fucking al fresco: or, the prelapsarian idyll

The last time I had sex outdoors was late winter of ’05, and it wasn’t even outdoors. It was in the front seat of an 80’s era burnt orange Cutlass, the car of Tyler, my boyfriend at the time. To make the whole episode yet lamer, it wasn’t even really sex. It was a blowjob.

However, to turn up the hottmeter, or thermometer to those of you who enjoy exactitude more than license in your lexicon, I can confess that it was while parked on a crowded corner, adjacent to a busy velvet-roped, b-list celebrity-laden disco, and undoubtedly many people saw into the window of the car to discover that this owner of an 80’s relic was getting more action than they, if only at that moment. It would not have been hard to see my blonde head bobbing in that unmistakable full-on fellating bop on the furry brown lap of my squat then-boyfriend.

But if I scrutinize that moment in the light of a cold, hard taxonomy, even I must admit that it doesn’t count as al fresco sex. For sex to be truly al fresco, it must take place in the unobstructed great outdoors. Doing it inside a structure, however penetrable to the peering eyes of willing, or hapless, voyeurs, doesn’t really count. This criterion of the al fresco sex having to be unencumbered by human structure precludes allowing sex in a tent, or in a shed with an open door, or half in and half out of a car to count as “al fresco.” I suppose one could make a case for lean-tos. But if one were a purist—and who is these days?—one would absolutely say no to lean-tos.

I have definitely fucked the alfresco fuck, even if austerely defined. I have been bent over roof-top carapaces and fucked from behind, the yellow glow of the undulating city rolling out beneath my gaze and my staccato popping hips. I have lain naked on the dark-warm tarmac of the top of a parking garage and had asphalt burns rubbed into the knobs of my shoulder blades and the knuckles of my spine while enduring my long-ago boyfriend’s unwilling and furtive fucking. I had to whisper in his ear to urge him on. It was not his idea.

I have lain in flowering fields, drowsy bees clumsily bumbling by my ankles that were raised into the blue summer air, my first longtime boyfriend fucking me from above. I have rolled in sand and felt it grate in my tender nethers on beaches in Cayman, Puerto Rico, Mexico and Cape Cod. I don’t know why it took me so long to learn the gritty lesson that while fucking on beaches may seem like a really good idea, it’s one best left to the movies. I have picked sand out of my pink mucous membranes too many times.

I have tried to fuck in swimming pool shallows, the chlorine a strange companion to the other sex smells. It is another more thing that works better in the movies (though nothing—nothing—is like the improbable Elizabeth Berkley/Kyle MacLachlan coupling in the best worst movie ever, Showgirls. Elizabeth Berkley looks like the girl in the opening scene of Jaws as she acts out riding Kyle MacLachlan’s submerged Jacques Cousteau cock).

One night when I was in my early twenties, I convinced some lover to go with me to a playground go next door to my student-grade apartment. We fucked on the swing set, my body precariously perched on his lap, the rubber swing desultorily moving back and forth. I hung from monkey bars as he swung my body up and down his cock. It was silly and fun and the next day I was sore in muscles I didn’t really realize I’d had, but it wasn’t particularly sexy.

And I’ve experienced many long, swan-song make out sessions that lasted for infinite hours in too many fields to count. I have kissed and petted and touched and blown and sucked under night skies, the grass and the leaves sibilant around me, perhaps the drifting strains of “Don’t Fear the Reaper” eddying and swirling and wrapping me and the boy in question closer together in our clammy embrace. Growing up as a slutty Vermont teen, I laid in many fields with some guy, the taste of Pabst Blue Ribbon and spit and semen swirling on my tongue.

The alfresco fuck is something we do because we don’t have to—or it’s something we do because we want to (or we do it because we have to, but that having to only increases the pleasure of it, like if we’re sneaking around our parents or our partners). Mostly, we want to fuck outside because it represents something we don’t feel like we have on a regular basis: nature.

In fucking out-of-doors is embedded the prelapsarian idyll. “Prelapsarian” means “before the fall”—a fictive time previous to Adam and Eve’s forcible ejection from Eden. When we fuck outdoors, we recollect in a primal unconscious the impossible notion of sex outside of cultural forces. And you’d think that this ideal of erotic pleasure unchained from lodging and other human contrivances, this sexual congress outside of the indoors, this fucking free of boundaries and therefore representative of nature and all things good, would be a relatively recent phenomenon.

