Best Sex Writing 2008

by Rachel Kramer Bussel

  [As I was] talking on the phone with the people at CCBill, they explained to me that it falls under the bodily fluids and excretions clause. I asked them if they still provide services to sites containing male ejaculation. “Yes,” he answered, “but that’s different.”

  “How is it different?” I asked. “Sounds to me like sexual discrimination.”

  “I don’t want to have a semantics argument with you,” one of them started.

  “No, you don’t,” I answered. “You won’t win.”

  Even if they would entertain our arguments and we could prove that their policy equating menstruation with feces is primitive and discriminatory (their “Bodily Excretions” clause in its entirety forbids “any and all depictions and/or actual occurrences and/or references involving the content of, advertising or marketing of scat/fecal matter, and/or a woman’s period or menstruation”), and even if they agreed that menstruation is a more normal function to integrate into sex play than, say, a gang of twenty guys ejaculating on a teenager’s face or a woman being double- or triple-penetrated anally (bukkake, dp and tp are all “acceptable” in the porn world), CCBill is only bowing to the higher power of Visa who couldn’t care less if they lose revenue from porn transactions; in spite of unsubstantiated reports about pornography being a multibillion-dollar industry, Visa could certainly live without Internet porn’s drop-in-the-bucket sales and the high chargeback rates endemic in our industry.

  With no reliable alternatives for processing payments, May Ling Su made her site free, Tuna turned to a European processor, and I held my breath hoping no one would rat me out to CCBill by telling them I had menstruation content tucked in between my softcore photo sets and striptease videos. Eventually I moved all of my red content to its own site, BloodyTrixie.com, to avoid having my white-bread-and-butter site’s income compromised with CCBill (although I am still technically breaking their rules simply by providing a link to my red site).

  I don’t think any of us really blame CCBill for covering their asses with Visa and I doubt that they relish shutting people down. It may sound counterproductive, but I actually appreciate CCBill’s conservativism; we all want to have a reliable payment processor that follows the rules, prevents fraudulent transactions and pays us on time, and we know the rules didn’t start with CCBill or even with Visa. In fact, no one really knows what the rules are because obscenity laws are extremely vague and entirely subjective, varying from one community’s set of standards to another’s. As attorney Anthony Comparetto says, “the problem with obscenity is that it is the only crime in which you don’t know when you have committed it. Think about that. You are driving down the road doing thirty-five miles an hour, and a police officer pulls you over to give you a speeding ticket. You tell him you were not speeding, and that there are no speed limit signs. He agrees that there are no speed limit signs, as it is up to the officer to determine if you are speeding…in his opinion. And you get the ticket.”

  The general public might assume laws against obscenity are just holdovers from bygone days, left on the books but never enforced, like laws against playing dominoes on Sunday or getting fish drunk. On the contrary, check out some of the steps made during George W. Bush’s administration to combat obscenity: • Under the guise of protecting children, in 2003 Congress enacted the Protect Act with an amendment authored by Republican congressman Tom Feeney restricting judges from imposing sentences lighter than suggested minimums even in cases involving obscenity that does not involve children.

  • Record-keeping regulations (18 U.S.C. 2257) requiring porn producers to keep model IDs on file proving they were eighteen or over at the time of the shoot were revised to include a level of detailed documentation and disclosure that jeopardizes the privacy and safety of porn actors and models and is nearly impossible to maintain without error.

  • Continuing the Ashcroft-declared war on pornography, in May the Department of Justice announced the establishment of an Obscenity Prosecution Task Force (in addition to the already-existing Child Exploitation and Obscenity Unit).

