioritize female pleasure should be ostracized from society and should keep their deranged proclivities to themselves. Women’s desire is amusing, a thing of bawdy anecdotes, a thing of winks and nudges, reducing female pleasure to little more than a punchline. And this is part of the problem with using food as a stand-in for accurate, tender portrayals of female desire. 

Food is further utilized in Sex and the City as a means of simplifying the complexities of female desire. “I have a crush,” Carrie says, as she shoves an entire Magnolia Bakery cupcake into her mouth. Miranda, while in a sexual dry spell, becomes addicted to buying and consuming boxed chocolate cake in its entirety. The first Sex and the City movie sees Samantha declare, in amongst shots of her inhaling guacamole: “I eat, so I don’t cheat.” The analogizing of food and sex in the female psyche reduces the intricacies of sexual pleasure to something that can be satisfied by, say, going to the grocery store, buying a box of cake mix, and throwing it in the oven. Betty Crocker’s Devil’s Food Cake mix takes approximately thirty minutes to bake, which, coincidentally, is about three times longer than most men will bother to try and bring a woman to orgasm.

Sex and the City certainly isn’t the only culprit. Other film and TV productions lauded for their open-mindedness toward sex are guilty too. Gossip Girl, so sexually free in its conception that it was dubbed “every parent’s nightmare”, finds itself incapable of expressing desire through a female lens. While an endless parade of Hervé Leger-clad women tiptoes out of Chuck’s apartment in the early hours to little fanfare, Serena is reduced to sucking on a chocolate-covered strawberry on the Hamptons’ Jitney while making eye contact with her ex-boyfriend Dan in order to convey her desire for sex. Even in the Gossip Girl universe, which portrays, in some respects a realistic teenage experience (wealth, and any season beyond the second one being the notable exceptions), won’t allow Serena to just tell Dan that she wants to screw him in the bus toilets. 

And it’s not just cis women whose desire is being censored. Sex Education, a much more recent show that has been widely celebrated for showcasing the gamut of sexual experience and not, for once, limiting itself to expressing solely that of the straight person, also falls victim to the trope of using food as a metaphor. Eric, when teaching Anwar how to give head to his boyfriend, demonstrates on a banana, leading to a scene in which several characters “comically” vomit all over each other. 

In Call Me by Your Name, a movie praised for its centring of a queer relationship, the audience is treated to multiple viewings of the bare ass of 17-year-old Elio thrusting into his lady friend, Marzia. But as soon as Elio’s desire shifts towards Oliver, a 24-year-old American graduate student, the camera pans slyly away. Now, his expressions of desire are made less explicit, culminating in him sloping off to the attic on his own to masturbate into a peach.

***

It's not that these food metaphors serve no purpose at all. In a landscape where female and queer desire has historically been sidelined (so much so that I nearly passed out when I saw the three-second-long cunnilingus scene in The Worst Person in the World), the use of food serves as an entry point for a conservative viewership to get comfortable with the idea that women and queer people experience the same carnal desires as their cis male counterparts. It wouldn’t be so much of a problem if these same filters were applied to the sex lives of straight men, but the gap yawns.

An optimistic reading of these omissions might posit that they’re simply a symptom of Hollywood’s diversity problem. For example, women made up only 5% of directors of the top 1,500 films made between 2017 and 2021, and only 19% of writers of the top 100 grossing films in 2019. Could it be simply that writers write and directors direct what they know? Or is there something more sinister about the censoring of female and queer sex on screen?

Although diversity is no doubt part of the problem, this failure on the part of the film and TV industry speaks to a culture that teaches us that desire and pleasure are things that white cis-men should have, take, and be proud of, but that everyone else should suppress or conceal. It’s the culture of slut shaming and victim-blaming, linked to the same systems of power that seek to control deviant bodies — those that can become pregnant or enjoy clitoral stimulation or touch others in parts that the Bible didn’t tell us to touch — through the repeal of abortion rights and access to contraception or gender-affirming healthcare. Whatever the reason for its absence, failing to show anything other than “mainstream” male-centric sex serves to reinforce mainstream misogyny. Are we not ready to see a different type of sex portrayed?

If media companies dared to thrust female and queer desire out of the darkness and into the limelight in all its serious, explicit glory, it might help to subvert collective norms around whose pleasure matters. Until now, scriptwriters, perhaps too busy patting themselves on the back for having portrayed queer and female sexuality at all, aren’t quite brave enough to show these acts for what they are: tender, meaningful, and explicit. As sex is, and should be. 

Megan Jones is a writer, editor, and translator living in London, United Kingdom. She writes a monthly newsletter at: onegoodonebad.substack.com. 

La food doit se comprendre avec ceux qui la font mais aussi ceux qui la consomment. C’est un passage, un témoin de générosité entre un émetteur et un récepteur.
S’alimenter est un acte oral, à l’instar de la parole ou d’un baiser, il s’agit toujours d’un allant vers l’autre. La bouche est essentielle dans toute communion.
Et pourtant manger ne relève pas uniquement du goût, mais s’arroge tous les sens.
Des orgies romaines au foodporn, la nourriture a toujours marqué son rapprochement à l’hédonisme charnel.
C’est ce prisme de la nourriture qui m’est le plus parlant et que je souligne dans mes photos.

Et malgré la fixation du vivant par l’image, malgré cette mort sur surface sensible, c’est la vie derrière.
Les pulsions ventrales qui nous poussent à lécher, mordre et dévorer les chairs qui nous entourent. S’alimenter et s’aimer, la vie la plus primaire.

Thomas Jaspers fait flamber les pellicules et les tappassiettes dans le restaurant Pantobaguette à Paris. Très présent dans l’univers food, ce photographe insuffle un vent de fraicheur à travers ces photos. Il est actuellement directeur artistique de plusieurs restaurants trendy et organisateur du festival La Douve Blanche, un festival qui rassemble haute gastronomie et musique.