When the oversized box arrives on my porch, I open it precariously, noting the "fragile" overnight mailing label from Male Boxes Etc. and the many parental-advisory stickers running down the left side. My heart leaps at the thought of what it might be: my fantasy come true.

It’s not like I asked for him as a birthday present, but everyone knows that I’ve lusted after him since 1992. I’ve kept a campaign button with both of their fine faces pinned to my wall for all these years. "He’s not stiff," I’d say," defending him to the death among my friends, all the while wishing he was tucked away under my satin quilt, stiff as a rod. "He’s just …shy."

They’d laugh, but I knew. One look at that smile on Tipper’s face, and I always knew.

I’m sure she won’t mind. I suspect she’s helped pack him herself. -- explicit content, indeed. I pull open the last panel of the box and he steps out and greets me with a kiss that erases all possibility of debate.

We dance. Dirty. To really dirty words. It’s only language, I whisper while I nibble my way up over his shoulder, sure that if I’ll ever have the ear of the leader of the free world, the moment is now, as soon as my lips get up and over his collar. It’s all in the usage, I whisper. There is a world of difference between "fuck you" and "fuck me."

He laughs, and says he will indeed. I know all about vice, he murmurs as he lays me down across my big brass bed.

We lean to the left, and then slide over to the right. We roll across passion and boundaries and light, but when he gets near my bush, the dirty tricks begin. I invented the Internet, he whispers. I know from things that are new. The silver-tongue they claim he doesn’t have runs liberally up and down my thighs, licking, kissing, nipping, biting, unsafe at any speed. He pulls all my levers, polls my ballot, rushes my limbaugh, presses my flesh and whistle-stops straight into my heart.

And then he takes off his tie.

Health care, I whisper passionately into his ear. Gay rights, women’s issues, the children who live in poverty.

"Soon," he promises, campaigning every stitch of our clothing right onto the floor.

I ride him like the national debt, rising and twisting and turning and then rising again – wooden is hardly the word, except for where it matters. Kennedy, Carter, Clinton, I shout out as we rise one last time into that stratospheric place where explicit content is all that ever exists.

*

I try to keep him loose for the ride home, but he just knots his tie and says he has to hurry. The earth is in balance, he explains, and I must go juggle.

I nod democratically. We shake hands, firmly, and I slip a copy of Doing It For Daddy into his left suit pocket. Smut, I whisper, sealing his box, stamping it US-Slut-Approved, shipping him safely off through the hazy environment, returning happily to my reverie of lust ... listen, learn, laugh, love, empower, vote.

###