Best Sex Writing of the Year

by Jon Pressick

  I’m not sure what this break will accomplish. I’m not even sure what I’m looking to get out of this sexless period. But I do know that I already feel a weight lifted from my shoulders at knowing I can guiltlessly stay in and write Wednesday instead of going to the local lesbian night to try to get laid.

  No Restrictions

  Dee Dee Behind

  My very first session with a client with severe disabilities was while I was working as a professional dominatrix on the third floor of a dungeon in an elevator-less building. In addition to the logistical nightmare of getting a man in a motorized wheelchair onto four hours of public transportation and then up three flights of stairs, how, exactly, was I to tie up someone who was already completely physically immobile?

  Paul, a man in his fifties with a degenerative condition that affected his nervous system, wrote a letter, a snail-mail letter, to the listed PO box of the dungeon, explaining his deep and unrelenting desire to be whipped. This, he said, had captured his imagination ever since our dungeon was featured on a silly public access television show that highlights the “wild and offbeat” places of my hometown of Chicago.

  Paul explained in his nearly illegible and deliberate handwriting his concern that his parents, still his primary caregivers despite his own age and independence, might think he was being abused by his attendants should they find marks or bruises on his body. He was deeply ashamed to admit that this had happened in the past after he managed to pinch his own genitals for sexual pleasure until he left deep purple bruises. The suspected attendant had been fired and was barely spared criminal charges, and Paul would never live down the regret he felt for the trouble he caused her.

  But to come clean and discuss desire, particularly his pleasure in pain, was not an option for him. It was one thing to have erections during sponge baths, but a penchant for masochism would have been too much for those who cared for him. Paul was surrounded by people whom he depended on, not just for a lifeline to all things physically beyond the reach of his crippled body, but also for their emotional ties to him created by his own helplessness. His helplessness was his survival.

  As a sex worker, I can imagine that if the source of those bruises were traced back to me, the consequences would be devastating. It freaks me out right now, just thinking about it. I imagine how I might explain consent to reporters at my courthouse interview while standing trial for felony sexual abuse of the helplessly disabled. How could consent exist in such a lopsided power dynamic? To believe that this was a consensual sexual experience would mean to concede to the sexual autonomy of a man who cannot feed or clothe himself. But here were the man’s desires, in black smudgy ink, an eloquent request he preferred to submit to me in writing, because, as the letter continued to explain, his ability to speak is also severely impaired and therefore he is unable to express himself with speech. Great. I imagined myself burning in hell in fishnets.

  After Paul arrived in his motorized wheelchair, and a long battle to get him up the stairs in the chair failed, I chained up the chair with my bicycle lock to the steel handles of our downstairs lobby doors, while the house wrestling domme carried him up the three flights of stairs to the dungeon. After strapping him to a wheeling gurney we kept as a medical prop in the “doctor’s office,” I carefully undressed him. I was terrified I was going to hurt him. The irony.

  Paul’s body was twisted and unwieldy, his skin a pasty white. His bony apple-shaped rib cage was topped with a huge lopsided head, giving it the illusion of growing out of his shoulder. His face was frozen in an insane smile. I could not tell if he was incredibly happy or horribly contorted. I peeled down his pants to discover, to my nineteen-year-old only-a-year-in-the-biz shock, a raging-hard penis, prominent and quite impressive in size. It stuck straight out of the dark recess of his lap, a lap permanently frozen in a sitting position.

  He made little encouraging snorting noises as I admonished him for being a horny little slut—so encouraging in fact, that I raised my hand in a threatening gesture as if I were going to slap his cock in punishment for his digressions. When I did this, Paul went wild. His eyes grew huge and he spasmed with excitement, making these crazy disturbing honking noises that emanated deep from inside his face. The entire session was one long negotiation of me being terrified I was hurting him, and him getting incredibly turned on, and then me becoming a little less terrified, and on and on it went. In the end, he came multiple times with only the stimulation of a riding crop whipping his cock—the mark of a true masochist.

