Big Ed's Place

There’s a great mini-scene in the movie Boogie Nights that summarizes on of the major challenges of writing erotica for me. Dirk Diggler starts his career in porn adoring his female stars and talking about how much he respects them. The mini-scene is him looking down at a woman off camera and saying, “Suck it, Bitch!” The point, of course, is that he lost his moral compass in his immersion in the porn industry. He fell into a common trap of degrading the sex itself.

I should of course define ‘degradation of sex.’ I happen to believe that Sex is Big. It’s powerful and sometimes it’s incredible and sometimes it’s awful. Sometimes it’s as light as popcorn and sometimes it has more meaning than God (or is a way to find God, if you follow tantra). I think it’s Big enough to allow plenty of views and plenty of opinions.

But the views I happen to seriously dislike are the ones full of disdain. I’d call them puerile, but they’re more than childish in that they actively attempt to devalue the very thing they’re promoting. The best example I can think of is the guy who says, “how can I get one of those bitches to sleep with me?” Err… are they something you want or not? Because your words say both.

Another example is Hustler. I’ve had difficulty getting past the poop jokes and blatant misogyny to appreciate the magazine. It’s crude and it revels in that crudity. But it also does so while making it clear that the crudity it’s reveling in isn’t worth appreciating. Kind of like Religious Conservatives looking down on the very acts their doing in private, except it’s open in the magazine.

Another example–why do some johns look down on the women they just paid for sex? Morally the two are pretty equivalent.

The degradation of sex in porn, where the porn actively denigrates the very thing it features, is unfortunately common. It’s also an easy mindset to slide into.

Now I should be clear that I have no qualms with people having the right to look at degrading crappy stuff. If someone wants to wallow in “Two Girls, One Cup” then that’s their choice and I don’t believe they should be censored or restricted from it. However, I don’t want to be part of it or contribute to it.

This is in part because I’ve had personal experience, unfortunately, of getting so caught up in sex and exploring sex that I did things I regretted and that I believe were degrading to me, if not also to the people involved. I was so interested in chasing the specific sexual event that I lost sight of the bigger picture and I couldn’t really accept what I was doing. It’s not something I wish to repeat as a writer.

So this is, for me, an issue in commercialism. Stroke stories sell. Crude stroke stories sell better. Taboo crude stroke stories sell even better. And that turns my stomach a little. I don’t like what that indicates about our culture. Aren’t we grown up enough to go for stuff that’s more openly honest about sex being a good thing?

Furthermore, the degradation is partially built into commercialism. Advertisers have long found that the best way to make money is to make people uncomfortable or unhappy with what they have. Then you offer them the solution for a price. Political advertising is the most blatant about this, but it’s elsewhere. Notably, personal care products do much of their sales by introducing insecurities about our appearance if we don’t use their product. Any attempt to go for maximum short-term profits has to at least consider degradation as a viable option.

I’m not willing to have that option, and it’s taken me a while to feel my way through to my own limits. I have to acknowledge the temptations as well, to ‘sell out’ for the cash. As I continue to explore sexuality as a writer, I don’t want to have my work contribute to the hypocrisy around sex I see so often elsewhere. It’s good, it’s fun, it’s big, and yes it can be misused. But it’s not worthy of disdain. It’s also not worth the money, when I can remember that.

Which means I’ll need remember that scene from Boogie Nights anytime I get tempted to write, “Suck it, bitch!”

On my drive to and from work, I listen to the radio, often flipping stations to avoid the commercials or to look for a weather report. This past week, I caught a Katy Perry Song, Last Friday Night that’s inspired this post.

Now I’m a lyrics guy. Good lyrics grab me, be they country, pop, blues, rock, or Broadway musicals. I’m not a big Rob Thomas fan, but his line, “I’ve got a scar I can talk about” in the Matchbox 20 song Bright Lights nails the emotion and introspection at the same time. Similarly, the lines from the Citizen King song, I’ve Seen Better Days, which go “I’ve seen better days, I’ve been the star of many plays” is just fricking inane (and it’s in the chorus!). So when the Katy Perry song came on the pop song, I listened for the words.

The song’s celebrating a drunken debauchery night that the singer can’t really remember. It has lines about ‘a stranger in my bed’ and not being able to remember if she kissed someone, as well as “It’s a blacked out blur but I’m pretty sure it ruled.” Then it has a repeated refrain:

Last Friday night
We went streaking in the park
Skinny dipping in the dark
Then had a ménage à trois

Last Friday night
Yeah I think we broke the law
Always say we’re gonna stop
Oh-whoa-oh
This Friday night
Do it all again

And this is where I went, “whoa!”

I’m not used to mainstream pop songs played openly on the radio talking about ménage à trois. It definitely makes me wonder what the younger generation is up to. Has group sex become casual enough to toss off as a line about a wild evening? Is it what the ‘cool kids’ are doing? I suspect it’s a standard “Katy Perry being mildly provocative” since she is the one who burst into fame with “I Kissed a Girl.” However, I’m still struck by how casual of a reference it was. I certainly can’t recall any pop songs from the 70′s or 80′s that referred to group sex. Plenty that referred to sex, but not group sex.

