quizzical pussy

One of yesterday’s confessions referred to a certain pornographic video clip. The confessor remarked that she was sad she’d lost the clip; she also mentioned that it featured anal golf ball shenanigans and sports puns. Would you believe that a reader took pity on her plight and found the clip?

…Okay, if I told you it was Laramy, then would you believe it? I’m pretty sure it’s the same one. It fits the description (oh yes, I’m going to) to a tee.

If you’re reading, confessor, this is for you. It’s also for the rest of us, because I suspect we all wanted to see this clip. I know I did!

The following link is a VERY NSFW clip of an anal golf ball threesome (it took me a minute to decide what order to put those words in) with all sorts of elements that might offend you. If you think it might be objectionable, don’t click it. NSFW Here it is! NSFW

(image source)

…Oh wait. Maybe it kind of is. Ugh.*

Laramy and I watched porn together for the first time on Monday night.

Actually, it was the first time I’ve ever watched porn with a partner, and I’m not sure why I haven’t before. I’ve never been one to take exception to my partner enjoying porn, and I enjoy it on occasion myself, so why no one wanted to watch porn with me until now is a mystery. Maybe previous partners thought I’d get in the way of their enjoyment or something, gumming up their fantasies with my flesh-and-bloodiness.

This isn’t to say that I want to watch porn while having sex, especially not as a routine. I can’t imagine too many things more joyless than getting ready to get it on with someone and hearing, “Oh wait, let me just put on this movie of people fucking to distract me from the fact that I’m fucking you, non-buxom, non-blonde, pale girl without a tramp stamp whose name I can’t recall just now. By the way, could you move your head so I can see the screen? Don’t want to lose my erection.” That would be depressing.

In fact, as someone who usually masturbates to pictures or just doesn’t use visual aids, I think porn is fun to watch, but it’s very hit-or-miss for me in terms of arousal. But watching it with someone cool always seemed like it might be fun and sexy: laughing at the cheesy parts together, critiquing techniques and positions, getting turned on and forgetting the movie halfway through. All fun, right?

Never happened that way for me. The closest I’d come until recently was when Edwin Pomble’s roommate pulled out Pirates one night and informed us it was the funniest porn of all time. “This I have to see!” I declared. Edwin agreed that we could all watch it together as long as we fast-forwarded through the sex scenes. …Yeah. This was shortly before I realized I’d rather be fucking his roommate.

When Laramy asked me if I wanted to watch Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Fantasy, a 1976 musical porn starring Kristine DeBell, with him my only misgiving was that I find nearly everything made in the 1970s ugly–not people, obviously (call me), but TV and movies, etc. I’m not sure what went on with film processing or whatever during that decade, but it’s unacceptable. But hey, I finally had an offer to watch porn with someone hot, so I was going to take it! Plus, Laramy loathes musicals and likes porn, so I was looking forward to a hilarious internal conflict at the very least.

The film is pretty ridiculous. Which is fair, because Alice in Wonderland is a literary tribute to the sublime within the ridiculous. On the plus side it didn’t take itself too seriously, there were some crazy hot chicks in it (I watch gay porn for the men; straight porn is all about the girls for me), and there was one section where, shortly after a lesbian nurse scene, they actually had sing-along lyrics posted: “His ding-a-ling up! His ding-a-ling up! We got his ding-a-ling up!” referring to Alice’s  messianic lifting of Humpty Dumpty’s erectile dysfunction where the hot nurses had failed. Needless to say, it was a fun movie.

The problem was, neither of us found it all that arousing. Sure, there were a couple brief moments where I felt myself getting into it, but then some new absurdity would get in the way and they’d all have to sing about it or stumble through some halfhearted rhyming dialog. It felt a lot more like watching a hilariously bad movie than a hilariously hot one.

Oh, we still had awesome sex afterward. But we both agreed, not without a twinge of disappointment, that the musical porn we watched beforehand had very little to do with it.

I must say, I’m fairly excited to see the upcoming Erica McLean’s Alice starring Sunny Lane and featuring April Flores as the Queen of Hearts (see Epiphora’s glad tidings about the project here). Fleshbot indicated that maybe it was scheduled to come out on Monday, the very day we watched the old Alice, which would’ve been a freakish coincidence since I thought it was coming out later. But I’m not so sure that it has, since the website doesn’t seem to have any clues as to how to get it.

