Monday, April 9, 2007

HOW TO (Jet Sex Edition): Share a Lover


filed under: HOW TO:, Jet Sex by Melissa Gira | 2 Comments

Once you begin to move in the jet sex world with slutty confidence, more fitting partners may cross your path than you have time to take as lovers, or, oh so more realistically, the lovers you have time to enjoy may not be so enjoyable after a time. Needless to say, sexual experience means that you end up with, for lack of kinder words, a reserve.

What better to do with your excess, then, but to redistribute accordingly to friends, to offer up these Ms. and Mr.-Right-(for-Someone Else)’s to one’s former and current lovers, even? No, we’re not talking about wholesale polyamory — more, a system of sexual microcredit. True, it’s unproven in economics, but in love? Usually what fails in finance, actually, fails spectacularly in love. Be that as it may, we present all the same, a guide for modern lovers who wish to share the love, literally.

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Thursday, April 5, 2007

Room Service: The W Dallas - Victory


filed under: Jet Sex, Room Service by Irene Kaoru | Leave a Comment

The other weekend I played jet-setter and hopped a quick flight to Dallas, Texas to attend the opening party for the new video installation at Victory Park. While there, I stayed at the W Dallas Victory, a 33-story hotel and condo that attempts to bring a slice of swank NYC to the cowboy kingdom and mostly succeeds. Sexy!

Atmosphere: The carefully-composed hipness of the W Dallas, like pretty much any W hotel, smacks you in the face from the moment you approach the building, blinding you with the giant gleaming chrome W sign, flattering you with the array of precariously positioned calla lily and tulip bouquets in tall vases, and trying very hard to impress you with low, sleek modern designer furniture and copious glittering chandeliers. The waitresses at the “living room” bar all wear high-heeled boots and short-up-to-there Kors dresses. Color changing LED panels adorn pretty much everything. This is clearly the place to stay and be seen for the twenty- or thirty-something set in the area; bared Texan flesh and the slinky oontz of techno club-music fills the lobby all night long.

Amenities: Free design and style magazines litter the desk (I came away with a new copy of *Surface and City mag to read on the plane) and tucked into the “snack box” was a $10 “intimacy kit”: two Durex condoms, two moist towelettes, and a mini package of lube. Bottles of Voss water were provided with chic glassware on silver trays, and a soft microsuede chaise lounge was positioned by the window for a nice city view while planning tourist activities or making out. Also, the 16th floor Bliss spa is available for manicures, facials or massages if you feel like dropping a couple hundred extra bucks.

Facilities: The well-appointed room (about US$264 per night) featured a queen-sized pillow-topped mattress, smooth white sheets with a satisfyingly high thread count, and five mirrors surrounding the bed. Yes, five. (The only thing to do with that many bed-facing mirrors is just let the inner narcissist loose.) Sadly, there was no bathtub, but the shower was large and featured an oversized shower-head, making it perfect for a couple to use together.

Overall: A-. The W Whatever/Whenever service is a great idea (and the front desk does cheerfully attempt to provide whatever you want) but a bit hit-or-miss (they lost our laundry, gave us free socks to make up for it, then found it again at the last minute). The waveless 16th floor pool was gorgeous–but we were shooed away when we tried to use it due to a private party. On the positive side, the decor was lovely, the staff friendly and helpful, the bed luxurious, and the walls thick. Once you’ve worked up an appetite in front of all those mirrors, be sure to check out Craft downstairs–the food at the Dallas location of Tom Colicchio’s high-end restaurant chain is every bit as tasty as at the 19th Street NYC location (try the melt-in-your-mouth foie gras, tender Canadian wild boar and the rich homemade-daily ice creams and sorbets) and the service is impeccable. Tout ensemble: a great place for a sexy getaway–just don’t stay long enough to get sick of all the hipsters trying to get into the painfully overrated and overpriced Ghostbar.

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Jet Sex: Condoms in Taipei


filed under: Design for Sex, Jet Sex, Smart. Safe. Sex. by Melissa Gira | 2 Comments

Condoms in Taipei

Changing planes in Taipei, I fell in design love with this condom display in the very front entrance of the airport pharmacy. I selected a box (of twelve, thanks for asking) to bring home for field testing.

Condoms in Taipei After a brief moment of consumer panic — that I had unwittingly chosen some lubricated with nonoxynol-9 — I was reassured in reading more closely that:

“FOUR IN ONE Condoms, red & green colours, textured and slip-prevention design, (plain,raised,dotted and ribbbed, and teat-ended) natural latex condoms silicone-oil (non-spermicidal lubricant). Nominal width: 52mm +/- 2mm / Diameter: 33 mm.”

