On an October evening, in the lobby of an old building just off Park Avenue in Manhattan, a uniformed doorman led a few writers and editors into a hand-crank elevator. They had come for a party that would bring together the literary establishment and people involved in Feeld, a kink-friendly dating app. When the doorman brought the elevator to a stop on the ninth floor, the guests could hear the din of boisterous conversation emerging from an apartment in the hall.
The party was hosted by Daphne Merkin, a critic, novelist and journalist who has distinguished herself over a 50-year career as a frank chronicler of the cultured class. Somewhat to her annoyance, her best-known piece might be something she wrote nearly 30 years ago — “Unlikely Obsession,” an essay for The New Yorker in which she wrestled with her desire to be spanked.
“I still get fatigued when people bring up the spanking essay,” Ms. Merkin said as the guests arrived. “I’ve written so many other pieces on sex, and I’ve written so much else. But still I believe sex is not written about well enough — this basic human experience — so I was glad to be asked to host this party for a new erotica magazine published by a dating app called Feeld.”
In its original incarnation, under the name 3nder, Feeld matched singles and couples with those looking for threesomes. These days it bills itself as the “dating app for the curious” and sets itself apart from its many competitors by providing users with options for polyamory, bondage and even celibacy. Those who sign up can also select from a wide range of gender and identity preferences, from gender fluid to two-spirit.
Now Feeld has started a handsome biannual print magazine, AFM, which is where Ms. Merkin, 70, comes in. Her reputation as someone who has written intelligently about sex, along with her roomy book-lined Upper East Side apartment, made her the perfect host for an intimate launch party.
“I don’t know much about Feeld,” Ms. Merkin said, “but in a world of fading venues for personal writing, I think it’s marvelous someone is putting out a magazine like this. And I care about young writers, so I agreed to throw this party as a mitzvah.”
Copies of the magazine, with the artist and D.J. Juliana Huxtable on the cover, were laid out on tables. The issue includes contributions from writers including Tony Tulathimutte, Allison P. Davis, Susanna Moore and Jazmine Hughes. There’s also an interview with the filmmaker and photographer Bruce LaBruce and a guide to making your own latex. The director James Ivory contributed an essay about his sensual coming of age in the 1940s.
Ms. Merkin flipped through its pages, pausing at headlines like “Ten Thousand Ways of Going Both Ways.”
“This magazine is a little more alternative than I expected,” she said. “But I haven’t thrown a party like this in a zillion years. I’m doing this with the hope these young writers might get to enjoy some of the old-time New York literary party vigor.”
Her apartment filled with young stars of the city’s literary scene, among them the novelist Emma Cline and the co-founders of The Drift, Kiara Barrow and Rebecca Panovka. Ms. Merkin’s own guests also started to stream in — the “Sex and the City” author Candace Bushnell, the political writer and commentator Molly Jong-Fast and the artist David Salle.
As servers offered trays of deviled eggs and smoked-salmon tea sandwiches, Ms. Jong-Fast recalled the splash Ms. Merkin had made with her spanking essay all those years ago.
“I was in high school, I think, when it came out in The New Yorker, but I remember it being a huge deal,” Ms. Jong-Fast said. “After that, Daphne was always held up as what a certain kind of deeply intellectual essayist looks like, and as someone who could write about sex without seeming degraded by the subject.”
The author Sloane Crosley mused that an app like Feeld might have helped Ms. Merkin back in the 1990s. “I think Daphne would have gotten a murder of responses for her desires, if something like Feeld had existed then,” Ms. Crosley said.
The co-editors of AFM, Haley Mlotek and Maria Dimitrova, both in their 30s, said they were honored to have an essay by Ms. Merkin in the first issue.
“The spanking essay is still so incredible, and the whole lore of it being so scandalous to publish back then in The New Yorker,” Ms. Mlotek said. “Daphne was writing about sex then in the highbrow and lowbrow way. For us, it’s a statement to be here in her home tonight.”
Heads turned when two people invited by Ms. Merkin — Woody Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn — dropped in. Feeld team members looked on a bit anxiously as the host chatted with them in a corner.