  After hauling wheelchairs up and down flights of stairs more than once in the past fifteen years of being a sex worker, I think about the barriers to sexual pleasure people who are disabled face all the time, both the physical and the social. In addition to the isolation people with disabilities face, stemming from their exclusion from physical spaces and communities designed for ablebodied adults only, many social situations prohibit people with disabilities from fully participating in their own sexuality. The world continues to shift and change around disability, but sexuality seems the exemption.

  However, despite being shielded most of their lives from the topic of sexuality, no disabled client has ever contacted me with the naïveté about sex that is portrayed in Hollywood versions of disability. Portrayals of sexuality of the disabled as innocent assuage our discomfort around the topic of different bodies and queerness. The reason they “feel good” is because they confront what disturbs us about the desires of the non-desirable. Their sexuality is transformed into something normative and comfortable only if we recast the disabled as children, and the hookers as saints.

  A few years ago, I received an email from Justin, a twenty-two-year-old virgin. He explained he was a person with a disease that made him unable to use his muscles and therefore needed a wheelchair, constant care, and an attendant who was typing the very email that I was presently reading. He was a virgin, and could I help him? He had the blessing of his attendant, but not his disapproving parents, who still spoke to him in a baby voice. Could I accommodate the unusual situation?

  I squinted to examine the picture attached to the email, showing a face propped up with pillows inside a huge motorized chair that swallowed his tiny frame. The idea of taking something—anything—from him made me feel uncomfortable.

  I knew that stigmatization of disability was the real barrier to Justin’s sexual satisfaction, not his inability to use his limbs. By recognizing my own feelings of discomfort as an acculturation to infantilize Justin, and responding to him instead as the horny twenty-two-year-old he was, I was trying to practice direct resistance to the everyday sexual oppressions and stigmas that all queer-bodied people face. Part of why I love being a sex worker is because I am part of a revolution to liberate the world from shame, heteronormativity, and social isolation.

  But, at the same time, I grew up on this planet the same as everyone else. I try to unpack my privilege, and sometimes I fall short: I hate my girl body, I “yuck” someone’s “yum,” or I am too scared to touch twisted limbs. Even though I’m scared, I keep chipping away at my own shit, going deeper and deeper into that world of Balls-Out Whore Fantastica, where everyone wears leopardprint spandex and speaks openly and curiously about shocking topics at the dinner table. This is how we get that way, that place where the shocking is normal. Among other things, it is one of the sex-worker superpowers that makes us soldiers in this revolution; we pull it together and pretend someone didn’t just scare the shit out of us with their drunken violence, that they didn’t just shit in our hand, or they didn’t deeply offend us with a stigmatizing backhanded compliment mid-fellatio. Or, at the very least, that all these things happened, but didn’t bother us one bit.

  I didn’t offer Justin any special accommodation except to waive my extra hundred-dollar travel fee. Is this a practice that balances helpful but not patronizing? To respect his sexuality by treating him like any other man, even if that means shaking him down for all he’s got? Is charging full price an act of solidar
ity? Or am I risking blowing his cover, because honestly, this man has no job, and how the hell can he hide a three-hundred-dollar bank account withdrawal? Did Justin feel like he had a political ally in this sex worker, someone who could provide comfort in his sexual normalcy, as I do for all of my clients? Or am I just a blood-sucking whore to him too? After all, he grew up on the same planet as everyone else.

  He and his attendant conspired to use the attendant’s father’s house while he was away on vacation, making the appointment an all-day production and a complex web of deceit for both of them. For me, it was a 2:00 p.m. outcall. I borrowed the car of a friend, another sex worker.

  “I’m leaving now!” I yelled, picking up the keys from her foyer table. My friend in her computer room-slash-home office-slash-webcamming stage didn’t answer. “Going to take a crippled man’s vir-gin-it-yyyy,” I singsonged, pausing for an answer from down the hall.

  “Have fun,” she said, without even directing her voice towards the door to the hallway.

