Best Sex Writing 2008

by Rachel Kramer Bussel

  I’m not sure. I had a good time, no question. I walked home after the session with that loose, rumpled, hormone-addled strut people get when they’ve just gotten it good, as high and relaxed on my way back as I’d been freaked out and high strung on my way there. But it was a very weird good time, an awkward good time during much of it, and in many ways a deeply unsettling good time. And while I definitely got off, it didn’t shake me to my core. The cool and distant persona I’d been cultivating was as much removed from herself as she was from Rachel, and her core was pretty damn unshakable. Besides, it’s hard for my core to be shaken by someone I barely know.

  But I have no idea how much of this unease and disconnect was simply unfamiliarity and first-time nerves. It’s entirely possible that if I did it again, with experience under my belt and without feeling all anxious and ignorant and self-consciously transgressive, I’d have an even better time.

  And in fact, I find that I’m still fantasizing about seeing a pro submissive. Not so much about the session I actually had; instead, I’m fantasizing about what I might do next time. I’m imagining what it’d be like if I let go of my fixation on being selfish and asked for more feedback; and I’m imagining what it’d be like if I could quit worrying about her responses and really let myself be selfish and cruel. And I’m wondering how the reality would stack up to the fantasy the second time around. So if money weren’t such an obstacle, then yes. I’d probably do it again.

  If only to find out what it was like.

  About the Authors

  AMY ANDRE has a master’s degree in human sexuality studies from San Francisco State University. She works as a sex educator and writer.

  VIOLET BLUE is the best-selling, award-winning author and editor of over a dozen books on sex and sexuality, all currently in print, a number of which have been translated into several languages; she has contributed to a number of nonfiction anthologies. Violet is a sex educator who lectures at the University of California and community teaching institutions, and writes about erotica, pornography, sexual pleasure, and health for major publications and blogs. She is a professional sex blogger and femmebot; an author at Metroblogging San Francisco (Metblogs); a correspondent for Geek Entertainment Television; she is on the Gawker payroll as girl friday contributor and editor at Fleshbot; in January 2007, Violet was named a Forbes Web Celeb 25. She is a San Francisco native and human blog. Violet is the sex columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle with a weekly column titled “Open Source Sex,” and has a podcast of the same name that frequents iTunes’ top ten.

  RICHARD BUSKIN is the New York Times best-selling author of more than a dozen nonfiction books on subjects ranging from Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana to the Beatles and Sheryl Crow. The coauthor of comic Phyllis Diller’s critically acclaimed autobiography, he is presently collaborating on the memoir of Loretta and Linda Sánchez, the only ever sisters to serve in Congress. Richard’s articles have appeared in newspapers such as the New York Post, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Observer, and the Independent, and he also writes features and reviews for music and film magazines around the world. A native of London, England, he lives in Chicago.

  GRETA CHRISTINA has been writing professionally since 1989. She is currently editing the annual Best Erotic Comics series, the first volume of which comes out in November 2007. She is editor of the anthology Paying for It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients, and author of the erotic novella Bending, which appeared in the three-novella collection Three Kinds of Asking for It edited by Susie Bright. Her writing has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, and anthologies, including Ms., Penthouse, the Skeptical Inquirer, and two volumes of the Best American Erotica series. She blogs at http://gretachristina.typepad.com/.

  JEN CROSS is a smut writer and writing workshop facilitator, and is a co-collaborator in the dyke erotica collective, Dirty Ink. Her writing has appeared in a plethora of anthologies, including, most recently, Nobody Passes, Best Women’s Erotica 2007, Naughty Spanking Stories from A to Z 2, as well as on CleanSheets. com. She’s featured at a number of San Francisco open mics, participated in the smutty part of LitQuake 2006’s LitCrawl, and, because she cannot get enough words, also co-facilitates (with Carol Queen!) a monthly Erotic Reading Circle. As a queer incest survivor, Jen writes to release, transform, and create space for as much unspoken erotic as possible. For more information, visit www.writingourselveswhole.org.

  MIRIAM DATSKOVSKY is a journalist and writer based in New York City. She got her start as the “Sexplorations” columnist for the Columbia Daily Spectator, for which she was featured in the New York Times, Philadelphia Weekly, and National Public Radio. In between busting her butt for a combined degree in political science and human rights studies from Barnard College, Miriam somehow found the time to serve as the Spectator’s editorial page editor. During her tenure she was responsible for expanding the section from five to seven pages a week and managing nearly thirty associate editors, writers, and artists. Miriam’s work has also been featured in New York magazine. She is currently working on her first book (fingers crossed).

