Sebastian_Metcalf

What the Hell Do Cars Have to Do With Sex? A Lot, Actually. Sebastian Metcalf. That’s me. Originally from Westminster, Colorado—yes, that flat, sprawling place between Denver and Boulder. Now? I’m planted in Saint-Chamond, France. Right in the crook of the Loire valley, between Lyon and Saint-Étienne. Spent fifteen years in sexology, research, the messy business of human desire. Now I write about cars. Well. Car dating. The overlap. Which, if you’ve ever had a real conversation in a car, isn’t actually an overlap—it’s the same damn thing. I run the “theautosDating” column over on theautosight.com. It’s a weird gig. I love it. Look, I’ve been around. Maybe too much. I don’t say that to brag—more like… a confession. I’ve had partners I can’t count. Or maybe I can, but I’d rather not. The numbers game misses the point entirely. What I learned, in all those years of clinical work and, uh, personal field research, is that intimacy is a language. And most people are speaking it phonetically—they know the sounds but not the meaning. I used to sit in my office on Rue du Docteur Rémy, watching couples in my waiting room. They’d sit six feet apart, not touching, and I’d think: they’re already in separate cars. They just haven’t realized it yet. That’s what this is all about. The metaphor, the reality, the overlap. So what do I do now? I write. For theautosight.com. My column, “theautosDating,” is this weird hybrid. I profile people who meet through car clubs—the Citroën guys, the Alpine obsessives, the young kids restoring old Peugeots. I write about the geography of desire in Saint-Chamond. You’d be surprised how much happens on the D36, that stretch that runs past the old Gier valley. I also run these curated drives. Not rallies, not races. Just… curated conversations. I pick a route, we take a couple of cars, and we talk. About what? About everything but sex. Which, paradoxically, is the best way to talk about sex. I did a piece recently on the covered market, Les Halles, and the architecture of approach—how you move toward someone, the space you give, the pause. It’s not an article about dating. It’s an article about threshold. My editor loved it. My mother didn’t get it. That’s about right. Growing up… well, I grew up in Colorado but I came of age here. Saint-Chamond in the early 2000s was a different beast. The industrial past was still heavy in the air—the steel mills were just ghosts then, but you could taste the rust. I was this lanky, awkward American kid trying to fit in. My French was terrible. I’d hang out at the Lycée Claude Lebois, not because I went there, but because that’s where the interesting kids smoked. I’d ride my bike up the Rue de la République, past the old church, just watching people. I got my first real French kiss—a cliché, I know—near the Parc du Château. A girl named Élodie. She smelled like Gauloises and rain. We sat on a bench overlooking the valley, and she asked me why Americans talk so loud. I didn’t have an answer. I still don’t. That’s the moment I fell in love with this place. Not with her, necessarily, though she was wonderful. But with the density of it. The silence between words. The way the light hits the Monts du Lyonnais in October. That’s where I started to understand that intimacy isn’t about proximity. It’s about texture. Saint-Chamond isn’t a postcard town. It’s a real place. People live here, they work, they argue, they fix their mufflers at the garage on Avenue de la Libération. I live just off Rue Gambetta, a few blocks from the IUT—the university institute where I actually taught for a while. A seminar on psychosociology of relationships. Weird gig. The building’s brutalist, ugly as sin, but the courtyard has these incredible plane trees. I’d walk there every morning, past the boulangerie on Rue Jacquard, and I’d think: this is my life now. It’s not about the grand boulevards of Paris. It’s about the corner where you buy your bread, the mechanic who knows your car, the specific way the fog sits in the valley in November. I know every curve of the road from here to the Col de la République. I know which cafés have the best light in the afternoon (Café de la Paix, if you’re wondering). I know the smell of the Gier river after a heavy rain—mineral, green, a little melancholic. This city is in my bones. It’s the structure of my days. I was born March 15th, 1983, in Westminster, Colorado. Which, if you don’t know it, is the definition of a suburb. Tract homes, strip malls, a big-ass Catholic church on Federal Boulevard that my mother dragged me to every Sunday. I was a c-section baby—my mom says I was stubborn even then, refusing to turn. She was a nurse, pragmatic, the kind of woman who could set a broken bone without flinching. My dad worked for Ball Aerospace, grinding out lenses for satellites. We weren’t rich, but we were stable. The house was on a cul-de-sac, the yard was tiny, and the Rocky Mountains were this constant, improbable backdrop to a life of lawnmowers and neighbor barbecues. I remember the sound of the irrigation sprinklers. That rhythmic hiss. And my dad’s car—a 1972 Ford Gran Torino, moss green, with a vinyl roof that was peeling. He’d spend Saturdays under it, cursing softly. I’d sit on the driveway, handing him wrenches, listening to the game on a tinny radio. I didn’t know it then, but that was my first classroom. The smell of grease, the patience of mechanics, the way he’d talk to the engine like it was a living thing. “It’s all about compression,” he’d say. “Timing. Pressure.” Same as everything else, I’d later learn. The same damn thing.