  “You’re so amazing,” said a voice off the foyer, just as I was opening the front door. I turned and it was my friend’s roommate. Leaning against the kitchen counter with a cup of tea in both hands, she cocked her head and made a face. I know this face. It’s the “sex work is a public service” face. It’s the “you are such a good person…and I could never do what you do” face. For the first time since booking this session, I felt gross. I wanted to scratch her eyes out.

  I drove around a deserted subdivision looking for the address number along rows of identical-looking houses. I found the house because it was the only one with a car in the driveway—an ancient gray minivan covered in special designation stickers, yellow warnings on all sides, and bulky door modifications, sitting in all its disabled obviousness in the driveway.

  When I knocked on the door, I was surprised to find that the attendant, a profession usually reserved for women, was instead a handsome young frat boy about Justin’s age. He explained that

  Justin wanted to skip through the undignified aspect of making me wait the thirty minutes it took to get him from clothed in a wheelchair to naked in bed, so they did it already. Justin was waiting in the bedroom, and he hoped I wasn’t freaked out. “I’m not,” I lied.

  In a whisper, the attendant expressed his ambivalence about helping Justin get laid, since he could lose his job, or possibly worse. He was visibly distraught describing how no one around him took Justin seriously as a young man, not just censoring him from the world of adults, but also disallowing him the right to grow up.

  He feared Justin’s parents were emotionally invested in keeping Justin five years old. He was afraid that by denying Justin his desire to finally get laid, he would be just like the parents. So he consented to help, even though he really didn’t want to. After some consoling and reassurance, I was led to the doors of the bedroom. I slipped though the double doors alone, into the dark, carpeted chamber. The bed consumed the entire room. At first I didn’t see him, his small body covered in folds of sheets. But my eyes adjusted, and from the doorway, I could make out the side of his face, his hair, a shoulder, all completely still.

  “Justin?” I said, into the quiet.

  Without moving or laying eyes on me, he bellowed, “Hello there, sexy!”

  My session with Justin was unremarkable in that when it came right down to it, Justin was like any other man who is twenty-two and still a virgin—wide-eyed and easy to impress. Justin was mature, funny, and self-deprecating, and I enjoyed his company, careful to not lay the hustle on too thick, lest he mistake my desire to make him feel good for the paternalism that is suspiciously heaped onto people with disabilities. Able-bodied men, hilariously enough, have no such “bullshit meter” for praise.

  I imagine Justin had a great time, but I doubt he could care less about the intersecting politics of disability and sex work. He was, after all, just wanting to get laid out of the arrangement, and wasn’t really interested in joining a whore revolution. And I, for all my radical political beliefs, am in this game to get paid. I like to think something is traded in those exchanges besides sex and money, but you never really know. I know that I made some kind of impression on Justin, because I got an email from him a week later. Thanks for the good time, he said, but I am not his type. Did I have a friend? Someone blonde perhaps, with big breasts?

  About the Authors

  LAURA AGUSTÍN (The Naked Anthropologist at lauraagustin.com) is an authority on undocumented migration and commercial sex. Her book Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry shows how prostitution is isolated as a feminist debate and how moral crusaders use neocolonialist ideas of deviance and crime to repress migration and infantilize women.

  LUX ALPTRAUM is a writer, sex educator and consultant specializing in sex technology. Past projects have included gigs as the editor, publisher and CEO of Fleshbot; a sex educator at an adolescent pregnancy prevention program; an HIV pretest counselor; and the founder of ThatStrangeGirl, an alternative porn site, and Boinkology.

  JASON ARMSTRONG is the author of the blog Hunting for Sex: Cautionary Tales from the Quest (huntingforsex.blogspot.ca), voted by Kinkly.com as one of the top 100 sex blogs on the net. Jason is currently working on his first book, entitled Gooning: Portrait of a Masturbator.

  DEE DEE BEHIND is a sex worker, mostly. She wrote her piece in a writing class at her fancy Ivy League university. On the last day of class, after workshopping her story to her shocked peers, a fellow classmate approached her in the hallway. “I’m a sex worker, too,” she grinned.

