quizzical pussy

Don't make this weird.

Happy International Women’s Day, everybody!

In honor of this highest and holiest of high holy days, I’m going to reveal something that may shock some people, and here it is: We’re really actually not living in a post-sexist age. Your mind’s blown, isn’t it?

I’m not here to tell you it necessarily sucks to be female, although concerning some parts of the world we can certainly make that argument. For me, though, in all my incredible comparative privilege, I more or less like being a chick and I’m not ready to turn in my pussy card just yet.

But even nestled in the bosom of Western culture we haven’t attained the basic equality that women set out to achieve generations ago. We’re closer, but we’re so not there. Equal pay for equal work is still a goal rather than a reality. Our culture produces children who believe that violence against women is easily justified. One in six women is sexually assaulted in her lifetime, and all too often it’s perfectly acceptable to blame her.

Women are still sexual objects, not just to some people, but to society as a whole. I know 20-year-old women who have anxiety over being “too old”. Too old to have a kick-ass career? Too old to make a difference politically or socially? Nope. Too old to be a doe-eyed ingenue; too old to be Miley Cyrus. Apparently legal is the new expired. And realizing that being pretty gets us more appreciation and success than any other positive trait, way too many of us have a near-religious conviction that we’re ugly: too fat, too tall, too short, too flat-chested, too pimpled, too muscular, too pale, too dark, too scrawny, too imperfect. We think that our toes are weird or that our stretch marks mean that no one will ever love us. And if no one is going to love us, we are somehow worthless.

If we mention that these things are unfair, we’ll often get called unbalanced, emotional, or irrational. There are still so many things to tackle, but as a small nerdy she-fish in an ocean of crap I wish women didn’t have to deal with, I’m starting tiny.

I’m starting with sexual harassment at the Sci Fi Conventions I go to.

Here’s an imagination exercise: Take a bunch of people who likely faced romantic rejection and isolation growing up, making sure that a healthy percentage of these are shitty at recognizing social cues. Add a common interest they may not get to talk to real people about all that often, and all the excitement and adjacent libido that would naturally result. Put some of these people in costumes designed to make the wearers look (with varying success) like cartoon and video game characters, and put others in corsets. There will also be people inexplicably wandering around wearing cat ears.

Hi there. It looks like you have a Fan Convention on your hands. You realize, of course, that with all those roiling factors in play, someone is going to try to fuck up this nerdy utopia by being super creepy, right? Some guy will inevitably think that the hot costumes exist only for his personal enjoyment and that any woman who likes the same TV shows he does must be praying nightly for someone just like him to appear and grope her tits.

Which is why I’ve taken on the daunting task of organizing an anti-harassment project at my local con. The convention has a sexual harassment policy in place already, but it hasn’t been implemented all that well, and some creeptastic geek-on-geek crimes have been perpetrated.

Creeps have been routinely grabbing or hugging people without permission or warning, commenting on their bodies uninvited, flirting aggressively… you know, the things that you might have heard about cons that make you reluctant to ever go to one, but that shouldn’t be tolerated. Worse, the injured parties have been afraid to report these incidents to con staff because they’re worried about seeming hypersensitive, or like trouble-makers.

But how fucked up does a culture (or subculture) have to be to alienate the victim and make the offender feel justified? Just because men tend to outnumber women at these things doesn’t mean they get to make it a boys’ club where the women attending are just so many sacrifices to the communal hard-on. And neither do women get to harass men, nor men men, nor women women. Let’s just be universally uncreepy.

Of course, nerds flirt at conventions. They get laid at conventions and have glorious, debaucherous times in an environment where free love and free energy drinks reign. I don’t want to put a damper on that, but seriously, the creepy people need to back the fuck off, practice common respect, and only put their hands where they’re expressly invited.

So I’m going to work to make sure the harassment policies are accessible to everyone, to educate the con staff and the con guests how to deal with creepy person encounters, witnessed or experienced, and to open a dialogue about this stuff. I’m going to try to make my little corner of fandom safer for catgirls and cosplayers.

In reality, though, there’s a good chance I’ll set a terrible example for everyone by shouting off-color jokes all over the place. But at least my horrible behavior will be a good talking point for whichever brave warrior takes over my post after I’m escorted off the premises.

They come to Monday night karaoke at the pub sometimes, and when they arrive the party considers itself brought.