Anyway, our porn-watching experiment was a blast, and I think we’re going to make this a regular thing. Musicals, probably not so much, although I did make him suffer through The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. early on in our relationship. Love me, love every single one of those 5,000 fingers, dammit.

*Or maybe it’s just our dirty, dirty minds and he was just being very nice to that little girl. The world may never know.

My voice gets deeper, huskier when I’m really aroused. Yeah, when I’m in the middle of a screaming orgasm it can get a little shrill, but in general I’m much less “excited chipmunk” than “scary sex tiger ready to fuck you up”.

Which is why I was surprised when I started training to be a phone sex operator. To me, the vocal Viagra archetype has always been along the lines of Kathleen Turner, Scarlet Johansen, Dr. Girlfriend (…too far?): deep, throaty, seductive. When I got hired on part-time at a phone sex company, I was ready to exercise my contralto range. Turns out, what I would consider a “sexy voice” wasn’t my work horse. At all.

Millicent, my boss, was a seasoned PSO who oriented me over the phone. I was sitting in my apartment and clutching the landline phone that I’d bought especially for my new career, leafing through the training booklet she’d sent me in the mail. I was a little nervous to get started; I’d had phone sex with boyfriends before, but who was I to know what complete strangers liked?

“You have a naturally sexy voice,” she assured me, after teaching me how to simulate the sound of fingering myself by using my hands and a little spit. “but you’ll find that guys tend to react better when your voice plays into their fantasies.”

“Like a Jessica Rabbit-type thing?” I offered. I was pretty sure I already knew the answer. Who doesn’t want to play patty cake with Jessica Rabbit?

“Not really,” Millicent dashed my fragile dreams. “Actually, they usually like it when you make your voice higher and giggle a lot.” She demonstrated for me; it was like she was the most vapid demon-possessed helium junky on Earth.

Really? Huh. I followed her lead. I immediately wanted to punch myself in the face. “Perfect,” she said.

I was skeptical, so I decided to split the difference. Millicent suggested I create two stock characters based on the pictures I’d be assigned on the website. (No, fellas: those pics are not actually the broads you’re talking to. Cry for me. Mmmm, your tears are so yummy and sweet!) Faun had light brown hair and a gymnast’s body, and she was a perfect candidate for the squeaky, maniacal rodent voice. Thumper had dark hair and blowjob lips, so I gave her what I considered a sex bomb voice, a little lower and smokier than my regular timbre. We would just see who the men liked better.

Would we ever!

Faun and Thumper had about the same number of calls, but Faun’s shrill laughter and adolescent wonder at everything the masculine mind could think to utter consistently kept the call times longer and the callers happier. Once, a guy actually gave a lame excuse to get Thumper off the phone, called the company back for a new girl, and then talked to Faun for hours.

I’m willing to accept the possibility that my Jessica Rabbit impression is crap, but it’s also possible that there’s something more sinister at work. It’s troubling to think that a me with an ice cube thrown down the back of my shirt may be more aurally enticing to the average man than a gagging-for-cock me.

I have a confession to make. I totally watch the British ITV2 show Secret Diary of a Call Girl. I consider it kind of a guilty pleasure. It’s the type of TV critics seem to like to call a frothy confection: a half-hour drama following a high-class (“upscale”) London call girl (played by Billie Piper) as she juggles her secret career as prostitute Belle De Jour and her personal life as Hannah Baxter. Yeah, I watch it and like it. Now what?

I appreciate shows and movies that portray sex workers as real people who aren’t predators, victims, or addicts. I do understand and acknowledge anyone who feels compunction about glamorizing something that can go so terribly wrong, especially when that glamor might threaten to blot out the stories that need to get told. The tragic injustices exist: hell, they abound. Prostitutes can and do encounter violence and exploitation, and please let’s not forget the nauseous abundance of women, children, and men forced into sexual slavery to fulfill the global demand for sex workers. There are major problems with the sex-based sector of the economy, some of which of arise partly because so much of it has to operate underground, accountable to very little, and even less that’s ever concerned with the health, independence, and well-being of the participants. Misplaced moral outrage and criminalization chase sex work into the shadows, and we know all too well what happens in a darkness like that: that’s how Sméagols become Gollums.

I believe it’s time to make a clear distinction between sex crime and sex business. These horrible infringements on human rights shouldn’t find it so easy to ape a harmless transaction between consenting adults any longer.

