JOE MAYNARD

on “Fleshlight,” originally published in Best American Erotica in 2001:

Funny you should ask about the circumstances in which “Fleshlight” was written.

It begins simply, as these things often do. A Bostonian woman who’d previously published my work moved to New York and was working for an erotica magazine.

We’d gone out to a movie together, and had a couple of those aesthetic discussions over cappuccino that you have with other aesthetes in your field. I was happy this new artistic ally had moved to the city.

One day she called me to say she had a product, the Fleshlight, and she asked me to write a product review. At this point in our relationship, the editrix and I were friends. Sure, she’d published a couple of my stories in Boston. But that was Boston. This New York assignment was closer to home: the assignment that would turn our relationship professional.

The story I wrote was pretty much exactly what happened while testing this product. As you said to me, “You don’t hear a lot about men doing this!” and that jibes with the fact that it wasn’t something I would normally do. I was happy with my girlfriend, “her cute little ass cupped inside a pair of velour bikini panties,” as the story goes.

It’s simple to find sex, but finding someone you love—that’s magic. The point of sex is ecstasy. Being in love is the drug; sex is the needle. So I found the whole situation of fucking a cold piece of plastic absurd—even if it was “space-age” plastic.

My editrix wanted only two paragraphs, but being the conscientious artiste that I was, I wanted them to be the best paragraphs ever written. I was taking a writing class at the time, and James Salter had given us a talk on the idea of getting a notion of some sort, and stringing beads onto that notion—using the notion as a string that holds a pearl necklace together—never articulating everything inside each pearl, yet “being the string,” and penetrating, then absorbing, whatever the interior of each bead had to offer.

You know, suck the pearl dry and move on.

So, geeklike, I struggled with my squeamishness regarding inter-elemental sex, my fears that I’d write a piece of boring crap, and I meditated on the wise words from the great author, stringing my friggin’ beads.

One day it just all came out. Probably not exactly what Mr. Salter had in mind, but potent, pearl-sucking pages.