  With these kinds of steps being taken, we can expect the DOJ to file even more obscenity-related charges in communities specifically chosen for their conservative standards, increasing the likelihood of conviction. So what are community standards regarding sex acts involving menstruation? Judging from comments in online communities, both men and women are shocked by the censor-free area of BloodyTrixie.com, calling it “gross,” “disgusting,” and “disturbing.” Even jaded adult webmasters accustomed to the most degrading hardcore porn imaginable respond to tame videos of intercourse with a menstruating woman by remarking, “Damn that is some sick shit. People who enjoy that fetish are really messed up,” and “I’ve seen a lot in this biz but that’s some really nasty shit. Why not just wait till it runs its course or get a blowjob? Takes unsafe sex to another level and generally it’s not pleasant pussy.”

  On the other hand, plenty of people pipe up during forum discussions about period porn to say that they enjoy red sex and point out that the disgusted parties must not have a lot of experience with women if they’re “afraid to get a little blood on their swords.” On the legal front, the beginning of 2005 saw the U.S. Supreme Court kill the Feeney Amendment, and a District Court judge dismiss the charges as unconstitutional in this presidential administration’s first high-profile obscenity case, filed against Extreme Associates. Of course, the DOJ appealed the judge’s ruling, which stated that people’s constitutional right to possess obscene materials is infringed upon by the government’s ban on the sale and distribution of obscenity (making it impossible to possess obscenity unless you create it yourself).

  The core values forming the foundation of the United States government’s war on obscenity are the same as its core values opposing sex workers’ rights across the board: they concede that sex itself is okay, but insist that it’s not okay to actually sell sex. The government’s antiporn warriors continually defend the persecution of pornographers by claiming to support First Amendment rights and privacy rights, essentially saying that we have the right to create and view obscenity… we just don’t have the right to distribute it or make any money off of it. We women (just barely) have the right to do what we want with our bodies, as long as we don’t make money on it. In fact, the sentences for obscenity increase based on how much money you’ve profited on through your “crime”; instead of being congratulated and sheltered from prosecution for your capitalistic ways as a good war profiteer, timber tycoon, or pharmaceutical company would be, the severity of your punishment increases proportionate to the amount of revenue you generate through sex.

  We’re encouraged to pay plastic surgeons to “beautify” our labia and stuff our cheeks, tits, and asses with implants, but we’re breaking the law if we charge men money to fuck our cosmetically modified cunts. We’re encouraged to pay tens of thousands of dollars to fertility therapists and remain on bed rest for months so we can distend our wombs with litters of artificially conceived babies, but if we sell pictures of ourselves with our girlfriend’s hand in our twats we could be fined and go to prison for distributing the obscenity of fisting. We’re encouraged to buy feminine hygiene products from “respectable” corporations like Proctor & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, and Kimberly-Clarke, generating over fourteen billion pads, tampons and applicators for North American landfills per year, but God forbid we charge anyone money to watch videos of us actually using one of these products. We’re encouraged to buy hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars worth of pills individually to cope with menstrual cramps under a system that makes health care unaffordable for the average indie webwhore, but if we earn money by selling explicit videos demonstrating cramp reduction by masturbating ourselves to a juicy red orgasm we could find ourselves behind bars.

  Menstruation may be the last taboo, but being a whore is the first…and we still haven’t conquered that one. Before we can expect people to accept eroticized menstruation (or golden showers or fisting or a host of
other “extreme” consensual sexplay elements) we must demand the basic right to sell sex in general. The current administration and its anti-obscenity posses are on the lookout for people like me, the kinds of people who turn public sentiment against the sex industry by our kinky ventures out of the mainstream, creating easy targets for precedent-setting court cases they can use later to further limit sex workers offering more vanilla fare. Is it worth it to make a big red target of myself and the industry in general just to assert that I should be able to do whatever I want with my menstruating pussy AND make money while I do it? Maybe I’m doing more harm than good, anyway; while failing to ever depict women menstruating in porn is a gross misrepresentation of our bodies, porn that caters to many red fetishists (e.g., “tampon munching teens”) is also misrepresentative of the average menstruating woman’s experiences—do I really want to pave the way for more male pornographers to jump on the red wagon and populate the Web with their own ignorant, exploitative versions of menstruation?

