On the opening night of the San Francisco Fetish Ball weekend before last, some friends and I ducked out of the chaos of the fetish art gallery show at the DNA Lounge and hit the pizza restaurant next door. While we were swilling beers and bonding over the superiority of pizza with jalapenos, one of my friends observed something: That events like the San Francisco Fetish Ball — or any other in-person BDSM event — take on an eerie irrelevance in a world where everybody knows everybody online. You can put your whole damn life on your website or MySpace profile, as can anyone, and “meet” a dozen people and read a dozen blogs in the time it would take to wander through a fetish-themed gallery opening feeling awkward and insecure.
It seems like a cliché to say that the online world is the new social arena — but it takes on special interest to me, because sexual intimacy and exhibitionism go so well and so badly together for me.
Ten years ago I didn’t have a Live Journal and I had never heard of MySpace. I knew people mostly from the San Francisco world of sex-positive sex-ed, sex parties and pervy arts. In 1998 I was at least as social as I am nowadays, but I then tended to meet writers and artists on the printed (or photocopied) page before I ever met them in person. But writers are a small percentage of the people attending science fiction conventions, and an even smaller percentage of the people you met with their clothes off at a BDSM gathering in the woods. Most of the people I met either had day jobs outside of the pervosphere or were going to school for their second PhD, this time in Human Sexuality so they could teach Integrational Fisting Studies to a commune of transhumanist hippie punchfuckers in Humboldt county. Either way, most people were strangers to me until they walked up to me and said “Hi, I’m Spontaneous Starflower, want to smoke a joint?”
On the other hand, my writing was sufficiently well known that I frequently met people who knew the ins and outs of my erotic imagination intimately; they knew (or thought they knew) I was into necrophilia, guns, straight razors, anal sex, strippers, cocaine, unicycles, phone sex, the pleasures of physical intimacy after eight shots of espresso, and the Mile High Club. People I met at cocktail parties would make sultry references to old stories I’d forgotten I wrote.
The exhibitionist part of me loved this; a big part of what drew me toward being a writer in the first place was a desire to share my fucked-up adventures with other people. But the anti-exhibitionist, reclusive, user-hostile part of me found it creepy and weird that people knew me before I knew them. It was a love-hate thing; I adored and despised feeling like I had no privacy.
Many writers I know are like this; their desire to share their stories with other people is only enabled because they are intensely private people — but their intense privacy is only survivable because they are able to express themselves through art. For me, it kind of freaked me out to know that someone sitting across from me in a bar knew the most powerful details of my sexual fantasies. It partly satisfied my need for intimacy — but only party. And it made the three feet between us seem like a void I could never cross.
In my experience, writers who tend to write about their own lives are more likely to be comfortable around other people than those who primarily write fiction. But though I write a lot of personal nonfiction, I was never one of the former. I only started writing about my own life because I loved to write so much I had to stop making shit up or I would run out of things to say. I was always a reluctant gonzo journalist, and when I discovered I was part of my own story it was like one of those frozen moments at 3:45 am when I realize that no, I am not having a threesome with Queen Elizabeth and my college Environmental Studies professor — I am having a dream.
Now, when I am social, at least in the land of pervs, the playing field is much more level. Blogging is the order of the day; lots of people without public blogs as such still have MySpace pages or Live Journals with friends-only posts about their sex lives. My writing is still out there, but I also read an enormous number of websites. I’m probably as likely to know the details of a local perv’s sex life as he or she is to know mine. It seems to happen at every event, reading or party in the sex-ed, sex-positive arts scene in San Francisco: I meet at least one person whom I’ve never met in person before, but I know what her boyfriend’s come tastes like or that he recently installed eyebolts on the roof of his ‘82 Honda Civic. Whether it’s the Fetish Ball, a class, or a poetry reading, I spot people I know more about than they know about me.
Which is why such events feel strangely awkward nowadays, and I feel less like a writer than ever. It’s not that I feel uncomfortable knowing intimate details about someone’s sex life; it’s that the pleasures of reading someone’s sexual fantasies or realities are so intense, and realtime social interactions so phenomenally awkward for me. What I get out of reading personal blogs, journals and other confessionals is a quick path to a (sometimes) profound sense of intimacy with the writer — an intimacy that is neither comfortable or appropriate with someone you just me.
Ultimately, that sense is no different than the intimacy I once felt when reading Townsend or Califia or Hunter S. Thompson — writers who spoke deeply to me when I was at a formative stage in my life. But there’s a real-time aspect to the blog — someone can have crappy or marvelous sex from 10pm to midnight, and at 12:45 I’ve been profoundly affected by it if the person happens to be moved to blog about it and I happen to be sitting at my computer. It’s almost like being there. It breaks the literary psychodrama’s fourth wall even further that on reading about the person’s sexual experience, I can leave a comment (be it “Weird,” “Lame,” “Beautiful writing,” “Thinking of you,” or “Tell him he needs to buy you a new chandelier!”) and get a response back almost instantly.
