Thursday, 28 February 2008
| 12:00 pm
| Advice
“How do we know we’re ready to have sex with someone?” I posited to the group. There was much rolling of the eyes at this question, but eventually most of the girls got into the discussion.
It helped that I had brought a list handed to me (without citations) entitled, “Top Ten Things To Do Before You Have Sex: a list for teenagers.” We had fun pointing out that #7: Meeting Your Partner’s Parents might not be a good idea in the slightest if anyone wants to actually get laid, and so on and so forth before getting down to number one on the list, the real crowd pleaser.
#1: Be Able to Give Yourself an Orgasm
If you’ve never had the pleasure of talking to teens about orgasms, I suggest you try. Fraught with giggles and extreme rolling of the eyes, it’s a good reminder of how forbiddingly exuberant speaking about sex used to be when we pretended to be innocent.
These girls are anything but innocent. Most of them have had more sexual partners before the age of 15 than I’ve had in my lifetime (admittedly not nearly as high as one might imagine being in my line of work). They’ve cheated on partners, been cheated on, slept around with other ladies in Juvenile Hall. They’ve been pimped out, pimped out their friends, survived some serious sexual trauma, and some have even assaulted other people. And yet, I say the word “masturbate” in their presence and the room falls apart into giggles.
How can such sexually experienced people lose their gangster cool over talking about orgasms? Or about being naked with the lights on? Or about putting someone else’s condom on to his hard cock?
Fearlessness can so easily be felled by the hint of sexual vulnerability.
Never has this been so potent to me as it was when watching a room full of bravado quelled into nervous uncertainty. Suddenly the ringleaders of ferocious cliques were bemoaning their stretch marks and discomfort around buying lube like everyone else I’ve ever known. Sex is the great equalizer.
When I was coming of age in the bedroom, I was allowed to talk about fucking. I could talk about blow jobs, about techniques, about fancy underwear, condoms, the pill, but I could not talk about getting myself off. That was a major faux pas.
Nothing has changed, apparently. My clients will talk about sex, about wanting it and how to do it, down to the gritty details, but they’ll never mention their own pleasure. It’s as if their orgasm is not as important as the fact that they are indeed having sex. Perhaps why #1 on the list was so controversial.
I wonder how many sexually active adults had orgasms before having sex with lovers. My guess is that most men, with their sexual equipment ever at the ready, are well versed in orgasm before ever laying hands on another. But women?
My partner is pretty up front with the fact that she was almost out of college and eight sexual partners into life before masturbating to orgasm for the first time. Other friends of ours took just as long, if not longer, to figure out how to make jilling-off feel good. I wonder what first sexual experiences would look like for people if everyone who engaged with another already knew how to come. I’d like to live in that world. A world, perhaps, with a whole lot fewer secrets around pleasure.
So imagine my surprise when the giggling died down and one of the ladies asked me point blank, “So how do I make it happen?” She meant orgasm, as in, could I please describe for her how to achieve orgasm. I wanted to floor to open up and swallow me right then and there.
Lame, Rebekah. So uncool. You, a sex-educator of all people, should be able to help a room full of uncomfortable, questioning teens discover the mysteries of their bodies. But I didn’t. I did what all adults do and I turned their questions back on them. I avoided answering because I got scared that they would think about me masturbating, that they would know. I would have to expose myself and be seen. I couldn’t get myself to do it.
Not that they showed any sort of disappointment, mind you. Right after the question was asked, the girl who asked it looked as if she herself would rather be swallowed up by the floor than have me answer. I was afraid to tell, she was afraid to ask. She did the braver thing, being that her peers were in the room. As for me, I hid, just like all the adults that came before me when I asked them my own personal questions.
I’m not proud, but I am curious about my reaction. Even as I work to put an end to sexual shame, I reenact mine upon others. And because of this, I learn how to do it better next time.
— Rebekah Skoor, MA
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There are many kinds of geeks — hell, “geek” has ceased to be a pejorative term (and, regrettably, no longer refers exclusively to people who bite the heads off live animals for the amusement of carnival-goers). Geeks can even be sexy — or, at the very least, sex-obsessed. Some geeky freaky links:
In one of my first columns I linked to “Whorecraft,” a live-action porn site inspired by the massively multiplayer online fantasy roleplaying game World of Warcraft. The site has since moved domains and been renamed “WhoreLore”, perhaps for reasons of trademark infringement, but the naked babes with pointy ears remain. Some enterprising WoW players have taken matters into, ahem, their own hands, however, creating a nudity mod that allows their computerized avatars to appear in all their bare-bodied glory — nipples, butt cracks, and all. (In the normal mode, characters can only strip down to their skivvies.) Some players have even created in-game porn, which you can view here, if you dare. The phrase “That guy’s hung like a Tauren!” comes to mind. (For those of you who haven’t consumed the Warcraft Kool-Aid, Tauren are humanoid bulls. See? I’ve just proved anew that if you have to explain a joke, it isn’t funny . . . Maybe I should have gone with “hung like a centaur.”)
