Intimacy at Scale
I knew I was horny on main the moment I bit into a fig. Its moist red flesh, nectar dripping, flavor exploding in my mouth—was I cumming, or was the fig? It was simply divine.
While it’s always been de rigueur for precocious, curly-haired Italian teens to be transfixed by forbidden fruit, I find it utterly demoralizing that the art of sensual produce is still lost on les Américains.
James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time, “To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become.”
And there it is. The indictment. As Americans, we have a deeply corrosive, detached relationship with pleasure and desire. We’ve not been taught to sensualize the minutiae of everyday life, to find romance in the leaves of a satsuma, the syrupy sweetness of a fig, or the juice of a gently caressed... persimmon. How do we change? How do we embrace the liberating nature of being horny on main?
It will take time, as all good things do. There will be awkward trials and tribulations—Oscar Wilde can attest. A man who wrote with the elegance of a glass of absinthe, intoxicated by beauty, punished for loving too extravagantly, too publicly.
But I do believe—no, I know—that with just a taste of a perfectly ripened fig, we can inch closer to a world where lovers share vulnerability in the kitchen, where shirts are left unbuttoned, cuffs rolled, tomatoes roasted slowly, and desire is allowed to marinate.
A world where quality isn’t just a word slapped on packaging, but something believed because it has been tasted.