Yeah, it’s almost like being there. The voyeur part of me loves knowing the intimate details of someone’s sex life in realtime. It’s an incredible taste of sexual intimacy — even if it makes the six blocks or five thousand miles between us seem like a void I can never cross.
Thomas Roche is the Public Relations Manager at Kink.com, an instructor at San Francisco Sex Information, and blogs about sex, drugs, and cryptozoology at www.thomasroche.com.
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The main event of this past Saturday’s San Francisco Fetish Ball was a spirited fetish reconstruction of German-Austrian director Fritz Lang’s 1927 German Expressionist masterpiece Metropolis. Some people would consider Metropolis the most influential science fiction film of all time, not to mention a socialist manifesto, so it’s worth asking what it’s doing at a fetish ball.
But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself again. In case I’ve left you several steps behind: a fetish ball is an event where hundreds or thousands of folks get dolled up in latex, leather, PVC, uniforms, clown outfits, bunny ears, tuxedos or other wacky attire. They swill $8 drinks, dance to “Bela Lugosi is Dead” and the Lords of Acid and occasionally spank each other on the ass or kiss each others boots.
Fetish Balls should (probably) not be confused with BDSM play parties; the fetish community tends to focus more on hot outfits and pervy dance moves that hint at bondage, SM and the like, rather than actual hardcore BDSM play. The tropes at a fetish ball are those of kinky decadence and haute couture fashion spiced up with sadomasochism, not the other way around. That said, the distinction between fetish and BDSM is almost meaningless in today’s world. Many if not most of the attendees at a fetish ball are people who do BDSM in their private lives, even if they don’t do it at the ball.
A relative rarity at their inception, oh, let’s say the early ’90s or thereabouts, fetish balls are now celebrated all over Europe and North America, with the best-known balls occurring in London, Tampa, Miami, Montreal, Toronto, Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, and Essen, Germany, in addition to San Francisco and more recently the Phoenix area and Detroit. Fetish balls as a general concept receive both rave reviews from participants who love the mind-boggling decadence of it all, and sneery putdowns from self-appointed “serious” BDSM people, who call the fetish scene “Stand & Model.” Like I said, though, the distinction between “fetish ball attendee” and “serious hardcore pervert” is sort of a subjective thing, and depends largely on which club(s) you have chosen to join. A Fetish Ball may not be an educational seminar on the politics of rope bondage, but it is far from a gathering of Givenchy models.
The San Francisco Fetish Ball, scheduled in March every year or two (there was a 2006 ball but none in 2007), is SF’s rendition of this fetish ritual. It is uniquely San Francisco and yet half the people there are from out of town; it is more of a straight crowd than a lot of San Francisco hoedowns, but there’s a healthy dose of sexual diversity that gives it a Bay Area feeling.
Back to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: This year’s San Francisco Fetish Ball took the 1927 silent masterpiece as its theme for the fetish fashion show that forms the centerpiece of the Saturday Night event. This makes oodles of sense given that Lang’s Expressionist vision has some of the moodiest visuals of all time, not to mention some seriously freaky outfits. Metropolis posits a future where the “planners” or “thinkers,” who live high above the ground in total ivory-tower luxury — wearing a lot of white, attending lectures and symposia, and sipping champagne — and “workers,” who live under the ground and toil to support the lifestyle of the sky-dwelling thinkers. In Metropolis, two well-meaning aristocrats touch off a class war that ends in a great conflagration. I’m skipping the part about the robot stripper.
For Lang, Metropolis was about the conflict of workers and aristocrats in society. The violent liberation of workers comes from the semi-enlightened and well-meaning aristocrats who want to make everything better. Ultimately, the villain of the movie is technology, which seems to require workers and aristocrats to live separately, and aristocrats to exploit workers — whether they know they’re doing it or not. Lang’s manifesto seems to be against a stratified society, even though the film is ultimately pretty pessimistic — the mobilized workers are a terrifying force reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s service in World War I. But on the other hand, the aristocrats, while beautiful, are pretty ditzy. Nobody comes off untarnished in Metropolis, though true to Lang’s artistic vision, everybody looks amazing.
How, then, does Metropolis serve as the theme for a fetish ball, with its message of “if it looks good, do it” — a fetish ball, which serves by its very existence as a manifesto of ultradecadence, with $60 tickets and $1500 outfits and pricey cocktails? This question especially has to be asked in an election year when San Francisco is, many of us hope, about to finish up an unwelcome stint as the isolated left-coast bastion in an increasingly right-wing, sexphobic and xenophobic nation?