For Valentine’s day, the science fiction blog io9 asked people about their science fiction sex experiences, posting a couple of brave respondents on video. They discuss their very special loves for Quantum Leap and The Matrix, respectively. Well, we’ve all got to get our sexual awakenings somewhere . . ..
Livejournaller Adam (AKA slipjig) posted the lyrics to a little ditty called “88 Lines About 44 Fangirls” (an amusing parodic response to the famous “88 Lines About 44 Women” by the Nails, of course). It’s got some genius moments: “Cindy had the cell phone number/THX-1138/ Gwen looked like Hermione/She always made me levitate.”
Of course, there are other varieties of geek than gamer-geek and science fiction-geek. One of the most venerable members of the phylum is the chess club geek. But how, you may ask, can you find the hot chess players? Fortunately, the people at Chesspics.com have done it for you: Consider their gallery of “The Most Photogenic Chess Players.” The “most photogenic” is sincere; it’s not technically a gallery of slamming hotties who happen to be chess grandmasters (some of them are rather on the young side), but there’s a lot of very bright eye candy there. Makes me wish I was better at chess so I could play in a tournament or two . . . but I suck at chess, so I’m stuck with naked elves on World of Warcraft.
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What if Driver’s Ed was taught the way the Federal government would like sex education to be taught? McSweeny’s has the answer.
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Tuesday, 26 February 2008
| 9:56 pm
| Videos
We’re very pleased to announce that pre-orders are now available for the next Blowfish release, in conjunction with MadisonBound Productions: Tail of a Bondage Model.
Bondage goddess Madison Young has made this erotic and extremely personal statement about her life, her work, and what it means to be a professional bondage model. It’s not a dry documentary; it’s a series of extremely hot rope bondage and sex scenes, woven into a theme about what being a sex worker is all about. Too many “real life sex work” movies are a series of irrelevant sex scenes with dry commentary betwen them; Tail of a Bondage Model integrates the sex and biography perfectly.
The scenes range from a sweet (although with hot wax and a fork!) couple’s-sex scene with Gauge, to a “first photo shoot” scene, continuing up to an extremely intense and surreal medical scene with Lorelei Lee (who is absurdly hot).
It’s now available for pre-order from us at a substantial discount; the price goes up when it is released (around March 11th). Order now for a great price on a great movie. For ordering info and trailers, visit at:
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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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Friday, 22 February 2008
| 12:00 pm
| Culture
As you’ve probably heard, the Texas law banning the sale of sex toys has been overturned.
This is excellent news, for all the obvious reasons. Most obviously, Texans can now buy and sell sex toys. People can now open sex toy stores in Texas, run fuckerware parties in Texas, sell sex toys to Texans through the mail without fear of entering murky legal waters. Woo-hoo! Go, Texans! (Good articles about it in the Austin-American Statesman, and in Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)
But I want to talk about one of the less obvious reasons why this is astoundingly, excitingly, kick-ass good news.
(Please note: I’m not a legal expert, and I’m definitely not an expert on constitutional law. These are simply the opinions of a smart lay person who’s been paying attention to this issue for a long time, informed by the opinions of people who are legal experts.)
The primary reason for the Texas sex toy ruling — the main precedent cited — was the 2003 Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, which overturned sodomy laws and legalized gay sex across the country. Now, Lawrence was important for sexual civil rights for a whole lot of reasons. Most obviously, it meant that nobody in the United States could be considered a criminal simply for having gay sex. And that has huge implications for things like custody rights, housing rights, employment rights, etc. Before Lawrence, gay people could be — and were — denied all sorts of basic rights . . . because, technically, they were criminals. Lawrence upended all that, and it was hugely important for that reason alone.
But this latest case — the Texas sex toy case, Reliable Consultants and PHE v. Texas — makes it clear that Lawrence has even broader implications . . . for everyone. Gay, straight, everyone.
The Texas sex toy case makes it clear that the Lawrence v. Texas ruling established a constitutional right to sexual privacy in the United States.
And that, people, is HUGE.
Before the Texas sex toy case, we didn’t have that. You might have had it in the particular state you lived in — we’ve had it in California since 1975, when the consenting adults law got passed — but United States citizens did not have any constitutionally guaranteed right to sexual privacy until February 12, 2008.
And we have it now. Yes, the Federal courts have now said that you have a constitutional right to use a vibrator or a dildo. But so much more than that: the Federal courts have now said . . . well, let me quote briefly from the decision.