But how about people who are drawn to prostitution and other sex work because it’s fun, because they enjoy both money and sex? Why the hell that should present a problem to anyone is beyond me. The self-created happy hooker who makes a deliberate career choice and executes it with responsibility deserves more play. That’s the kind of sex worker we should encourage. Secret Diary portrays a call girl’s vocation as difficult and complicated, but also rewarding and sexy. Plus, there are times I feel sure I could compose a panegyric to Billie Piper’s ass.

The show is loosely based on the real experiences chronicled by the real owner of the really fake pseudonym Belle De Jour, who maintains a blog and wrote bestselling books, remaining completely anonymous until early this week. Turns out (via sexoteric), she’s 34-year-old scientist Dr. Brooke Magnanti, a respected specialist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology. These days she’s spending her time researching children’s cancer. Yep, she’s a science geek who’s trying to keep kids healthy: your move, naysayers. She spent 14 months selling sex to support herself while she worked on finishing her thesis, and she doesn’t regret it at all. In fact, she enjoyed it.

Good on you, doctor, for coming out and proving that a whip-smart woman (who is not, as it turns out, some man’s wishful invention or a writer’s fantastical thought experiment) can choose to participate in prostitution, have a great time, and walk away when she’s good and ready.

Now, to wait for season 3 to start…

It was a while ago at this point, so I’m not entirely sure where it all went wrong. The idea was good. I would write erotic fiction for a semi-popular porn website and they would pay me $20 for each short story I cranked out. Not only was this easy money, but it presented an ideal excuse when it came time to actually do my homework. I was always on the lookout for novel ways to avoid homework.

The stories I came up with weren’t the worst to ever infect the genre, but that may be the best I can say for them. Once in a while I’ll linger over the old backup files because I need a good laugh, and will I ever laugh! At the two-dimensional characters fucking through showers of synonyms and tinny dialog (ex: “You geek, there’s no such thing as a superhero. I am, however, a super-human screw, if you care to try it out,” after which the character gives a saucy wink, naturally. Sweet Christ why did no one stop me?) At the more and more absurd scenarios I manufactured as paper-thin pretexts for ineptly written sex scenes. At how altogether silly they seem now. Occasionally, though–out of nowhere, I’ll find a sentence or two that’s almost hot… to me. Usually these sentences tend to somehow invoke the concept of tension.

I was still a virgin: a technical virgin, the most hilarious kind. Believe I knew tension. I’d fooled around with my oddly sex-adverse college boyfriend, but “sex-sex” was an odd taboo between us. Showing too much interest in intercourse was tantamount to spoiling for a fight back then. My inexperience may have thrown the wrenchiest of all the wrenches bogging down my fledgling erotic writing career. Of course virginity really never stopped anyone from writing about sex (I’m looking at you, fanfiction.net), but when a 10-year-old boy first draws two concentric circles and calls it a boob is it really fair to call that erotic art? And he certainly shouldn’t expect anyone to hand him $20 for his trouble. Getting paid to clumsily explore one’s sexuality is, of course, a pretty nice job if you can get it, but the results are bound to be awkward.

When I reread my old erotic fiction it occurs to me that although I knew the rudiments of orgasm, I didn’t really understand how sex works: the logistics, the sensations, the movements and blistering chemistry of bodies really overlapping. I also didn’t, DID NOT, understand attraction. It was all but impossible for me to navigate the murky waters between rawest acquaintance and bareback. All too often that transition was settled with a jaunty “wanna fuck?” proposed by one of the characters, usually the girl because the porn site was (brace yourself) targeted to men, and it seemed to me the kind of thing a guy might like, having a hot-as-only-fiction-allows female offer sex completely unsolicited. Come to think of it, my reasoning there was fair.

If I’m being honest, I still don’t have a handle on attraction, but we’ll revisit that some other time.

It’s odd to me that I never got any complaints from the client. They seemed perfectly happy with my work, although frankly, who reads erotic fiction on a pay site anyway? I could’ve gone on for decades. Maybe I would’ve hit some kind of stride, once I had a little more familiarity with my subject.

Eventually I just lost interest and stopped writing smut. One of the most frustrating things about writing for a glorified Girls Gone Wild porn site with a (for lack of a better term) frat boy demographic was the fact that as much as I didn’t understand my own sexuality I just absolutely,  7,000 times more, didn’t understand theirs. I mean, it’s possible… just barely possible… that that saucy wink I threw in really spoke to them. But if I knew that for a fact, I really couldn’t live with myself.