The obvious answer is that “if it looks good, do it,” and Metropolis, as anyone who’s seen it will attest, looks damn good — in decadent conflict with its socialist tendencies, maybe, but inarguably and irresistibly beautiful.
There’s a deeper answer, though, because Metropolis seemed to be (on some level) Lang’s attempt to reconcile his bourgeois background with the genuine conflict of rich and poor in society. What’s more, Lang’s decadent, gothic, expressive films reportedly earned him both the ire and admiration of none other than Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who regarded Lang’s work as unacceptably decadent and erotic, but so well executed that he offered Lang a position as head of the main German national film studio.
There’s a (probably apocryphal) story about Lang fleeing to Paris without any money after a meeting with Goebbels, but the point’s not so much what happened as what it means. Lang’s exploration of future decadence and worker’s reality can represent more than just socialist anxiety about the future — it represents the triumph of imagination in envisioning a world where sensualism meets reality, for good and ill. Metropolis, if you’ll allow me, could be the triumph of freak chic as a liberating force.
For my money, that’s what I saw at the climax of the re-enacted Metropolis with its stage full of latex-garbed fetish models raising their hamhocks in proletarian unity: the freaks of the future, pumping their fists as one.
Thomas Roche is the Public Relations Manager at Kink.com, an instructor at San Francisco Sex Information, and blogs about sex, drugs, and cryptozoology at www.thomasroche.com.
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A company called OCZ Technology has taken a big step forward toward virtual sex — maybe. As reported by online tech blog Slashdot, they’re readying their “neural impulse actuator” for shipping next week. What’s a neural impulse actuator? A device that goes on your noggin, headband style, and transmits your thoughts to your computer — via USB, believe it or not. Devices like this are intended to replace the mouse, or ultimately the keyboard, with devices that read your thoughts. All you gotta do is think “a little to the left,” and that’s where your mouse goes. The device is selling for either $600 or $300, depending on who you listen to, so obviously it could make quite a splash in the gaming market and elsewhere.
One of the early Slashdot commenters on this story, going by the handle “corpuscavernosa,” observed that “The online porn experience would be greatly simplified” — ba-dum-cha! Mssr/Mme. Cavernosa may intend to be cheeky, but this one’s a gimme. More than a few friends I know have already mused how a neural impulse actuator could change the playing field when it comes to the online jerkoff. OCZ is marketing this as an input device for gaming, but I guess the gaming-perv-sex-nerd underground has already decided there are built-in sexual uses for any computer input device that leaves both your hands free.
Yeah, maybe. The problem is that ultimately while a look-left-look-right, nod, cock-your-head model of the computer-user interface would make everything a bit simpler and more instinctive, when applied to online porn, it’s not ultimately any different than an index-finger-click, thumb-rollerball-left, scroll-wheel model of user interface. Just browsing online porn with neural-actuator-enabled instant gratification, no fingers required — except the ones crammed into interesting places — would not be a concretely different experience than just, say, having an extra hand or two. How many hands do most people need to get off?
What really revolutionized porn was the rapid deployment of custom-ordered images and video to your computer screen. The delivery method, not the control interface, is what makes human-computer erotic interactions really interesting. And that’s where this device gets me all worked up. If information can travel from brain to computer, won’t it someday — and probably soon — be able to travel from computer to brain, directly? We’re talking Brainstorm or Strangedays-style shared experience. The really revolutionary output device is going to be one that provides not just a direct neural interface for visual and auditory cues, but tactile experience.
There have been a number of variously successful and unsuccessful attempts to integrate tactile or physical interactivity with the computer browsing experience — user-interface nerds call this “haptic technology.” In the gaming world, such things include wholesome effects like force feedback, which I first experienced back in the early ’90s with the shuddering weapons of the Terminator 2 arcade game. But ultimately, what I’m hoping for is to be able to have a computer provide an all-body tactile experience, and the way that’s going to happen is if information can go from computer to brain without having to stop in my body.
We’re hopefully going to see a lot more interactivity from online sex over the next few years, almost certainly driven by development in the online gaming world. But personally, I don’t really care how the information gets out of my brain — I’m more interested in how information, and therefore experience, can get into it.
Thomas Roche is the Public Relations Manager at Kink.com, an instructor at San Francisco Sex Information, and blogs about sex, drugs, and cryptozoology at www.thomasroche.com.
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The big news this week in the sex-and-science universe is that an Italian team has demonstrated that the G-spot can be viewed on ultrasound. Surely, a new round of high-tech porno is sure to come.
