The first thing I notice—okay, truthfully the second: the first thing I notice is the muddled lighting design—has something to do with the difference between ‘work’ and ‘labor’.

I am not especially fond of work and I tend toward laziness.

Work is not a thing from which I derive pleasure. I do it because I prefer a certain degree of misery to living on the street at the mercy of my growling empty stomach.

Labor, on the other hand, while not necessarily intrinsically pleasurable does possess the capacity to induce joy.

Even that is perhaps too abstract. A better way to put it would be saying: work is unloading the truck; labor is not unlike making a game of unloading the truck.

On the surface, that sounds stupid. But everyone has experienced this transformation of dull, repetitive tasks into games: Joe stacks boxes on the loading dock as quickly as he can with Margie hefting them onto a conveyor belt even faster in an effort to allow her to stand around—if only for a second—and gets to friendly needle Joe about how slow he’s moving.

Sex is a form of labor; or, it should be—with give and take, friendly but unrelenting pushing of boundaries.

One gets the feeling that these two young women are working. This is a job for them. But their eye contact, the intense focus of the woman on the left and the pink flush to the girl on the right suggest that both are holding back, racing to make the other first in succumbing to a shuddering ecstasy.

But unlike most races, there are no losers—only winners.