Sex on Craigslist: The Jewish Gangbang Squad Needs You

I don’t know where my erections come from anymore. When I was younger I didn’t often have time to think about that question. They came from me, and that was enough. They would come, bidden or not. I remember a practice I’d use to try and get rid of them when they’d arrive on a bus ride or in class. I’d try and imagine my blood vessels opening slowly to release the constricted blood while staring out into space. I’m not sure if it really worked, but it was a good distraction from the thought of having to walk down a narrow bus aisle with a sundial formed in the crotch of my pants. When there wasn’t enough time for my enlarged appendage to reduce itself, I’d walk in an awkward hunch, my torso angling forward like an old man about to tumble over, hoping to bunch my pants up in a way that made the pointer contained inside seem like an incidental billow between zipper and pocket.

Now that the volume of my erections has subsided—still unpredictable but no longer inducing the nervous vigilance of my late pubescent days—I find it more difficult to know what really starts them in the first place. In junior high a shampoo commercial or the sight of a girl’s absently revealed bra strap was enough to overwhelm me. Now nudity and the promising touch of another person can sometimes be met with indifference by my lower brain—like a cranky child who not only wants his meal cooked, but demands it also be cut into bit size pieces. The once frantic hunter has become a capricious critic with tastes that sometimes mystify me.

I’d often thought of sexuality as something I owned, because of that, any changes feel like a loss. It’s hard to say what exactly is lost in the less frequent appearance of boners on public transportation. Over the past couple of years I’ve taken pleasure in replying to a question of where I met a certain friend or mutual acquaintance by saying we’d met on Craigslist. The only people I’ve met on Craigslist are a man who bought my dresser for $50 when I left San Francisco and an MBA student who sublet my apartment recently while I was traveling. Yet I don’t ever have to explain the purpose of the joke. There is something about an anonymous marketplace that immediately points towards prurience. There are few things people seem to want more than sex when allowed the cover of randomly generated numbers, and couched in an open social setting. Since I’ve been in the habit of making my little introductory joke, I’ve discovered several friends, men and women, straight and gay, have subsequently admitted using the fabular Casual Encounters portal.

I sometimes look at the Casual Encounters section for entertainment. Even navigating to the right page is an act of initiation into coded language, hung with the careful discretion of illicit behavior. M4M, W4M, W4W, T4M, and so on. On first approach it feels like a forgotten corner of the IRS database. You have to categorize yourself instantly and in the most impersonal way, based on the parts of yourself that you’ve had no hand in shaping (me culpa to the T’s). These distinctions normally pass unseen in my daily life, rarely am I asked which physiological category my nerve endings prefer to receive their stimulation from. It’s more flattering to imagine types, personality traits, or mysterious ideals emerging from the glinting shadows of a bar half an hour before last call.

Casual Encounters makes it possible to think about piping and taxonomy first. I recently read a listing that described a woman looking to meet a young black hipster, “the kind that wears skinny jeans, and maybe even has a skateboard.” She’d seen these types of men around her neighborhood and found them increasingly attractive until she finally couldn’t restrain herself. “I want to find out what that’s about,” she’d written.

In another post a “Jewish Gangbang Squad” was seeking new women for group sex. They guaranteed satisfaction and to prove it mentioned the last woman they’d taken turns entering and anointing had called them a week later for a command performance. They were also looking for a new member of the team. Applicants would be required to meet with the team in person, “no exceptions. Must be circumcised and in great shape.” The picture accompanying this listing miraculously avoided nudity while still showing a young man in black ankle socks squatting downward into a woman whose legs pointed skyward like mock-antlers. In the background were the slightly flabby torsos of two pale, hairy men who, I assumed, were masturbating in the vicinity of the woman’s face.

It’s impossible to know if any of this is real. Indeed, the lists are filled with an anarchic clatter of posts, some obvious fakes, some connected to prostitution services, others that seem like giant mousetraps of deception, and quite a lot that seem bluntly honest. A 45 year-old woman from Queens described having an afternoon off and needing some satisfaction from a “well-hung” man who liked butts. She included 2 pictures of herself in a thong and translucent nightie, crouching on the bed like a wrestler waiting for a match to start. She looked large, maybe 200 pounds or more. The photos captured the depressing contrast between the yellowing walls and dimly brown carpet of her apartment with the sharp white flash of the camera. I may be wrong, but I believe someone from the internet sent her a picture of his penis, made the trip to her apartment building, walked up the winding stairs to her shuttered one bedroom, and had sex with her.

Sex is everything. It can accommodate the most transcendent closeness between two people, or be used as the most basic transaction of bodily maintenance. It can be an assault or a gift of empathy. It can be a joke or something that reverberates in the parts of our brains most conditioned to experiencing divinity. It can take the same housings of piss and shit and turn them into conduits to the universal. It can be something owned and something sold. And it’s something that seems to best be understood after it’s done—and even then it can be made to mean anything.

Which is why there’s something ghastly about sex on Craigslist. The format is just an empty channel, almost entirely defined by the people who use it. And in that way it’s a challenge to every sexual presupposition that I have. If sex is something that can be swapped anonymously, what exactly is it I’m doing when I imagine some intimate exchange in the dark? Reading through Casual Encounters I feel like I’m looking at testimony against my own sense of sex as some immutable part of myself.

I have, in the last year, made a small art of declining sex, maybe to the point of offense to the women who I’ve tumbled into bed with. Just when it’s time to reach for a condom I’ve decided I don’t want to go through that gate with that person. I hadn’t thought about it much at the time, but I’ve been told this can actually be an offensive thing. I guess it is. Getting naked with someone in bed does send a certain signal, the switching off of which can reasonably be construed as some kind of social fraud.

I am afraid of the kind of sex that’s advertised on places like Casual Encounters. I’m afraid of the idea that it doesn’t actually matter as much as I’d like to think who I have those experiences of ecstatic release with. It’s scary to imagine that sex with the exact opposite of my physical and social ideal wouldn’t ultimately be that different from the most intimate and connected version I like to flatter myself with, spinning around in the woozy curtains of love. If sex can be owned, then my instinct is to claim the most dreamlike version of it. I imagine that makes me either an emotional adolescent, an adolescent idealist, or someone in the foundling states of creating a new religion.

And still, half of me is curious about that Jewish Gangbang Squad. I wonder if it would be worth the price of the circumcision to join? Could they make an exception for me? Everyone’s circumcised when they have an erection, after all. I don’t know where mine come from, but they still come, blindly knocking against my fly as if it were a door. They’d open that door to everyone if they could.

Photo by Katie Tegtmeyer