Am I Allowed To Use The "F" Word?

Loud people fucking

BY Kate Carraway June 03, 2009 21:06

Comment (As a descriptive for a sexual act....not as a substitute for a limited vocabulary and an infantile intellect.)

The sound of sex comes in three parts. One is the externalized noise of fucking: the cheap headboard squeaking; the bathwater slapping tile; the reading lamp shattering when it’s punted mid-orgasm. Another is the sound that bodies having sex make, the skin-on-spit-on-skin-on-sweat sound. The third kind of sex noise is the stuff that’s vocalized during genuine mind-and-body sex possession, after a sudden shot of pleasure of pain, or to encourage, turn on, placate or impress partners and their egos.

Except for really accomplished voyeurs, we’re not often exposed to the real-time sex of other people; hearing it happen is the closest we usually come to actual, non-porn sex that isn't our own. A couple of weeks ago, I stayed in a hotel downtown, rolling into the art-deco lobby in a trench coat and my biggest, blackest sunglasses to play “Affair” (and, obviously, to do it in a king-sized bed). I thought nothing of any noise that was made, in the anonymous void of a 10th-floor hotel room, until early-morning moaning next door woke up me and my co-conspirator. We were treated to a lengthy sexual soundscape, featuring an unusual amount of man-noise (it seems to me that lady-squeals make up the bulk of straight-sex vocals, while men provide more of the effort-related grunting; dirty talk seems to be an equal split).

Without the totality of sex, hearing just the soundtrack is disconcerting. When it’s coming from the other side of the wall, it’s most often going to be annoying or hilarious. It’s always educational. I’ve never hired a hooker, but my ex-boyfriend’s next door neighbour sure liked them, and we got to hear not only their mostly apathetic sexing but also the girls’ pimp appraising them with the john the morning after, outside the apartment door. It can also be endearing. Living with a couple that I loved and respected, I found their sex noise to be a neutral, common sound effect, one that usually meant they’d be in good moods and wanting to go get dinner soon.

Even though generating some kind of noise is crucial to what we commonly understand to be good sex, letting loose with it is controversial. In mid-May, the Toronto Star’s Rosie DiManno slagged her neighbour for late-night loudness, revealing herself to be a sexual have-not, anxious to shame other people for their sex-having. Other neighbours seeking questionable retribution upload clips of sex sounds to YouTube, which is definitively creepy but also useful to watch a few of them in a row. Turns out, most people sound basically the same.



Still, so much about this sort of noise is wrapped up in our general anxiety about having sex. Girls, especially, wonder and worry if the sounds they’re making are normal and attractive. In a New York Times article on text-messaged sex education, a teenage girl wrote in that her boyfriend thought she was too loud, and should she keep it down (to quote all of my dude friends: “What? No.”). Internet message board queries about “What should I sound like?” rival “Am I pregnant?” for space and attention.

Sex noise is always performative, even if the panting or frantic begging or strangled name-calling is a simple response to what’s happening in bed between you and your sweetie-muffin. Making noise, especially the kind that requires accessing another, subliminal level of your personhood than you usually get to, is debasing and satisfying in a profound way and maybe the only time to feel really uncaged. More than kissing, more than getting naked and slippery, more than how exactly you like to fuck, even, the noise you make and hear is probably the most revealing and intimate and terrifying thing about sex, especially when you’re saying out loud what it is you’re going to do to someone, and what you want them to do to you.

All of that is what makes hearing your partners’ sex noise so rad. Even trying to keep the noise down for reasons of sanity and etiquette in your parents’ basement or when your roommates are at home is hotly sexual: the restraint involved opposes and suppresses what your mind and body and voice want to do, redirecting that voltage elsewhere. And the humiliation of being found out works a kind of magic on some. While I was first inadvertently, then intently, listening to my hotel-neighbours fuck each other, I was weirdly OK with it. Not grossed out, not particularly turned-off. Listening to other people’s sex can, for sure, provide a perverse kind of pleasure, but also just the thumbs-up kind.

Email kcarraway@eyeweekly.com or tweet @katecarraway.