But seriously, folks: As reported in New Scientist (ignore the overheated opening paragraph), researchers led by Emmanuele Jannini at the University of L’Aquila in Italy have demonstrated that there are anatomical differences between women who experience G-spot sensitivity and orgasms, and those who don’t.
What’s more, Jannini is quoted by New Scientist as saying “A simple test could tell you if it is time to give up the hunt for your G spot or if your partner just needs to try harder. For the first time it is possible to determine by a simple, rapid and inexpensive method if a woman has a G spot or not.”
New Scientist also says: “Jannini had already found biochemical markers relating to heightened sexual function in tissue between the vagina and urethra, where the G spot is said to be located. The markers include PDES - an enzyme that processes the nitric oxide responsible for triggering male erections.” (as reported in New Scientist in 2002). Those markers have still not been linked to the ability to experience a vaginal orgasm in the absence of clitoral stimulation.
The Italian team recruited twenty women, nine of whom typically experienced vaginal orgasms and eleven of whom didn’t. They reported in the Journal of Sexual Medicine that the women prone to vaginal orgasms had thicker tissue in the urethrovaginal space — the area at the anterior (belly-side) wall of the vagina, kinda on the back side of the urethra. Jannini claims this means that “women without any visible evidence of a G spot cannot have a vaginal orgasm.”
Beverly Whipple, coauthor of the classic book that coined the term G-spot, responded to the study by implying — or maybe I’m just reading this in to her comments, guilty of wishful thinking — that orgasm does not equal sexual pleasure. “It is an intriguing study, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that women who don’t experience orgasm don’t have any tissue there,” said Whipple. Whipple also said that the next step would be to perform the study again, but compare the women’s urethrovaginal area after they were aroused, since the area “is believed to swell in response to physical pleasure.”
I’ll say! As someone who’s had the tips of my fingers on the G-spots of more genetic females than propriety allows me to mention (high five!), I can say that every one of them I spent any serious time fingerfucking had a discernible swell exactly where the G-spot is “supposed” to be. It feels kind of spongey and springey, which is about as unsexy a way to describe it as I can come up with, but it’ll have to do. It varied greatly in size and firmness between women, and also varied depending on how turned on they were. What varied more dramatically is the degree of sensitivity shown by women to stimulation of the G-spot. Some went nuts; some liked it pretty well; some were sort of, like, “eh.” My fragmented memories tell me that the ones with more prominent swelling in their G-spot region tended to experience greater pleasure from it.
On the other hand — and I don’t want to understate the importance of this — I’ve had pleasurable sex with only one woman who didn’t go absolutely bugfuck batshit given the appropriate and enthusiastic attentions paid to her clitoris. That woman found vaginal stimulation much more satisfying, and stimulation applied to her clit kind of “Eh.”
Subjective experience is a crappy mixer and a terrible aperitif for serious scientific research — but it makes a great chaser. And San Francisco sex nerds invariably find a million things to bitch about in any sexual study. Many things about this research are sexy, meaning sex-nerd sexy: Physical proof of the G-spot! Correlation of measurable urethrovaginal tissue with orgasms during intercourse! Italians!
More importantly, research like this represents the attempt of serious science to address the varieties of female sexual pleasure, something there just ain’t enough of.
But I have a lot of questions about how much this study really applies to practical reality. To start with, the sample — 20 women? — is small. I agree strongly with Whipple’s observation that ultrasound measurements should be conducted not just at baseline, but when the subjects are aroused — otherwise, the information’s relationship to actual sexual pleasure is pretty friggin’ limited. What’s more, the comments of the researchers seem to equate G-spot pleasure with pleasure during (heterosexual, vaginal) intercourse, when in fact intercourse can bring pleasure and even orgasm through other mechanisms — for instance, depending on the shape of the woman’s vulva and clitoris, thrusting might bring indirect clitoral stimulation through the labia or even with pressure on the pubic bone.
Oh, and there’s also the women I’ve known who report what appear to be G-spot orgasms from anal sex — that’s beyond the scope of this study and this article, but it’s important enough to mention, as is the fact that some women I know can occasionally come without any genital or anal stimulation at all; human bodies, female or male or other, are riddles wrapped inside enigmas.
I also look with both fascination and discomfort at the idea, mentioned in the New Scientist article, that G-spot development could be encouraged by hormones. I’m all for using hormones for whatever; I’m down with the restructuring of the human body to help it satisfy the owner’s sexual needs. But any potential future pharmaceutical solution to a sexual problem sets off alarm bells in my brain, encouraged by the daily flood of Viagra spam that buries my inbox. And you don’t have to go very far to find sketchy fix-er-ups around the G-spot.
