Love bites

The strange, scandalous power of the hickey.

By Michelle Tea

I GOT MY first hickey off a longhaired rocker named Ritchie. An adolescent playa, I got only one night with him, and we spent it making out on a set of risers inside a teen disco. Couples slow-danced to "Careless Whisper" on the light-up dance floor below; black lights on the ceiling gave teeth and lint a greenish illumination. When the music ended and the overhead fluorescents flashed on, Ritchie was gone, and all I had left to remember him by was the glowing red hickey on my throat.

Hickeys are the physical proof of passion's violent nature – that strawberry-stippled blemish was caused by internal bleeding, an alarming phrase that conjures images of car crashes, not liquid hours of heavy petting, a persistent suck at your throat giving you a shivery thrill. It's a hard sensation to pull away from, even when you know that for the next week you'll be rocking turtlenecks, inventing odd new neckerchief fashions, and telling '80s-era lies involving curling irons.

Hickeys are scandalous. They make you look like you've recently been fucked animal-style by someone so consumed with desire that he or she longed to bite a chunk out of your throat, like you entered the altered state of consciousness that rabid sex can bring about, in which pain feels like pleasure and good sense goes out the window and some primitive part of your date's brain is inflamed with the need to territorially mark up your neck. And brave are the souls who wear their hickeys brazenly – even in these permissive times, those who flaunt their sex bruises run the risk of public scorn.

Most people's loathing for hickeys seem to date back to high school, where there is so much to loathe, not least your fellow classmates and their grotesque sex lives. The first love-ravaged throat I ever spied belonged to a teenage girl in a clinic waiting room, and I mistakenly thought her leopardesque neck was the symptom of an exotic illness.

"They're hickeys," my mother informed me, disgusted. "You get them from letting boys suck on your throat." I spent the rest of the visit battling visions of teenage boys attached, barnacle-like, to the girl's spotted neck.

According to hickey hater Cookie, this is just the problem. "When you see a couple with hickeys, it's like they're saying, 'Imagine us having sex.' And sometimes it's something you don't want to think about." Cookie developed her deep disdain for neck jewelry in high school and has never allowed her throat to be marred, which is OK with her beau, Laramie. "I don't like giving them; I don't like getting them," Laramie grumbles darkly. Continues Cookie, "In high school I never wanted one, 'cause I was like – that's trashy. Just because I'm a slut doesn't mean I have to look like a slut."

True, but what about proud sluts, who like to wear their trampiness on their throats? Red as a ruby choker, the hickey flaunts your initiation into the sex aspect of the sex-drugs-rock 'n' roll triad as well as any tattoo. And anyone boasting a chewed-up neck clearly doesn't give a damn about their reputation, and that's always attractive.

"I'm a hickey queen," gushes Alexis, who falls squarely in the pro-hickey camp. "You know that it's going to look trashy, but it feels so good."

And therein lies the hickey's glamour as a fashion accessory – more than a wild mane of hair, a leather wrist cuff, or fuck-me pumps, a hickey suggests a passionate nature, a willingness to sacrifice propriety for sexual heat, the probability of being a really fun lay.

"Some guys call them playa-hater marks," a chap named Bucky informs me. " 'Cause if one girl marks you, other girls will know you got a girl around. Some people use them as territory marks."

Here we encounter the dark psyches of those who use the hickey as a primal stamp of ownership. I once received a love bite during a one-night stand with a popular Casanova. There was something noticeably smug and deliberate about the way she planted it – I knew she was essentially tagging my throat as if it were the side of a subway car. Dumb with infatuation, I was flattered to be temporarily claimed by my crush, but not everyone enjoys being flagged as someone else's sexual property. For these people, I have compiled a small but handy list of supposed hickey remedies:

• "Freeze a spoon, place it so it's suctioned to the hickey, and let it sit there," a dude named J.B. shares. When you remove the spoon, the hickey's all gone!

• Another cure, from the there-ain't-no-hickeys-if-there-ain't-no-skin school of thought, is to remove the cap from a tube of lipstick, jam the hollow end onto the offending bruise, and gouge in a circular motion. Anything to make sure your hubby doesn't find out you went at it with the pool boy!

• A gentler technique was revealed to me by a chick named Chupa: "Get a blow-dryer and a comb, blow-dry the area of the hickey, comb it while you're doing it, and it goes away like that. It works!" Grab a round brush and feather your hair into wings while you're at it!

All of these remedies, as well as old standbys such as ice, or arnica, are helpful if there is a desperate need to cover up the evidence. However, I urge you all to wear your hickeys proudly whenever you can, in celebration of sex, trashy fashion, and, um, sex. Have fun with your hickeys – attempt to spell your lover's name, use all that skin as a canvas for your abstract expression, or engage in a long-term hickey project such as the one Bucky took on:

"This girl I went out with liked getting hickeys in the shape of states. At first it was easy, 'cause you just make one and pick which state it looks like. After a while, you have to get creative. Massachusetts is hard, because you have to get the Cape on there, and if anyone sees Texas, they'll send your girlfriend to a battered women's shelter. Texas is really hard. It took us a couple months to get all 50."

Michelle Tea lives in San Francisco and is the author of Valencia and, most recently, The Chelsea Whistle.