Aside from the fact that ‘oil’ is one of the last words one wants to see on condom packaging, silicone-lubricant is a novel choice that I think I’ve only seen (well) once before. As for the design of the sheath itself, the side-of-the-box illo ought to help bring those descriptions home.

The drawing, or the raised. Or maybe the dotted. Hmm.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

JET SEX (COUNTERPOINT): WHAT KIND OF DISTANCE, REALLY?


filed under: Jet Sex by Melissa Gira | 1 Comment

NYC-based artist and writer Irene Kaoru joined Lux and I over this past weekend in New York, storming fancy hotel suites with her camera and offering wine to lubricate our conversations on awkward sex. She offers this contribution based on our bathtub chats (forthcoming, in video form), as a counterpoint to my ceaseless futurism. Read, weep, and learn:

irene No human beings grow apart with the painful speed and grace of lovers. Of all types of people and relations, lovers grow apart the best. Friendship and family beget their own sorts of slippery channels and idle acquaintance is itself an isolating protective moat, but these are nothing compared to the treacherous trenches dug by lovers for one another. Feeling oneself distant, apart, from a lover is one of the more acutely unpleasant emotional experiences one can know. So what if we strip away the romanticism of painful distance and look at it, in true Sexerati style, as something positive, exciting–not a bug but a feature? This is just what I’ve been pondering after an interesting chat with editrix Melissa about the nature of jet sex and its possibilities.

The ideal of jet sex can in a way be distilled to convenience–the convenience and novelty of building a network of lovers/partners/flings in far-flung locales through the natural course of our (urban elite) globe-trotting lifestyle. Assuming (and it’s a large, hopeful assumption) that all parties involved are forthright and respectful, this Utopian community idea could potentially make of this world a garden of destigmatized business-trip/pleasure-trip sex, further blurring the already-dissolving lines between work and play. If as Melissa declared recently, jet sex is “[l]oosed from marriage, loosed from relationships” then does jet sex actually diminish the painful feelings of distance and loss inherent in many sexual encounters, even while it encourages physical distance between partners–and partners-for-one-night-only? Perhaps, the jet sex ethos seems to imply, we should simply accept that lovers grow apart, whether or not they want to, whether or not there is physical distance involved, and we should just embrace this fact and use technology to make optimal use of the time we have together to have all the sex we went–miles apart be damned.

All of this sounds ideal until we add the sticky complication of love. Is there room for love in the jet sex playground? Or is jetting from one city, one lover, to the next simply a way to stave off the (perhaps inevitable) feelings of attachment and vulnerability that come whether we like it or not when we share our bodies with others? The sweet and debilitating pain of emotional distance from a fading long-term love is something that requires that old paradigm of two-by-two, of commitment and often of self-denial in the form of monogamy. While I believe love may only possible in the absence of the self-centered pure-pleasure-seeking that jet sex entails, that love is something which requires the wait and build-up of occasional self-denial in order to keep its spark, my jury’s still out on whether love and marriage can keep up with the competing, tantalizingly schedulable nature of jet sex or whether jet sex will simply be another blind alley on the road to sensual and emotional fulfillment.

If we simply don’t have time, or won’t make the time, to build a relationship with only one person, is jet sex a “next best”? I’d give that one an emphatic “no”–it’s a different beast entirely. Jet sex is–must be, in order to be successful and fulfilling–an expression of a radical reordering of priorities…and the first thing you can guess about a jet sex-er is that she (or he) puts their pleasure and their work first.

Monday, March 19, 2007

Sex Across the Pond


filed under: Jet Sex by Lux Nightmare | 2 Comments

This week’s issue of New York Magazine takes on one of the great debates of modern times: which city is superior, London or New York? In an attempt to decide the matter, once and for all, the magazine compares various aspects of British and American (well, London and New York) culture, from food to nightlife to the literary scene to, yes, sex.

Penned by Em and Lo, the piece mostly rehashes the same old stereotypes about Brits and sex (i.e. they’re bad at it, it freaks them out, and New Yorkers are way ahead of the curve on Brazilians, sex blogs, and speed dating). Nerve.com (and UK) expat Grant Stoddard offers up the following gem: “Being sexually inadequate is as British as tea and crumpets.”

Can it really be true? Is that hot, sexy British accent just a tease? My sole experience with British flirtation was with Mr. Stoddard himself, who, yes, does fit the bumbling Hugh Grant stereotype: but are all Brits really that bad?

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