Last, but far from least, I can’t help but say: here we are talking about the G-spot again. Awesome, great, kickass — friends, I dig the G-spot; it rocks as hard as Hendrix at Woodstock. But in all this fascination with the G-spot, not to mention fringe sex culture’s longstanding obsession with female ejaculation, do we tend to forget about the C-word? Yes, that’s right, the clitoris — which has as many if not more flavors than the G-spot, tends to provide plenty of the “waves of pleasure spreading out across the whole body” New Scientist refers to in the G-spot orgasm, and doesn’t have nearly enough research — formal and informal (high five!) — devoted to it.
I’m with Betty Dodson on this one, basically. Dodson spends a lot of her time “explaining to women young and old that the clitoris is their primary sex organ — not the vagina.” I’m not quite as convinced of that as is Dr. Dodson. I think all women have different sex organs, and for any given woman the vagina or the G-spot or some other erogenous zone (tits and ass spring to mind) may be very important to her. But Betty has a good point. To quote an underground comedy that has little if anything to do with sexual liberation: “Vagina, vagina, vagina! Does that do anything for you?”
So many women have so much anxiety wrapped up in whether their sexual response cycle is appropriate and whether their erogenous zones are the correct erogenous zones. It’s dangerous, because trying to find pleasure where you don’t already find it can be both invigorating and crazymaking. How many women take the promise of an undiscovered G-spot as the hope that they’ll be able to experience something they can’t yet find with their partner? If personal experience makes a good chaser for sexual science, then insecurity, shame and desperate expectations make the worst possible one.
The search for the G-spot, both individually and culturally, has all elements of a riveting story — it promises intriguing investigations and an unfolding mystery, not to mention the promise of virtually unlimited power when the mystery is solved, and, of course, the subtext that the hard cock, or its silicone doppelganger, is the bringer of orgasmic pleasure. It’s Agatha Christie crossed with The Matrix crossed with Deep Throat. Certainly the clitoris gets lots of press, but how can it compete?
San Francisco Sex nerds love to turn every piece of sexual research into a springboard to talk about all that is wrong in society, and nobody likes a crankypants. Research like this Italian study is critically important; I believe that modern medicine should tell us everything about the G-spot specifically and about sexuality in general that it can find out.
But like I said, when it comes to scientific sexual research, personal experience makes a crappy aperitif, but a great chaser. In researching pleasure, let’s not let the sexy appeal of new discoveries eclipse what we already know.
Thomas Roche is the Public Relations Manager at Kink.com, an instructor at San Francisco Sex Information, and blogs about sex, drugs, and cryptozoology at www.thomasroche.com.
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For the last few years I’ve had a day job where I write oodles and oodles of articles about porn, fetish and adults-only events. I almost never see the sun; I drink more coffee than the nation of Turkey and when I get home after a 10 or 11 hour day, I often respond to my significant other’s “How was your day?” with a crazed owl-like stare for a few minutes until I remember that this language I type in can, occasionally, also be spoken.
Since I pretty rarely talk on the phone, I’ve spent some years now as a mobile-impaired American — that is to say, I’ve had one of those cheap pay-per-minute cell phone plans for which “Unlimited minutes” means “Limited only by your rapidly-dwindling bank balance.”
I’m switching jobs, though, and there will be a lot of phone calls in my immediate future. Soon I’ll be one of those schmoes you see walking down the street with a Borg headset saying things like “You tell Antonio we’ll need documentation on PX4 migration and a twenty RSV, maybe a CTTA with vio markers and a TS4″ or, more probably, “Let’s run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes.” “Unlimited minutes” for me is pretty soon going to mean “Limited only by the hours in the day and the number of people you can keep on hold at one time.”
What does this have to do with my sex life? Plenty. Because, you see, pay-per-minute plans are a really crappy way to have phone sex.
In this case, I’m not talking about the pay-per-minute corporate butt-reaming advertised in the back of Hustler, where you pay $4.99 for sixty seconds chatting with a bored Florida college student or an Indiana single mother who probably doesn’t even know the meaning of the word “supplicant,” let alone “St. Andrew’s cross” or “cattle prod.” In those cases, the additional 18 cents per minute barely rates as a surcharge. Sure, there are some commercial phone sex workers who know their way around every perverted sexual act you could think about — hey, some of ‘em could even beat the pants off me a filthy-talk contest — but that’s not my primary concern here.