  RACHEL KRAMER BUSSEL (rachelkramerbussel.com) is the author of Sex & Cupcakes: A Juicy Collection of Essays and a sex columnist for Philadelphia City Paper and DAME. She teaches erotic writing workshops at colleges, conferences, sex toy stores and online, and has edited over fifty anthologies such as The Big Book of Orgasms.

  LYNN COMELLA, PHD is an Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She writes a regular column on sexuality and culture for Vegas Seven magazine, and is co-editor (with Shira Tarrant) of the book New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law.

  AMY DENTATA (amydentata.com) is a writer, game designer and performer whose writing has appeared on Autostraddle and in Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, a resource guide for the trans community, and in her self-published chapbook, Bite. She has also spoken about trans issues at colleges across the U.S.

  EPIPHORA (HeyEpiphora.com) has been testing sex toys and writing about them on her blog for seven years. She has been featured in VICE, Playboy XBIZ Premiere magazine and Tristan Taormino’s The Secrets of Great G-Spot Orgasms and Female Ejaculation, but her greatest accomplishment is that readers entrust their future orgasms to her.

  LAUREN MARIE FLEMING (LaurenMarieFleming.com) is a writer and motivator who believes in radical self-love, mindblowing sex and the healing power of writing. Formerly known as Queerie Bradshaw, Lauren is the founder of the Frisky Feminist Collective & Press (FriskyFeminist.com), and creator of the Bawdy Love movement (BawdyLove.com).

  ALEXANDRIA GODDARD has over twenty-five years of combined experience in legal investigations, fraud/risk management investigations and social media analysis. She has appeared on shows such as “Dr. Phil,” “20/20,” “Piers Morgan,” “Democracy Now,” “Jane Velez-Mitchell” and in a multitude of print and web-based articles regarding the Steubenville, Ohio rape case.

  FIONA HELMSLEY’s writing can be found in various anthologies like Ladyland and Air in the Paragraph Line and online at websites like Jezebel, Junk Lit, The Hairpin and The Rumpus. Her book of essays, stories and poems, My Body Would be the Kindest of Strangers is forthcoming in 2015.

  TINA HORN produces and hosts “Why Are People Into That?!”, a podcast that demystifies desire. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Her first book, Love Not Given Lightly, is a collection of nonfiction stories about sex workers.

  MITCH KELLAWAY is
a trans, queer, biracial writer, and the coeditor of Manning Up, an anthology of personal narratives by trans men. He covers transgender news for Advocate.com and has published with Lambda Literary Review, Everyday Feminism, Huff-ington Post and Original Plumbing. He is assistant editor for Transgress Press.

  BELLE KNOX is an award-winning pornography actress and a feminist activist. She has contributed to Time, Rolling Stone, Jezebel, XoJane, Huffington Post and Forbes on the topics of feminism, sexual freedom, censorship and libertarianism. A women’s studies student at Duke University and a Students for Liberty Campus Coordinator, Belle has spoken at Duke University, UNC Chapel Hill, Lafayette College and the International Conference on Human Trafficking.

  JIZ LEE (JizLee.com) is a queer porn star whose video work spans a decade of more than two hundred projects over three continents. The genderqueer performer is founder of the erotic philanthropic Karma Pervs, and editor of the porn anthology How to Come Out Like a Porn Star.

  ASHLEY MANTA (AshleyManta.com) is a feminist sexuality educator and writer and author of the e-book, A Feminist’s Guide to Phone Sex (Frisky Feminist Press, 2014). Ashley speaks candidly about living with herpes and has done extensive work to promote acceptance and break the stigma surrounding STIs. She is cohost of sex and relationship podcast Carnalcopia.

  CAMERYN MOORE (camerynmoore.com) is a playwright/per-former, free-range writer, accidental educator, and yes, a phone sex operator. Her first play Phone Whore won the award for Best Female Solo show at the 2010 San Francisco Fringe Festival and Critics’ Choice at the 2013 Houston Fringe Festival.

  JARRETT NEAL earned a BA in English from Northwestern University and an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been featured in many publications, both online and in print, including Cold Drank, The Gay and Lesbian Review, Chelsea Station, Q Review, Requited Journal and Off the Rocks.