Just as in Lawrence, the State here wants to use its laws to enforce a public moral code by restricting private intimate conduct. The case is not about public sex. It is not about controlling commerce in sex. It is about controlling what people do in the privacy of their own homes because the State is morally opposed to a certain type of consensual private intimate conduct. This is an insufficient justification for the statute after Lawrence. (Emphasis mine.)
The Lawrence case didn’t just say that gay sex couldn’t be criminalized. It said that people — all people — have the right to engage in any consensual intimate conduct in their home, free from government intrusion. It said that people’s sex lives are not their neighbors’ business, not society’s business, and most emphatically not the government’s business. It said that the fact that the State doesn’t happen to like a particular kind of sex doesn’t mean they have a right to ban it, or indeed to have any say in it at all.
This case says, “Yup. That’s what Lawrence meant, all right.”
And that has enormous implications. (Assuming it gets upheld, of course; the decision could be appealed to the Supreme Court, and I haven’t read anything yet saying whether or not it will be.)
It has implications for sadomasochists. Fetishists. Swingers. Any other sexual minority you can think of. If you’re any of those things . . . you now have a legal right to it, anywhere in the country. And that’s pretty darned important for all those custody rights and housing rights and employment rights and whatnot that we were talking about. It may wind up having implications for porn laws; if we our right to sexual privacy means we can have vibrators, it should mean we have a right to dirty movies as well. (It should have implications for the legalization of sex work, too; but alas, the rulings in both Lawrence and this case made a point of saying that the rulings don’t apply to prostitution. Mistakenly, in my opinion.)
So here’s the lesson for today. Apart from just, “Hooray for sex toys!” and “Hooray for the right to sexual privacy!”
The lesson for today: Gay rights are human rights.
Gay rights are everyone’s rights.
And straight people have a personal vested interest in fighting for gay rights.
This is a point that sex advice writer Dan Savage has made on several occasions. He’s pointed out that the right-wing homophobes who want to stop things like same-sex marriage are the exact same right-wing sex-phobes who want to stop things like birth control and sex education and abortion. Gay sexual rights are often on the cutting edge of sexual liberation . . . and they’re often the first on the chopping block when right-wingers try to turn back the clock.
So I want all the straight people reading this to say a big, heartfelt “Thank You” to the people in the gay rights movement who fought so hard for so many years to get the Lawrence verdict. They are the people who, last week, gave you the right to own a dildo or a vibrator in every state in the country.
And I want you to promise to treat the fight for gay rights as if it were the fight for your own.
Because it is.
Greta Christina, copyright © 2008. Be sure to check out Greta’s blog.
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Thursday, 21 February 2008
| 12:00 pm
| Advice
I’m not just a sex writer. It’d be nice if writing were my full-time post, but on the off hours I earn the “big bucks” as an intern therapist.
Glamorous is not the word I would use to describe my current position providing counseling services for adolescent girls in the juvenile justice system. These ladies are some tough cookies. What I didn’t glean about their way of going about the world from their probation records (all participants in the program have multiple offenses), I inferred from their ferocious desire to keep me at arms length. Teens are a tough crowd and these teens in particular and far less than “warm.”
So what am I to teach these girls about relationships that they will stay in the room and tolerate?
I know very little about what it must have looked like to grow up in homes with little to no security (emotionally, physically, financially, etc). While having taken some courses on “cultural competency,” I am a far cry from understanding them as cultural beings or what it may mean for them to be 15 and imprisoned and away from lovers and siblings, their pimps and dealers, their friends and/or their babies. By any kind of measure I am a skinny, young, wealthy Caucasian woman from “the city” and I can only imagine what it must be like to have me help them think about their own relationships.
And yet, these young women are teaching me more about my own way of interacting with the world than I could hope to assist in illuminating for them. I’m inspired by what they go through to define themselves and how they must fight for every bit of love they can get their hands on, even when it comes with violence.
As they build new understanding of their relationships with others and learn about sex, love, abuse, and the core of relationships, I’m finding that I was never explicitly taught about these constructs when I was growing up. Relationships just were, whether on not I chose to think about them.
But what I am learning is that learning about them might make for stronger, better, more actualized relationships. For the next few weeks, I’d like to bring some conceptual models of relationships to the table and see what we think of them. As these girls learn about their choices, maybe we can learn more about our own. It’s never too late, after all.
Lesson One: Relationship Values
I often think about the way that I go about intimate relationships. Ruminating is what I do best. But I don’t often consider where I got the relationship values that I hold most dear, nor what I understand intimate relationships to consist of on some deep, unconscious level.
While leading a group with the girls last week entitled “My Relationship Role Models,” I asked the group to think about the very first intimate relationship they spent time around as a young person. The focus of the group was looking carefully at what we learned about relationships from the important people in our lives and seeing how they have affected, or continue to affect, the way we build our relationships now.
Together we considered our options for this first, formative relationship model. Many people chose their parents, although some selected their sibling’s relationship, their grandparents, the leaders of their group home, or some other coupling.