No, no, I’m talking about free phone sex, the kind you have with a boyfriend, girlfriend, otherfriend, fuckbuddy or distant acquaintance, or whatever. It’s hot, it’s taboo, it’s sleazy and it’s wrong, which makes it overridingly awesome, especially if you have it while rollerblading in the park, sitting in traffic or pretending to take an important sales call in the hallway in the corridor outside the corporate boardroom while your boss laserpoints a flow chart and says things like “Maximize the supply chain lead conversion ratio through product development interdynamics” and “Focus on center-specific IT protocols while codifying network goals” — and you stand outside saying “Sure, we can get you those documents by EOB Tuesday” (then whispering) “Yeah, slut, work that fuckin’ egg beater, you sick little spank monkey!“
I mean, what could be dirtier? The unlimited-minute cell phone plan, like the white collar job, carries with it as a God(dess)-given fringe benefit the right to a conversational reacharound in the most inappropriate possible situations. How the hell else is a self-respecting secret pervert supposed to make it through the day, let alone anything resembling a commute?
Problem is, in many ways I’m shy as all fuck, a fact lamented in thes hallowed pages just last week. My own phone sex experiences are few and far between, and tend to be rather famously unsuccessful. which is why despite my ability to disgorge 75,000 words of profligate sexual debauchery in what amounts to a weeklong almost unbroken cafe-table fuckfest of Yergacheffe-fueled delirium, when faced with the possibility of phone sex with a steamy goddess of love, stern bitch in combat boots, college girl in a bunny suit or other willing participant, I tend to tremble uncontrollably and burble things like “Stick your finger up my butt!” and “Boobs!!”
It’s really quite embarrassing. I might make boastful proclamations of Wagnerian coprolalia in my immediate future, but to be honest I wonder if I can even cut the mustard when it comes to the Bluetooth-enabled filthy talk. Successful phone sex, for me, has always been LOLWTF of human sexuality: I love it (the “LOL”) but I can never seem to do it properly (”WTF!?!?”)
Will that change, like my phone number? Soon we will be Borg, zombiewalking down the street with blinking electronics crammed into our right ear (and maybe elsewhere). Pass us on Market and you might hear us crooning “Just be sure to let Mike in accounting know we need a check to GD Contracting cut first thing Tuesday morning” or whispering furtively while our face reddens with every hissed “whack!” or murmured “yeah? you like that Tiger Balm on your—” [furtive look, clears throat] “thingie?“
Will unfettered access to mobile technology render me a skilled coprolaliac? Tune in next time when the author, walking down Mission Street past an accordion-playing frightwigged street musician in a fuschia catsuit and fuck-me-pumps, may or may not blurt inexplicably: “Panties!” and walk into a telephone pole. Cue the organ music.
Thomas Roche recently left online sex and culture site Eros Zine for an as-yet unspecified job in corporate America. He also blogs at www.thomasroche.com.
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The first time I got my hands on a video camera, I tore my clothes off and wanked.
Actually, let me revise that a bit—I didn’t actually get my clothes off before I started wanking. The intention was to strip for the camera, all sexy and debonnaire, and perform moderately dirty acts on myself while first-gen deathrock played in the background. I don’t think it quite worked like that.
This was in the old days, when home video cameras were the size of a schnauzer and used those enormous VHS tapes—remember those? The lack of a tripod meant that I’d propped the thing on a chair; when I reviewed the first few seconds, I had some really hot footage of my booted left foot bobbing up and down while I caressed my crotch through a tight pair of black 501s. I relocated the camera to my pillow and tucked my feet against the wall above it—great shot of my left thigh, soooooooo sexies.
I should point out that in these bygone days there were no pivoting LCD screens, so while I frolicked in front of the camera I had no idea what I was shooting. Once I found the sweet spot, sort of, planting the camera on a stack of Gun Digests atop a folding table, I tried to prop a mirror behind the viewfinder—but as you can imagine, that didn’t go well. Finally I just gave up, stripped my jeans off, and jerked off, acutely aware of the camera with my every move, glance and utterance.
Why’d I do it? Just to do it, that’s the obvious answer. I created porn because it was there to create, because I had a camera, because the camera had an on button, because I had a dick. It just seemed like the thing to do at the time, and all told it was one of the more interesting experiences of my sexual life—and I’ve had some exceedingly interesting experiences.
When I reviewed the tape later, I immediately got turned on. I revisited it for several private screenings, each time getting impossibly turned on despite a vague sense of embarrassment—I have never considered myself photogenic; I doubt most people do without a fair amount of effort. For several years I had the tape stashed in various hiding places, thinking “Fuck, somebody is going to find that thing and laugh their asses off at me.” I wasn’t so concerned that what I’d done would be disapproved of on moral grounds—just that it would seem ridiculous.
My concerns about being “discovered” as the star of a self-made porno tape seem, in hindsight, sort of paranoid. VHS tapes are rarely the first thing a burglar steals, and my friends, even in those days, were not people who ridiculed other peoples’ sexual foibles. They were more the types who, if they’d discovered such a tape, would share their own fuck films with me, doubtless asking for pointers.