They’re a middle-aged couple. He’s husky with a Van Dyke goatee; she’s short and slight and definitely shops in the juniors’ department. Often they have costumes on: a cowboy hat and loud print button-up for him, platform boots and mini-skirts for her. The first time I saw them they were wearing matching gold lamé outfits, so to me they’ll always be the Gold Lamé Couple. I can’t explain how intensely I adore them.

The thing you have to understand about the Gold Lamé Couple is that they take karaoke very seriously. The other thing you have to understand about them is that they are not strictly very good at it. Their singing isn’t anything to write home about, but they commit. You think you’re committed to karaoke? Do you bring your own CD case full of Black Eyed Peas and Lady Gaga karaoke tracks? Do you have a prop bag? Is there a harmonica for every conceivable key in your prop bag? Have you ever pulled out a whip and set a hula hoop aflame whilst performing “Circus” by Britney Spears? Yeah. Didn’t think so. The Gold Lamé couple comprehends all these wonders and more.

My friend Miriam likes to play a little game when she’s at bars. She looks around at the different couples and tries to guess what kind of relationship each pair has and how long they’ve been together. She’s either pretty perceptive or great at bullshit because she can usually back up the reasoning behind her guesses with details about  body language and other visual cues. She thinks the Gold Lamé couple found each other fairly recently, perhaps a second marriage for each. Miriam suspects they were tired of decades of boring relationships and their exuberance about karaoke mirrors their glee at finally finding someone to really cavort with.

Eloise, another friend of mine, surmises that they aren’t even together romantically but decided to form a platonic partnership, knowing that they had the potential to be a gestalt karaoke tour de force. They do it just for the love of performing…in front of thirty or so pub patrons. Their electrifying chemistry is limited to what they do on the mic. And with props. And the choreography.

The one thing everyone agrees on is that they probably practice their act for hours every week at home. You don’t mess with hula hoop fire without a trial run or six.

But I prefer Miriam’s theory. I want the Gold Lamé Couple to be a real couple. It makes me smile to know that maybe these two people have something beautiful and playful and oddly fearless. They don’t care what they look like to each other or the pub at large. They go balls out and have fun, wasting no time being self-conscious. If they ever settled for boring before, they certainly don’t anymore.

And if that’s what they’re like about everything, I think they might just have the perfect relationship. Life, and especially love, should be like music you don’t care if anyone else likes… and definitely like a motherfucking flaming hula hoop.

Does this happen every year?

The day after Valentine’s Day my laptop broke out in a rash of news articles and blog entries about sexual violence. Maybe it’s because sometimes rape feels like the other side of the sex coin that Valentine’s Day embraces, or maybe there was a coordinated effort/awareness day that I didn’t know about. Maybe the day-after-Valentine’s Day thing is a red herring and President’s Day is the real culprit. Maybe it’s Zeitgeist. I suck at Zeitgeist sometimes.

Breda got a day-early jump on the trend when she wrote about a video that was posted on ManUp, a campaign whose mission is to stop violence against women. The video’s original source is Omnipeace, “a humanitarian fashion brand that donates 25% of all profits to charities promoting peace, education, human rights and ending extreme poverty in Africa by 2025.” The video, which I’m going to call the iRape video, uses violence against women as a trope to call attention to ongoing violence in Eastern Congo over conflict minerals (tin, tungsten, titanium, and gold ore). The video isn’t just about rape, really. Rape is one “weapon” being used, and it’s not the only intolerable thing happening there: Omnipeace uses rape in the iRape video because sexual assault is especially visceral, horrifying, and to many the rape of a pregnant woman (which this video depicts) is even more so. The overarching issue is that electronics manufacturers (and by extension, consumers) are fostering violence (definitely including rape) when they buy these minerals from the wrong people and out of the wrong mines in the Congo. The escalating war crimes, the unchecked violence, and how corporations are providing economic motivation for them to continue, are the larger issues, and rape is but one really, horribly disgusting aspect of all that.

The iRape video does the job it was designed to do. It communicates the problem and even appropriates pop culture images culled from the once-ubiquitous silhouette commercials for Apple’s iPod. Surely Apple is one of Omnipeace’s biggest targets here, if only because it’s emblematic as an industry leader. In the sense that it presents information about conflict minerals and violence in the Congo, it accomplishes a lot in ninety seconds.