It’s not. I’m not a student of medieval literature. I can, however, point to any number of renaissance texts that suggest the erotic ideal of the natural idyll. Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, with its glens and glans  and romping of donkey-eared semi-humans, suggests that erotic license is best discovered when freed, however magically, from civilized bonds. “Come live with me and be my love,” begins Christopher Marlowe’s “A Passionate Shepherd to His Love.” In the poem, the shepherd promises “we will all the pleasures prove/That hills and valleys, dales and fields,/Or woods or steepy mountain yields.” Note that Marlowe’s speaker is not a haberdasher, nor does he promise the smut besmirched plums of urban life.

And I could go on. I could mention the plethora of seductions and near-rapes that stud Aphra Behn’s restoration comedies. I could discuss William Wordsworth’s nutting about with his sister in the woods, and I could talk about Robert Browning’s rueful love among the ruins. I could make a solid case for about six hundred years of literature touting the supremacy of al fresco fucking. I shall, however, forbear and stop myself.

Of course some of the pleasure of the outdoor fuck is like the pleasure of the outdoor shower: it’s nice to be naked in the breeze. Like the nude swim, it feels good. More glidey, somehow. More authentic. And like the skinny-dip, the outdoor sex has secret pleasure served with a side helping of potential discovery. This thrill of possibly being seen in the altogether is inseparable from any other pleasure of copulating.

But most of it, I think, is that sex outdoors makes it not just more nice, or more authentic, or more thrilling, but more natural. Sex al fresco recaptures the bees-do-it/ the-birds-do-it/ why-don’t-we-do-it animalism that fucking, dressed as it usually is in the pomp and circumstance of seduction and/or relationships, cosseted as it is in hearts-and-flowers romance, and draped as it is in the unconscious shrouds of shame and whatever other, sometimes pleasurable, psychic baggage we humans have. Sex outdoors reclaims fucking from all of that, renaturalizes it. Good, bad, or gritty, fucking al fresco causes sex to shine by the warm light of day or the cool light of the moon.

So much so that despite the pointing twigs, the nipping bugs, the grating sand, I’d do it again. As soon as it gets warm. Perhaps this time I'll be tied to a tree and switched by lithe green branches....

Comments

[hweight]

Just because I was enjoying the list: you can add John Milton's "Lycidas" and Paradise Lost (need to italicize. . .can't!) to your catalogue. I mention these also because he has such a reputation as a stodgy bastard, yet his Adam and Eve have sex almost constantly. . .

Please, no more forbearances. .

[nymphobrainiac]

Yes! Yay for AlFresco Sex!!! (and yes, I think it's so good it needs capitals) I've never heard it spoken of so lovingly, hooray for you!
~nym

[Gadfly]

Ok ... you are like scary smart

That's a definite turn on. And you are enormously sexual -- that's righteous. You're one of us.

But "long-ago boyfriend ... unwilling ... furtive"

He was gay, no?

[badinfluencegirl]

geeze lady

there i was reading a nice blog and thinking in the back of my head about maybe trying out that toy i just got and what else i was going to read and you end your post like that!

great post, i have to go to bed now.

[efg]

A harbinger of spring and the pleasures of the out-of-doors, on a cold winter day... thank you.

[LoneRhino]

I checked out your competion in that 'Eros Blog" thing. Sorry I do condescend a bit. You are without a doubt not even in the same Genus as those jamokes.

Please keep your planet revolving. Its gravity is tilting my sun. And my wife is shining a little brighter for it. Smiles.

Yrs-
LR

[Dave]

CG,

What a great tribute to one of the greatest pleasures of all! You celebrate with words so well, I can only say Yes! Here's to al fresco fucking!

[Al Sensu]

I'm so self-centered, I thought it said "fucking al sensu"

[Raschied Britannica]

I felt it appropriate to post this link to a song by Jonathan Coulton. Read the lyrics, but listen to the song at your own risk - it'll stick in your head forever...

http://www.jonathancoulton.com/lyrics/first-of-may

"First of May, First of May, outdoor fucking begins today...."

[Angel]

Delightful!
And January cold ... I love it too!! Amusing blog Chelsea Girl.

Kisses,
~Angel~

[VJ]

Excellent. I was right there with you too riding along the crest until I heard 'Don't fear the Reaper...'. Damn. Just too close. Too specific. I remember, but it was working out less well for me the last time I was there. Yep, literary references. Work it CG! Just love it. But this is where it begins. Houses were far too crowded, small peckish places. The beasts & the children, the dead & the dying. Outdoors meant release in more ways than one. For 100's of years. Cheers & Good Luck, 'VJ'

[damn]

You need to write a book, my friend. I'd pay some good money for that shit