But then I realized that the song also implied that they had to be drunk to have the ménage à trois. That implies there are still inhibitions around group sex. Which leaves me wondering… hmmm. Is this as big of a step in mainstreaming non-traditional sexual practices as I thought?

So… if you could fulfill all your fantasies, would you?

In the comments on my Submission 24/7 post, FG said, “the quickest way to ruin a fantasy is to think about it rationally,” which is of course a variant on my opening question. That’s the problem with moving fantasies from an ideal to reality. Rational thought kicks in, or should kick in, along the way. But that doesn’t prevent the speculation about what it’d be like to seriously go after it…

I can think of two people who’ve gone after their fantasies, at least in the sexual sense. One is Mr. Acworth from kink.com (see my review of The Upper Floor). The other is, of course, Hugh Hefner.

Now I admit that I haven’t studied Hefner or Playboy closely. I did investigate their stock several years ago and decided it was a bad buy because Hugh wouldn’t let anyone run the magazine other than the way he wanted, and that approach was clearly no longer competitive. It might have been in the 50′s and 60′s, but the sensibility was out of touch with the Maxim crowd. I did hear about parties/orgies at the Playboy mansion and also unsubstantiated rumors that a girl couldn’t become a Playmate without sleeping with Hefner.

Then, a tell-all came out recently. The author alleges that Hef still has Viagra-assisted sex with 10-12 women twice a week in what can only be viewed as an assembly line (each woman rides him for a couple of minutes). They’re all paid quite well for this coupling. I haven’t seen anything that vouches for whether this is true or not, but I could imagine it being true. It sounds exciting at first, until I start really thinking about it and the reality sets in. It honestly doesn’t sound very much fun after the first couple of times as the novelty would wear out and it would be just a chore.

But what strikes a chord is that it sounds like Hef is “living the life” that he wanted. The company can go down the drain because the magazine and company really only exist to let him have that life. He got the sexual life he set out to have.

But is that the life I’d want to live?

If I’m honest, I’m living most of the life I want to live. This came up for me recently because a friend asked the question that’s formed the basis of many time travel stories–”if you could go back and do it all over again, knowing what you know now, would you?”

I have to answer “no.” Yes, I’d probably have gotten laid a helluva lot more often, and possibly been richer (since I’d know who to bet on in major sporting events), but the rational thought makes me consider all the things I’d be giving up (my wife and son for starters) and all the real practical issues involved. Sure, I could seduce the-one-that-got-away, but what if she’d turned out to be crazy, or had an STD, or a handful of other problems I didn’t know about because I didn’t end up with her? The most beautiful woman I ever bedded turned out to have serious depression, after all.

Instead, I have to consider that perhaps I’m already “living the life”…

The synchronicity of two things this past week involving sexual conservatism made me smile. First, an author wrote me and reminded me that my sexual history is not the mainstream. Second, a woman I know attended a ‘sex toy party’ (one of those sales parties where women sell adult products to other women in someone’s home) and discovered that she was one of the more ‘liberal’ attendees.

Now I know that I’ve got more experience than most people. After all, I deliberately set out to get experience in tantra and bdsm. I accumulated several shelves of books on sexuality and that’s after purging a shelf or two about a decade ago when I last moved. I also spend way too much time exploring the internet, and it’s usually on sexually related topics. Hell, I write porn. My wife jokingly calls me a dirty old man.

So I wasn’t surprised to be politely reminded that most people tend to get into vanilla sexual relationships and those relationships are where the majority of their sexual life occurs. I, after all, have been happily married and monogamous for several years now and therefore ‘retired’ from a lot of the active exploration.

But I was surprised to be reminded how much more adventurous I’ve been than average. Most of that hearing about the sex toy party. The sales lady said that every woman should own five vibrators, and listed the five types (phallic, bullet, wand, butterfly, waterproof). I smiled when I heard this, recognizing a marketing spiel in work. If five is “ideal”, how many of the women she’s selling to will break down and buy at least one?

For that’s what the surprise was. I had long ago hit the point where I assumed that every woman owned a couple of vibrators. At a minimum, I figured every woman had one that she really liked. But the party reminded me–not so. Most of the women attending were about to make their first purchase.

And when I step back, I have to go “duh.” I’m sure, in the national or global average, a substantial number of women, if not the majority, don’t own a sex toy of any type. Quick googling confirms that–only 46% of women admitted to owning a vibrator in one survey. Another says 25%. A third says half. None of those numbers are close to the “every woman” figure I’d had in my head.

This was confirmed because one of the women expressed concerns about her husband feeling threatened by a vibrator. That just made me raise my eyebrows. I thought we’d culturally moved past the belief that a man wasn’t truly manly if his wife got off by other means. My personal belief is closer to: “hell, enjoy your vibrator! Use it a lot! Can I watch? How about if I drive?”

In fact, as a single man, I owned, gawd, six vibrators. Not for my use, but ones I’d accumulated for use with various lovers and playmates over the years and ended up keeping (though on more than one occasion, a breakup meant I lost my sex toys).

Which, I guess, it part of why I was surprised. It’s too easy to take myself as an example of ‘normal’ without realizing how non-conservative I really am.