But it raises some issues. Some of us…well, I… think making rape into a cartoon/parody is just a shade tacky. Even the “iRape”… “iSuffer” copy in the video is so flippant it kind of makes me sick knowing that they don’t mean it as a joke, they’re only accidentally presenting it as one. When you use rape as a supporting argument or an attention-grabber you’ve just invoked something complex and rife with emotion– sometimes raw, throbbing pain. I also think it’s worthwhile for organizations to make it very clear when reposting and sharing the iRape video that it isn’t about rape in general. It’s pretty specifically about rape as a war crime, and to me it’s more successful at highlighting a regional conflict and its related atrocities than it is at saying anything about violence against women in a broader sense.

Breda linked to iRape via ManUp, “a global initiative to engage youth in preventing violence against women”. Theirs is an admirable goal, and I haven’t a clear enough picture of them yet to say whether I agree with their politics and methods or not. But clearly their mission isn’t specific to the Congo. So the fact that ManUp has the Omnipeace iRape video as the lone offering in the “Media Center” section of their globally-minded website seems like a counterintuitive decision because it depicts a very specific type of rape in a very specific context–with little surrounding explanation–on a website that has a very diffuse goal.

In war-torn Congo, rapists are certainly often armed. Non-combatant civilian women have no practical means to defend themselves nor access to legal justice. The details are far removed from what many of us might experience in other parts of the world (and in this and many other respects we are so damn lucky). Here in the United States, for example, that isn’t what rape usually looks like.

Breda’s point that self-defense knowledge and preparation (particularly access to and training with firearms) are key to preventing violence against women is an important one. Her declaration that “…the only way to stop violence against women is to make it a very, very risky endeavor,” is nothing more or less than absolutely true. There are dozens of ways to educate and mitigate and hope the bad guys stop being bad guys, and some of these can help, but they’ll never eradicate sexual violence. Only a culture that tolerates no rape and gives women the tools to enforce that standard would have any chance of existing beyond the threat of sexual violence. I’d be thrilled to see more organizations focusing on teaching women how to defend themselves, and spreading the message that it’s completely appropriate to do so. We shouldn’t be expected to leave our protection solely in the hands of men/authority figures/social change campaigns.

But it bears repeating that “you can fight back!” is not the same thing as “you should’ve fought back”, because I think sometimes people conflate the two. You can’t tell a rape victim she (or he) should’ve been “better” at being assaulted and violated. Well, obviously you can, but if you do, you’re an asshat. Empowering women to stop sexual violence dead in its tracks is good; expecting women to claw, shoot, gouge, or maim their way out of every such situation, and wondering what’s wrong with them if they don’t or can’t, is just another way of blaming the victim. Blaming the victim really needs to end, people. Rape isn’t just a physical fight, and even if it were, not everyone has the strength or reflexes or equipment to stop it. Sometimes sexual violence isn’t exactly what you expect it to be, and if we don’t have a clear and realistic picture of what diverse scenarios rape can include, we definitely can’t stop it, decry it, loathe it… in fact, we’re in immediate danger of tolerating it in many of its more insidious forms.

Ladies, are you prepared to fight whenever you’re on a date? Are you prepared to claw your best male friend’s eyes out at a moment’s notice? Would you kill your husband rather than succumb to forced sex with him, or might you take the abuse, and maybe even blame yourself for it? If you’re an average American silhouette woman bopping around to your iPod in Everytown, USA, the armed soldier bogey is probably not what you need to worry about. The scary shadow you need to keep your eye on is the inky outline of the devil you know.

I’m not saying that all the men in a woman’s life are potential rapists. I am saying that 77% of rapes are committed by non-strangers, and sometimes it’s hard to see these coming. If you’re a man and just felt a glimmer of umbrage reading the examples I gave at the beginning of the previous paragraph, your reaction should provide one flash of insight as to why women might have a disincentive to remain ever-vigilant and prepared against acquaintance rape. Often men want and encourage us to be on our guard with every guy… except with them, of course.

Britni posted a great piece on marital rape and the mythical gray area it presents. I want to address some of the things that occurred to me while reading it, but that will be its own blog entry (Soon, my pets. Very soon…) because I’m not writing a goddamn dissertation here. I’m just some chick on the internet who happens to be not so fond of rape.

Sofia: I’m preorgasmic.

Jamie: Does that mean you’re about to have one?

-Shortbus

The word for a woman who has never gotten off used to be anorgasmic, which isn’t very optimistic. The term preorgasmic is much more hopeful, but it seems like it might be a little too much pressure: like the universe is crouched in breathless anticipation, waiting for you to climax at any minute. All the time. And if you can’t hack it, you’re disappointing yourself, the word, the universe… everyone. Maybe it’s just my imagination running away with me, but I think I’d actually prefer to have a more desolate term and just let my body surprise me if it ever got around to coming. But I’m not much of an expert on not coming.