In 2018, amid the #MeToo movement, there was a renewed focus on allegations of sexual abuse made against Mr. Allen in 1992 by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow. Mr. Allen has denied the allegations and was never prosecuted, but he lost his deal to make films with Amazon, the last American entertainment company to have worked with him.
Ms. Merkin has been a friend of Mr. Allen’s for years. In 2018, she wrote a profile of Ms. Previn for New York magazine. The article’s critics said it was tainted by her bias in Mr. Allen’s favor; Ms. Merkin said at the time that her “intention was to let a silenced woman’s voice be heard.”
As Mr. Allen looked around the room, he reflected on the city’s literary life.
“I’d go to those parties, always held by writers like Norman Mailer or George Plimpton,” he said. “You’d stand around talking with Susan Sontag or Dwight Macdonald. It was like how this is tonight.”
‘Dreading This’
Earlier that day, as a team was setting up for the party, Ms. Merkin was in her study, sipping tea from a cup marked with a “D” as she reflected on the lost world that had once thrived at Elaine’s, her plans to write about the Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade for The New York Review of Books and, yes, that essay.
In 1996, she was a 42-year-old writer for The New Yorker, which the editor Tina Brown had given new life since having taken it over four years earlier. When Ms. Merkin pitched the spanking idea, she said, an editor suggested she write it anonymously, but she declined.
“Before there was a word for going viral, going viral is what happened to me with that essay,” Ms. Merkin said. “Everyone was talking about it. I had to flee the country to Israel for a while. Someone even posted a newspaper classified ad saying they were seeking a ‘Daphne Merkin type.’ It was all too much.”
“I didn’t want that piece to be talked about only as a form of titillation,” she continued. “I was trying to write about the topic in a way that made it Talmudic and experiential. Instead, people just wanted to reduce it to that I longed to be spanked. They said: ‘How could I write this as a mother? How could a woman write this?’ I said, ‘Well, how come John Updike can write about pink vulvas?’
“The sensational reaction to the piece was such that I felt besieged. I’ve only read it once or twice again ever since.”
What did Ms. Merkin make of New York’s current literary scene?
“I’ve heard of Dimes Square and of the downtown bar Clandestino, but my knowledge of the scene goes no further than that, and I don’t have any great wish for it to.”
“Back in my day, it was a time of smoke-filled rooms where people threw grenades of opinion at each other,” she said. “Diana Trilling once called it the ‘life of significant contention.’ It was a glamorous intellectual era, and I think we all felt like it mattered.”
Ms. Merkin could hear the early guests arriving in her living room. She slipped into a caftan and magenta Manolo Blahnik flats.
“I’m dreading this, but I hope they’ll enjoy it,” she said. “I know the city’s literary scene has changed, but writing is still lonely work, so writers should still get to have parties. I’m sure it’s still a world overshadowed by envy, competitiveness and not the milk of human kindness. That much still can’t have changed.”
Hours later, in the crowded living room, Ms. Merkin read from her essay for AFM, “The Erotics of Unhappiness,” to applause.
Mr. Tulathimutte, whose recent fiction collection, “Rejection,” has been longlisted for a National Book Award, read from a piece titled “Creeps.” Madeleine Dunnigan read a story, “Celia, Celia,” which she described as being about “two women, both called Celia, one of whom has lost her sense of taste, and the other is a chef.” Mr. Ivory read from “Back to Palm Springs,” in which he describes his boyhood attraction to the boy next door: “Whenever I saw him moving about through a window, I stopped to watch him, and felt desire for the first time in my life.”
Near midnight, as the last guests hung around nursing drinks, Ms. Merkin repaired to her study.
In the room’s stillness and quiet, I asked if she still had a copy of that 1996 New Yorker issue. She searched through a closet cluttered with old magazines. There it was, at the bottom of a heap. She placed it on her desk and flipped to the article.
“I haven’t looked at this in a long time,” she said. “There’s a side of me that still doesn’t love it. But over the years there are women who’ve told me they think it’s the bravest thing they’ve ever read.”
“So I don’t know how I feel,” Ms. Merkin continued. “But I guess part of me looks at it now and thinks, ‘Way to go, girl.’”
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