  Who am I kidding? The Internet is going to be littered with degrading, twisted, and moronic porn whether I’m present on it or not. The religious right is going to condemn us and sic their Rethuglicans on us whether I stay put or pussy out. The conservative element in government doesn’t distinguish between sex workers except from a strategic standpoint in their efforts to eradicate all of us. Sex work has to be validated and legalized across the board; our rights won’t be won by segregating our ranks between least-offensive and most-offensive, so I’m just going to keep on offending in whatever ways sound like fun.

  Buying Obedience: My Visit to a Pro Submissive

  Greta Christina

  Part One: Thinking about It

  First of all—no, the book didn’t give me the idea. I’ve thought about hiring a professional submissive for years, long before the book came along. I’ve thought about it idly, fantasized about it intensely, even read the ads in the back of the adult papers with semiserious intent. But the book is what gave me the courage, or maybe just the excuse, to go ahead and actually do it.

  A quick explanation. See, I recently edited this book, Paying for It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients, which is pretty much what it sounds like—a collection of writing by sex workers, with advice for customers on how to treat sex pros so they like you and give you a better time. I edited the book (and wrote parts of it myself) very much from the point of view of the worker, and while it was written with sympathy and compassion for the customer, it was written entirely in the workers’ voices.

  But as soon as I started working on the book, I started wondering: what would it be like on the other side?

  Part of my interest was professional. How easy would it be, I wondered, to follow the advice in my own book? Would having the guidelines make me feel relaxed and confident about hiring a sex pro? Or would they make me even more anxious about whether I was doing it right?

  But mostly, I was just curious. Sexually curious, I mean, not just intellectually curious. What would be different about getting off with someone who was doing it for the money, instead of doing it pro bono? I liked the idea of paying someone so I could have the session be about me me me, so I could be sexually selfish without feeling guilty. That’s a big reason I decided to hire a submissive instead of an escort or a dominant—it fit so beautifully into that fantasy. But would it really be like that? Would I really be able to think of her as my servant girl, there for the sole purpose of doing my bidding and getting me off? Or would I be unable to let go of my reflex of wanting her to like me, wanting her to think I was cool, wanting her to have fun too?

  And would the very fact of the money get in the way? Would it make me mistrust my own instincts? Would the money be constantly in my mind, a nagging reminder that she probably wouldn’t be there if she didn’t have bills to pay? I knew from the writing in Paying for It (and from my own experience as a stripper) that sex workers do sometimes like their customers and sometimes even get off with them. But weirdly, knowing this wasn’t entirely comforting. It made me want to prove myself, made me want to be one of those special ones…which, of course, made it harder to imagine just selfishly letting myself be catered to. Would I be able to forget about the money? And if not, would I be able to let the money be part of the power dynamic, one of the things that made the encounter unique and hot?

  There was only one way to find out.

  Part Two: Planning It

  I’ll tell you this right off the bat. As soon as I started even thinking about hiring a pro, I immediately got a lot more sympathy for sex customers. I even got more sympathy for some of those customers’ more common failings. See, as soon as I started imagining hiring a submissive, I of course started having sex fantasies about it—and one of my first fantasies was about the woman dropping her professional limits for me and making an exception to the “no sex” rule that most pro submissives have.

  Now, dealing with customers who push their sex workers to do off-limits stuff is one of the big pet peeves in the industry; it’s an absolute top-notch way for a customer to be an asshole. But now I’m not sure it is about being an asshole. I don’t think it’s about being a selfish jerk who wants what she wants and doesn’t care how the other person feels. Or at least, it’s not always about that.