Laramy and I watched a movie over the weekend about a female sex therapist/couples counselor who had never had an orgasm, and not for lack of trying. What followed was a journey into a debauched New York City sex-drenched subculture, much like Alice in Wonderland if the White Rabbit were a hot chick with many tattoos and the flower beds were dozens of strangers engaged in joyous orgies. This is a world I’d like to live in. At one point Laramy asked “Are there really sex clubs like this?” and I replied, “I have no idea, but we should definitely open one.”

But it was hard for me to relate to the protagonist’s problem. Sure, at one point I was preorgasmic too, but I had to be eight years old or so at the time. I know women who’ve never gotten off, or whose sexual response is tricky and elusive, but I’ve never had any good advice to give them. I’m the opposite. There is no mystery in how to make me come. Of course you need some skill to get me off just touching my arm or back, but if you’ve found my clitoris or are penetrating me with anything more comfortable than a cactus, I’m not going to walk away frustrated.

There were ten months or so a couple years ago, though, during which I lost my orgasm. I had no sex drive, no periods, and couldn’t get off no matter what. I was dating Edwin Pomble at the time. He’d told me early on in our adventures that he hadn’t really cared for sex until we started fucking, and a lot of the change was down to the fact that he never had to worry that I was enjoying myself. He could just relax and have fun.

My orgasms are hard to miss. My pelvic muscles can contract with enough force to eject any cock. I usually cease my mid-sex caterwauling and get suddenly quiet. I stop breathing for a moment (a terrible habit). I make funny, blissed-out faces. If it’s an especially crazy one, my eyes roll way back into my head, which is super sexy…I promise.

I’ve noticed that the ease of getting me off sometimes goes to people’s heads. It did Edwin’s. Although he started out ambivalent about sex and self-deprecating about his abilites, by the time we’d been together for a while he would trot out the “I know I’m really amazing at sex, but is that all I am to you? An incredible lay?” card during arguments.

But all that stopped for a while, and poor Edwin didn’t understand what was happening any better than I did. Although I think part of it was the fact I was unhappy in the relationship, it turned out that the larger factor was a medical thing. When I got on the right thyroid medication things improved and eventually went more or less back to normal. But while I had this problem, I had zero interest in sex (which just goes to show how much we owe to biology, seeing as one of my dominant personality traits shut off one day because of hormones) so I didn’t really miss my orgasms all that much. It was troubling, but not really very frustrating. For me. I’m sure it was frustrating for Edwin, poor thing.

When my thyroid levels were still iffy, but rising, I finally got off by masturbating while doing deep breathing exercises, which I still find makes my orgasms more intense (this is why holding your breath is a terrible habit, by the way). A couple weeks later I had Edwin jack off against my clitoris, kind of slapping it with his cock. I don’t know why, but I absolutely love that. Would these methods help anyone else? No idea!

So while I had this little taste of what it’s like to have an orgasm block, I’ve never had to wonder if I’ll ever be able to come. I knew from early on what I like and how my body reacts. I was always confident that my climax issues were temporary. I still don’t know what it’s like to be preorgasmic. I’m lucky.

In fact, I’m so easy I worry about it. Later in our weekend together I flashed my left nipple playfully at Laramy while we were cuddling in bed. Guys are to nipples as magpies are to shiny things, so of course he started teasing it with his fingers, tonguing it, gently sucking. I had three orgasms from this inside of five minutes.

“Does it get irritating how easy I am to get off?” I asked after a bit. I worry about this way more often than I bring it up. It’s particularly embarrassing when I’ve just had a blatant orgasm during a PG-13 second-date make-out, but it almost always makes me a little self-conscious.

“Why would that be irritating?” He seemed puzzled.

“I don’t know. Kind of like always having to play a video game on the easiest level. Like there’s no challenge to it or something.” I swear this makes sense in my head.

“That’s very silly. I never think, ‘Wow, this would be so much cooler if I had no idea how to get her off, or maybe if I had to apply the same super specific stimulation until my tongue was numb and my jaw ached and I gave up in despair and she was completely frustrated and unsatisfied.’ You don’t have to worry. I don’t think I’ll ever get sick of watching you come.”

…Which is good, because being hyperorgasmic is pretty fun for me.

