Anthropology Auto-Erotic Radicalism Food and Drink

Tongue Action

January 3, 2023 by David 52 Comments

From the pages of Bon Appétit, where Brooklynite pronoun-stipulator Isha Maratha is determined to overshare:

My First Time Eating an Oyster Was an Act of Queer Intimacy.

Ms Maratha’s first time, in Boston, during college orientation, is recounted in some detail:

My own acquaintance with the oyster started off memorable — hot and vulnerable, in public, and somehow profoundly intimate. The oyster covers most of your face when you eat it, and it’s usually alive when you do. It can keep a secret. In it, there is something uniquely unspoken between the eater and the eaten. 

If anyone’s getting aroused by this, I’m fetching the hose.

When the server brought out a tray of shaved ice, my peers looked on, nonchalant and delighted. I slipped on a facade that I too, was well-acquainted with the mollusc. I wasn’t about to give an arbitrary group of strangers at my liberal arts college the benefit of knowing that I — the only Indian girl I had seen on campus thus far — would be performing the act for the first time. 

If madam’s outpourings seem a bit much, be assured things do not get better on that front.

I snuck peeks at the nice girl with a Chanel handbag and a minimalist balayage. Her name was Lily. When she introduced herself — a screenwriter’s daughter from Los Angeles, studying marketing — in a drawl, leisurely and low, during one of our earlier icebreakers, I wanted to hear more of her talk; I wanted her to hear mine.

Hot stuff. And hence the, er, significance of the mollusc-gobbling.

I tossed my neck back to let the crustacean slide into my mouth, a brief, brisk flash of vulnerability washing over me. I returned eye-level to our table — an Olympic swimmer finishing the race, coming up for air. Despite the oyster’s cool taste, I felt warm, and then feverish because Lily was looking at me. Her symmetrical eyebrows were raised ever-so-slightly. And just like that, I knew she knew — it was my first time.

This goes on for quite a while, longer than seems strictly necessary. Droplets on chins, alluring eyebrows, lemon wedges being squeezed. Yes, the situation was “hot and vulnerable,” and “profoundly intimate,” with the object of intrigue covering her face, leaving her breathless and gasping. She was “performing the act for the first time” – and in public, no less. 

Should readers need a moment to steady themselves, I quite understand.

“My memory of that first time,” writes Ms Maratha, “echoes that special frisson of noticing your femininity.” You see, “Something about the discovery of the oyster’s flesh, the patience needed to harvest it from its shell, and the fortitude required to enjoy it, feels intrinsically feminine.” We’re told, by an obliging editor, that Ms Maratha’s “love of oysters grew alongside her queer identity.” And that, “For her, the act of eating an oyster uniquely and intimately expresses her queerness.”

Next month, one assumes, the erotic thrill of sausages.

Via Jonathan Kay.




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