  I think it’s about wanting to be special. It’s about wanting to not be just another customer, wanting to be the one the pro likes so much that she (or he) will make an exception and invite you across that line. For me, the pro sub in my fantasies always made the exception because I was a woman—either the “no sex” rule didn’t apply to girls, or she was so excited about playing with a woman that she let the rule slide. As if lesbian erotic sisterhood was so powerful that it rendered professional limits obsolete. I knew rationally that this was absurd, but it was a very difficult fantasy to let go of. And it was hard not to feel disappointed about it, even before I’d booked the session. I still think pushing sex workers to do off-limits stuff is a top-notch way to be an asshole—but I now have more sympathy for the impulse.

  And once I stopped just thinking about it and started actually shopping around for a pro submissive, my sympathy for customers went sky high. It was a weirdly nerve-wracking experience, a blend of comparison shopping and answering a personal ad. I wanted to come across as respectful and experienced and interesting and fun: if for no other reason, I knew that sex workers do sometimes turn down customers, and I wanted to look like a good prospect. At the same time, I wanted to be sure I was getting the best person available for my desires, or at least some assurance that I’d actually be getting what I was paying for. To put it bluntly, I wanted to get my money’s worth. And while as a former sex worker I’m happy to advise customers, “If you don’t hit it off with a sex worker, write it off to bad luck and try again with someone else,” that advice was tough to accept when it was my own hard-earned, not-very-plentiful cash on the line.

  It might have been different if I’d been looking for an escort or a dominatrix. Those fields have a glut of professionals to choose from (in the San Francisco area, at least), and shopping for someone with compatible interests, good energy, and hot photos would probably have been pretty easy. But there aren’t a jillion people doing professional submission, even in the Bay Area. So while my filthy sex fantasies involved sorting through a large online harem of beauties and picking the one who most suited my whims, the reality was that my choices were limited.

  To make things more difficult on myself, I wanted to hire someone with a lot of experience in professional submission, not just a domme who switched now and then on the side. And for reasons that are somewhat obscure even to me, I didn’t want to go to one of these brothel-y domination houses if I didn’t have to. I’m probably not being fair, but the houses seemed too much like an assembly line, and nowhere near private enough. I wanted someone who worked for herself… which of course narrowed my choices even further. It wasn’t a problem exactly—the few independent pro subs I did find seemed perfectly good�
��but I hadn’t realized how much of my fantasy was about the power of selection until I discovered how little selection there was. And the limited options made me that much more anxious to make a good impression when I did make my choice.

  I decided to go with Rachel, of www.rachelobeys.com (no longer online, alas). Her website was expressive and articulate, with plenty of details about do’s and don’ts as well as about her general style. Her vibe seemed submissive and eager to please, and at the same time clear and firm about limits. And—I felt guilty about being this shallow, but there it was—her body was more my type. Voluptuous rather than skinny, with big boobs and a round, spankable ass. That wasn’t my top consideration, but it certainly wasn’t my most trivial one either—and with so little info to go on, it became even more central. I set up an anonymous email account, took a deep breath, and dropped her a line.

  And the minute I started composing my email, my first question was answered: yes, I was glad to have the guidebook in my hand. True, the book did give me a certain amount of “Am I doing this right?” performance anxiety, what with knowing all those damn guidelines and wanting to be good about following them. But I’d have had performance anxiety no matter what. That’s just the kind of gal I am. And while the book did give my anxiety some very concrete forms, it also gave me the tools to cope. My stomach had serious butterflies—during every step of the process, actually, not just this first one—but at least my head was saying, “You’re doing fine, you’re doing everything you’re supposed to.”

  More importantly, I’d have been a lot more shy about spelling out my specific desires if I hadn’t been assured by every damn writer in Paying for It that spelling out specific desires is exactly what sex workers want you to do. They don’t want to play guessing games, and they don’t want you leaving disappointed and pissed just because they couldn’t read your mind. This makes perfect common sense, of course; but it still felt a little weird to provide a total stranger with a short but detailed list of my sexual expectations. It was good to have a clear, authoritative consensus telling me to go ahead and do exactly that.