But no one ever found it, and one time when I moved I decided it was finally time to shred my one and only amateur-porn appearance. I tore the tape into little bits and slashed it with a razor.
It’s something I’ve actually regretted since then, and I’ve often wondered: What would I think of that tape today? Would I find it hot, weird, disgusting? Would I bum out on my pot belly or freak out on my dick size? I haven’t got the foggiest idea.
I haven’t yet made a repeat performance on camera—why, I don’t know. I am hard-pressed to explain what exactly turned me on so much about it the first time. Exhibitionism? I doubt it—I’ve been to enough play parties to know I’m not much of a natural exhibitionist. Voyeurism? I am not particularly aroused by the sight of guys jerking off, Tina Tyler’s Handyman series notwithstanding. Transgression? Maybe . . . it certainly felt edgy and weird to perform on camera, but transgression for the sake of transgression isn’t actually a big sexual button for me personally, though I certainly appreciate it in other people. Purely aesthetic pleasure? No. Just no.
My long-lost one-and-only smoker reel comes to mind lately because I recently acquired a video camera. But the camera sits in its case with a stack of DVD-Rs, its creative potential having produced some footage of me saying “Is it on?” and a few scenes of my cats high on catnip.
Nowadays the web makes self-made porn easy to make and distribute. Why haven’t I planted that camera on a stack of Gun Digests and stroked myself for your viewing pleasure, or at least my own? Lack of exhibitionism would be my first excuse, but the fact is, I write and talk about sex almost constantly and I think my pleading shyness would be questionable. Do I not find myself hot? I didn’t find myself hot twenty years ago, either, but still found the process a turn-on.
The answer is that I have no idea why, at twenty, I found it hot to perform for the camera and now, years later, I don’t—at least not naturally. Some day maybe I’ll get bored and it’ll seem like a great idea to create some self-made porn. I’ll do it just to do it, because it seems like the thing to do at the time—how many awesome sexual experiences have happened to me for that reason? A few terrible ones have as well, but then, quite frankly creating self-made porn is one of the safer things a guy (or anyone) can do with his body.
Hopefully it’ll end up being hot to do and hot to watch, and I’d be shocked if any of you ever get to see it—but then, it’s not for you.
Thomas Roche is the managing editor of Eros Zine, teaches at San Francisco Sex Information, and also blogs on sex, drugs and cryptozoology at thomasroche.com.
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Close on the heels of my rant on sexual urban legends comes a tragic case from Pennsylvania that sounds like bullshit — but it’s not.
In a story headlined “Kinky Sex, Shocking Death: Pennsylvania man charged with electrocuting wife during nip zip,” scandalcentric website The Smoking Gun reported on — well, it’s pretty self-explanatory. Toby Taylor and his wife Kirsten were, in Toby’s words, “into weird sexual behaviors,” which sounds to me like the sort of thing that a perv says when he or she is forced to explain certain recreational activities to somebody who is just not going to understand. In this case, it’s pretty clear why the cops wouldn’t understand, since Kirsten had just died because of them.
The behaviors, whether or not you consider them weird, were unquestionably dangerous. They involved running current from a power strip to clamps on Kirsten’s nipples; Kirsten and/or Toby would then turn the current on and off using the power strip.
While The Smoking Gun milks the story for its more prurient aspects, I confess to being just plain horrified by the light-hearted attitude people seem to be taking to the Taylors’ story; just one example is the post on urban legend site Snopes.com’s message boards — “bet she came and then went!” “missy_pooh” rimshots, ha ha ha ha ha. Thankfully, somebody named “Spamamander” (isn’t the Web great?) sets Missy partially straight with the comment that electrical play can be done safely, and in this case was not.
Still, the response of most people on hearing of cases like the Taylors’ has been to laugh their asses off and proclaim loudly that they would never do anything so weird. Those people are sexual freaks, you see, and they fucked up. Let’s make fun of them.
At least ten years ago I read about a Darwin Award supposedly given to a man who stuck one electrical cord up his ass and the other up his wife’s; they died trysting frenetically with current arcing between their bodies and were discovered burned to a crisp. That event almost certainly did not happen; in fact, it sounds physically impossible to me, but that’s hardly the point. The point is that it held people who enjoy sexual variation up for humiliation and provided endless hilarity at their expense — always good fun in the Darwin Awards, regardless of the story’s veracity. Unfortunately, Toby and Kirsten’s tragedy is real.
The problem with what Toby and Kirsten Taylor did wasn’t that it was weird — it’s that it was ill-informed. Playing with electricity is not to be done lightly, but it can be done safely. What makes Kirsten’s death a tragedy is that it didn’t have to happen. I hate seeing stuff like this in the news because I fear it hurts the cause of healthy sex. It advances the idea of “alternative” sexual practices as dangerous and stupid.