I’m massively creeped out by the purity movement and abstinence culture. You know how religious parents and teenagers– mostly daughters–buy into virginity in a big way with purity pledges, purity balls, purity rings, and… I dunno, probably chastity belts? That’s creepy.

I’m not even going to get into how I hate the fact that we’re teaching young women that their worth depends on their ability to withhold sex and/or to provide an unsullied sexual vessel to some schmuck in the future. I’m not even going to mention that. Well, barely.

What specifically makes my flesh crawl is the concept that somehow fathers are supposed to be the custodians of their daughters’ virginity. The implication that a man can more or less own his child’s sexuality at all is unspeakably corrupt, and giving her a little extra attention in the form of jewelry and dressed-up dancing doesn’t sanitize the concept or make it any easier to swallow. It’s still creepy as hell.

Take a look at this sample purity pledge, culled from the Hollywood Purity Ball’s website:

I (Name) pledge my purity to my father, my future/husband and my Creator. I recognize that virginity is my most precious gift to offer to my future husband. I will not engage in sexual activity of any kind before marriage but will keep my thought and my body pure as a very special present for the one I marry.

…Okay, I’m not trying to be a dick here, but what business is it of this girl’s father, future/husband, or Creator to care so damn much about stifling her emerging sexuality? These three guys are heroically falling all over themselves to bellyflop on some catastrophic grenade, but it’s actually just this poor girl. Now that she needs a training bra she might want to think about sex at some point and do other things associated with puberty. The pin has been pulled! Horrors! “Save yourself, Creator! Future/husband and I have got this. You have other virgins to make.”

And as “precious gifts” go, I think that if I were a guy I’d value other things in my future wife above her absolute lack of experience. Some examples that spring to mind:

1. An awesome sense of humor that still manages to pretend I’m funny from time to time
2. Compassion
3. Wit
4. A terrific ass (I’m an ass guy)
5. A sense of adventure in and out of the bedroom
6. Unfuckingbelievable blowjob skills
7. Independence, self-agency, and the ability to make up her own mind instead of just listening to her daddy all the fucking time
8. A good DVD collection
9. A ravenous intellect
10. A ravenous sex drive

If you don’t know what you’re doing or what you like, you should date and have some fun figuring it out. Being clueless isn’t your cue to go get married. Maybe it’s okay to give some virginity to your husband as a very special present, but for heaven’s sake, it shouldn’t be yours!

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.

If you read this blog and haven’t yet realized that I’m sort of a geek, I find your naivete both charming and worrisome. I’m not claiming to be geeky in any useful or entertaining sense: I’m not working on a new app for your iPhone or anything, and I’ve gnawed through the necks of zero chickens so far, but I like sci fi and video games and nobody talked to me in high school, so I guess that’s what’s important here.

And considering I’m a geeky girl who can remember any part of the late eighties/early nineties, you sure as hell know I wanted to fuck Data. You know, Lieutenant Commander Data of the Starship Enterprise, from Star Trek: The Next Generation… the pasty, stoic android with a heart of gold (proverbially speaking). I don’t know what it was about him, but I think most little girls who grew up on TNG grew up wanting to get on Data (or maybe it was just me, but I cherish my delusions). Maybe it was because he was childlike yet adult, so we could relate to him but also perceive him as a sexually mature male. Maybe it was the Pinocchio pathos of his whole story arc. Anyway, when I was a wee lass I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to do with Data, but I certainly knew I wanted him, especially when he dressed up as Sherlock Holmes. I’m wet as October just thinking about it.

That early crush may be a contributing factor in the lust I later developed for the replicant cyborg Bryan Fury from the Tekken games. I even wrote a series of haiku for Bryan. Among them:

Cyborgs are machines!
I like to grab your joystick
It’s just two quarters

I also had ravenous crushes on Tasha Yar, Geordi LaForge, and Beverly Crusher, whom I credit with my later interest in chicks with short hair, literature, and… er… blinky scanner thingies, respectively. I’d probably still pine for Jean-Luc Picard to this day if I didn’t identify with him so strongly. I’m really a bald, French, male starship commander with an English accent trapped in a woman’s body, you know.

But I have to admit that I haven’t watched much TNG since I was a kid, so when Laramy asked me, “You’ve seen the episode where Yar and Data fuck, right?” I was like “Whaaaaaa?” because while I’m sure I saw it back in the eighties, I’m also positive that I had nothing approaching any concept of what was going on in sex scenes until circa 1993.

So, of course, we had to watch The Naked Now, like, now. While naked. Just kidding. Although we probably should’ve thought of that.