(I encourage you to play along this exercise with me as I run through it now. Maybe we will learn something together . . .).
After selecting a couple to examine, we privately answered the following questions:
- When I think about the relationship between _____ and _____, the first words that come to mind are _____, _____, _____ and _____.
- This relationship gave me the impression that men are _____. This relationship gave me the impression that women are _____.
- The best things I saw about this relationship were _____.
- The worst things I saw about this relationship were _____.
- Most of the time, being around this relationship makes/made me feel _____.
- These are some of the ways this relationship has affected me individually: _____.
- These are some of the ways this relationship has affected my own relationships: _____.
(note: question two implies a heterosexual dynamic between relationship partners. It is my belief however, that even non-hetero couples can still teach us messages about gender roles which if why I left it written this way.)
Even though I was the facilitator of the group, I took a worksheet and dutifully began filling it out along with the rest of the room. As I moved through the questions, I found that thinking about my parent’s relationship dynamic was something not something that I had done before, but strangely felt familiar regardless.
I asked the group if anyone walked to talk about what they had written and, after a long pause and eight pairs of averted eyes, one of the more outspoken cleared her throat and read from her list. She used words like “absent” and “angry,” reported feeling that being around her parents made her feel like she wanted to “run away” and that she was “tired of having to parent them” when they fought. She had a lot to say about the negative and somewhat idealized concepts of the positive, but overall we got a terrific read on how her parents related to one another, and to their children.
It wasn’t until a few more people had read their lists that this first girl blurted out, “I do the same shit with my asshole boyfriend. I see myself do the same shit and ask myself why I can’t stop right as I keep going back and doing it.”
I found this realization quite profound.
We often behave the way we’ve seen our loved ones do and wonder why it doesn’t turn out any better for us. We are affected by the relationships that came before us in ways that we may have not seen or considered before.
While many people carry on the patterns they learned before them, we don’t necessarily have to. I believe that illuminating what we have learned from our relationship models will bring about the opportunity to make decisions about which lessons we wish to live by and which we choose to reject. We have the ability to make our values conscious and live by those that we decide we want, not just those that were handed to us.
The girls seem skeptical about this and I get why they feel that way. Perhaps they aren’t at a place to feel empowered enough to choose their life values. Maybe some of us will never feel that directly empowered. But whether or not change comes from seeing one’s past, seeing one’s present clearly will give us the tools to make it better.
— Rebekah Skoor, MA
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In honor of the just-passed St. Valentine’s Day (and the even-more-recently passed President’s Day, which gave some of you lucky Americans a three-day weekend), it’s time for another look at holidays — the fun kind. And, sure, there’s a lot of bitterness associated with Valentine’s Day as a made-up Hallmark holiday (though, really, Geoffrey Chaucer is the one who pretty much invented it — check out the Wikipedia entry for the holiday for the amusing details), but any excuse to eat chocolate and screw should be embraced. If you nevertheless find yourself sickened by the whole notion of Valentine’s Day, take a page from Warren Ellis and call it “Horny Werewolf Day” instead: “Valentine’s Day is a Christian corruption of a pagan festival involving werewolves, blood and fucking. So wish people a happy Horny Werewolf Day and see what happens.” (He’s talking about the ancient festival of Lupercalia, celebrated on February 15, which is definitely close enough for jazz.)
Following hot on the heels of V-Day is Steak and Blowjob Day on March 14, which I’ve mentioned here before; basically it’s a male reaction to the hearts-and-flowers of Valentine’s Day. Of course, women are just as much into sex and food as men, and so some of them have declared April 14 Cake and Cunnilingus Day (or Muffins and Muff Diving Day, Pudding and Pussy Licking Day, Candy and Clit-Licking Day, etc.). I say let the carnal holidays multiply! If things go on, eventually December 14 will be Apple Cobbler and Ass-Fucking Day, and what could be better than that?
Though pirates, as an internet meme, are largely passé, it’s still worth mentioning that November 23 is Fuck Like A Pirate Day (certainly it’s potentially more fun than Talk Like a Pirate Day on September 19). What, exactly, it means to fuck like a pirate is unclear, but it likely involves wenches and grog, with optional peg legs and cat-o-nine-tails. (Cats-o-nine-tails? Plurals are so complicated.)
Disappointed with the holidays other people have come up with, but lacking in the time or creativity to come up with your own? Fear not. The internet is here to help. Specifically the Sexual Holidays generator. Just enter a date, a food, and a sex act, and the generator will create a holiday for you! (Well. If it works. It keeps throwing errors every time I try it, but I like the list of sex acts anyway — “The Camel Clutch”? “The Ghetto Pocket Rocket”? “The Glass Bottom Boat”? Even if you can’t make the generator work, you can entertain yourself plugging those phrases into Google for a while . . .)
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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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