But it also mixes up two widespread areas of ignorance in most peoples’ lives: sex and science. Shame around alternative sexual practices like electrostimulation limits people accessing information about how to do it safely. It also interferes with the experimenters’ ability to rationally evaluate what the risk levels are of certain behaviors and choose ones that are both hot and safe. Meanwhile, lack of science education means that while most people might get that electricity is dangerous, they don’t understand why or how it is dangerous, with the result that their own ill-informed sexual experimentation provides all the information they have. They don’t understand that running current, particularly wall current, from one nipple to the other means that it’s crossing the heart, potentially causing a cardiac arrest even in an otherwise healthy person. A cardiac arrest is what killed Kirsten.
Coincidentally, the Pennsylvania case hit the news a few days after I interviewed Princess Donna, webmistress of San Francisco BDSM porn company Kink.com’s Wired Pussy, which is a mostly female-on-female BDSM electrostimulation and electrotorture site. In that interview, Donna told me that her first experience with electrostimulation was with her mother’s TENS unit when she was a kid. Her reported response, then, was “AAAAAAHHH!!!” — which is pretty much how I felt when I slapped on a TENS unit recently for the first time in years. Then, the thing was on my thigh — frankly, I’m damn glad it wasn’t on my nads, and if I ever put it there, boy howdy!! It takes some getting used to.
A TENS unit (the term is short for “Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation) is a device used to stimulate the muscles for the purposes of physical therapy. These units are relatively inexpensive, run off a 9-volt or similar battery, and are sometimes adapted for sexual pleasure or pleasurable discomfort.
My first encounter with a TENS unit, about ten years ago, was my first encounter with electrostimulation unless you count accidentally sticking my finger in a light socket when I was a kid — which was stimulating, but not in a good way. My TENS unit experience occurred when the unit was in the hands of someone I was really turned on to. I wasn’t exactly a bottom at the time, but it certainly helped that I was turned on. When I tried TENS recently just “to see what it’s like,” it was just plain weird. Never overestimate the ability of arousal to make things seem hot when those same things seemed weird five minutes or a year ago (or ten years later). That is (forgive me), if you’re wired that way.
TENS units are usually medically prescribed and considered pretty safe. They also taking some jerryrigging to adapt for internal or nipple stimulation — which is not recommended unless you realy know what you’re doing. At Wired Pussy, nipple stimulation only goes from one side of one nipple to the other side of the same nipple — never crossing the heart. The Kink.com folks also build many of their own electrical toys — but, and I cannot emphasize this enough, they know what they are doing. Unless you are an electrical expert and have a pretty good understanding of physiology, please don’t do the same.
On the other hand, Blowfish features an awesome inventory of electrical toys that are designed for safe sexual use right out of the box. There’s also some exceedingly important safety information, which you should check out whether or not you’re going to buy your electrical toys from Blowfish. The key things to know are that you should not play with electricity without knowing what you are doing — and that some very basic safety information can tell you very much what you’re doing, and how to do it without hurting yourself or your partner(s).
In addition to being safe, electrostim can also be rock-on amazing-friggin’ fun. I once watched a good friend climb into an electrostim chair manufactured by a different company and slide herself onto a probe that within minutes had her climaxing copiously. It was hot.
Safe electrical stimulation can be either pleasurable or uncomfortable, and in either case it can be either mild or intense. But just the fact of electrostimulation carries both a stigma and a — forgive me again — charge.
Something Princess Donna said sticks with me: “I think electricity is a very psychological thing for most people; most people are familiar with what it’s like to get slapped or to bump into things, so they’re familiar with corporal pain, or at least the idea of it. But when you introduce electricity, it’s automatically something that you’re not supposed to feel. You learn from an early age don’t stick your hands in the socket; you lick a battery you get scared. So I think it’s definitely edge play for a lot of people.”
The fact that electrical BDSM play, or electrical sex play, is so taboo and edgy means that it carries an extra level of excitement for some people. This means that it lends itself to exactly the kind of freaky fears and prurient obsession that can make pervy sex hot — and that can help spread both misinformation and shame.
Did the Taylors know they were taking a risk by running wall current from nipple to nipple — and was it that risk that made it hot? Probably not, but I don’t know for sure. Maybe they just didn’t know how serious a risk it was. But enjoyable electrical play, like any kind of “alternative” sex, oughta be about taking calculated risks, preferably minimized by knowing what the heck you’re doing.
Thomas Roche is the managing editor of Eros Zine, teaches at San Francisco Sex Information, and also blogs on sex, drugs and cryptozoology at thomasroche.com.
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