In The Naked Now, the crew of the Enterprise is infected by some exotic water molecules, which pick up carbon from their bodies and somehow produce dramatic intoxication, rendering everyone completely uninhibited and wacky. This was the second episode ever of TNG, and in it they had basically everyone break character, which is an odd choice for so early in their development. But anyway, all you have to know is that Tasha Yar seduces Data (whom we learn is fully functional and programmed in multiple techniques, a wide variety of pleasuring), but she wasn’t in her right mind so we the audience aren’t obligated to think she’s a slut. What the fuck is that, anyway? The only time this character can exhibit sexual agency is when she has zero personal agency? That’s super weak. Tasha had every right to keep boning like mad until she got killed by that evil blob guy.

I explained as we were watching that I used to want to lick Data like a 9-volt battery, and Laramy suggested I fulfill the old fantasy: all I’d need is a white dildo with a subtle shimmer.

…

That’s when it hit me. That dildo already exists. I’ve been making fun of it for months! Sweet William H. Macy on a stick!

Have you seen this? It’s called the Vamp. Toymaker Tantus thought it would be a good idea to capitalize on the Twilight series mania, and made a dildo that was pale, shimmery, and retains temperature. Put it in the fridge for a couple hours and bingo, you’re fucking Edward fucking Cullen. But it occurred to me that this novelty dildo was perfect for fucking Data, too. I’m sorry I ever doubted you, Tantus.

And really, isn’t the super creepy, controlling vampire heartthrob that has captured the hearts of repressed, immature females everywhere actually just a poor woman’s Data? I trudged through part of the first Twilight book before it put me off my feed, so I know what I’m talking about here: Edward Cullen is cave creature-pale, has yellowish eyes, isn’t quite human, has superpowers, and uses unwieldy diction. Sure the details are different: Data has more awesome, less emo powers like logic and speed reading against Edward’s preternatural moping and mind reading. But really, the major difference between them is that Data doesn’t suck, and he doesn’t hesitate to pleasure (with wide variety) a lady when she asks nicely. Now that’s a character truly deserving of his own dildo.  Plus, he isn’t profoundly troubling like some other pasty anthropomorphs I might mention. Could everyone please stop teaching young girls to fetishize abusive relationships? Eschew trashy supernatural abstinence porn, kiddies, and embrace the high tech lechery of science fiction.

Now, to order a Vamp and emblazon the Starfleet logo on the bottom. Oh, my delicious android: I’ve waited far too long.

I want it. No, I don’t lust after it. Masturbating with a tentacle dildo would be more a matter of novelty than actual desire. While cephalopods are super awesome, and ever since I saw The Future is Wild I absolutely believe that they’re going to inherit the Earth, it’s hard for me to sexualize them, or their appendages.

It would be more in the family of giving a foot job: something to try just so I could say (mostly to myself, and possibly to the internet) that I have.

I get why there’s tentacle porn. Kind of. Apparently sex with octopodes has been a theme in Japanese literature and art since the early 19th century. So when hentai creators were faced with the prospect of forever turning penises into pixelated blobs to comply with censorship regulations someone cleverly dipped into the historical vault and pulled out a writhing, slithery tentacle that was all too willing to get down to business. For the greater good.

I don’t get why that should be hot, per se. I also don’t really like coffee, but I’m not thrown every time I pass a Starbucks. I figure it’s just a personal choice. Some people get off on watching women popping balloons; some people get off on watching cartoon women with balloon tits being forcibly penetrated by tentacle monsters. Or maybe everybody actually just finds both things funny. I mean, even if you did find this stuff unbearably erotic, part of you would realize that it’s hilarious, right?

And that’s why I need this toy. It just can’t get around being funny. I want to bring this tentacle dildo on adventures with me. I want to take vacation photos of the tentacle dildo: in front of the Louvre, gravely contemplating the heretical MacDonald’s there; taking advantage of perspective by pushing his mighty suckers against the Leaning Tower of Pisa to keep it from tipping over. I want tourists everywhere to pose with my tentacle dildo. I want virgins to flee from it. “It’s okay, virgins!” I’d laugh, “he’s friendly.” But they don’t understand English very well. My tentacle dildo and I would have a laugh about the misunderstanding over tea and Turkish Delight.

But the really compelling thing about owning this tentacle dildo is that it empowers a person to say “my tentacle dildo” a lot. You know, without having to do so much imagining. My tentacle dildo. It should be a show or something. Things being what they are, probably an anime.

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…