  JILL EISENSTADT is the author of the novels From Rockaway and Kiss Out and is cowriter and producer on the 2006 feature film The Limbo Room. Her shorter work has appeared extensively in the New York Times and other places, including Vogue, Elle, Mademoiselle, and Bomb magazines. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the writer Michael Drinkard, and their three daughters.

  DR. PARI ESFANDIARI is a native of Iran who now lives in California. An eyewitness to the Islamic Revolution, she left Iran shortly after. Esfandiari came face-to-face with postrevolution Iran and the condition of women when she returned to Iran sixteen years later. The experience led her to found Irandokht.com, a global media outlet that reflects the voices of Iranian Women. Esfandiari is a social entrepreneur and a business ethicist with over twenty years of diverse experience. She has a PhD in business ethics from the United Kingdom’s Oxford Brookes University, and serves on the board of several nonprofit organizations in California. Her popular weekly television and radio programs about Middle-Eastern sociopolitical issues earned her the runner-up prize for the New American Media’s 2004 Award in broadcast journalism. She is a public speaker and a frequent guest commentator on radio and television.

  PAUL FESTA’s sex essays appear in Nerve, Salon, Best Sex Writing 2005 and Best Sex Writing 2006. His movie Apparition of the Eternal Church, about the music of Olivier Messiaen, was named Best North American Independent Feature Film at the 2006 Indianapolis International Film Festival. He is currently revising a novel and can be found online at paulfesta.com.

  TRIXIE FONTAINE is a self-professed webwhore and Internet pornographer. She and her boy/girlfriend created and operate a handful of porn sites featuring themselves, including Trixie.com, SpyOnUs.com, and DeliaCD.com. Trixie is also an avid blogger/ web-based diarist and much shorter in person than she appears on camera. Her boobs, however, are just as big and juicy in real life as they look in photos. In her spare time she likes to run her fingers across her stretch marks.

  GAEL GREENE wrote “The Insatiable Critic” column for New York magazine for more than thirty years and remains on the staff, writing a weekly “Ask Gael” column. The author of Blue Skies, No Candy; Doctor Love; and other books, she is also cofounder (with James Beard) and board chair of Citymeals-on-Wheels, an organization that delivers 2.2 million meals a year to elderly housebound New Yorkers. She lives in New York City. Visit her at www.insatiable-critic.com.

  MELISSA GIRA (melissagira.com) is a blogger, writer, editor of Sexerati: Smart Sex (sexerati.com), and a contributor to $pread magazine & the blogs BoundNotGagged, Gridskipper, and bub. blicio.us, “tracking the Web’s social economy.” An international sex worker rights’ advocate, mobile media maker, and shameless sex futurist, she fully unpacked three times in the last year and prefers to work out of her purse-sized office: cell phone, wireless keyboard, and DV camera, wherever a cheap GPRS signal and fancy lip gloss can take her.


  ASHLEA HALPERN is the associate features editor of Time Out New York magazine, and is the former sex columnist for the Philadelphia City Paper. Her work has appeared in Maxim, Marie Claire, Glamour, Magnet, Bust, Cleveland Free Times, Detroit Metro Times, DIW, Skyscraper, and Punk Planet. She lives in Brooklyn and shares custody of a nine-pound chihuahua.

  KEVIN KECK is the author of Oedipus Wrecked, a collection of essays that features work first published on Nerve.com. He is also the father of three children who should be sufficiently embarrassed later in life by what he writes. Visit him at www.thekeck.com.

  KELLY KYRIK has been writing professionally for over a dozen years. Her stories, essays, copy, and nonfiction articles have been printed in publications such as the Chicago Tribune, Writer’s Market, Cat Fancy, and Penthouse Forum. She also writes several monthly columns, including one for Police Magazine. The subject matter of her writing runs the gamut; essays about marriage and family, how-to pieces for writers, sexually-themed articles and more. Samples of her writing can be seen at her website: www.kellykyrik.com.

  As a freelance writer and columnist for sixteen years, LIZ LANGLEY has covered subjects from a mini-golf course in a funeral home to the Global Orgasm for Peace. She’s written for numerous magazines, newspapers and websites including Salon, Glamour, and alternet. org. She is currently the pop culture columnist for the Orlando Sentinel, works with the Florida Film Festival, and teaches belly dancing.

  ARIEL LEVY is a contributing editor at New York magazine where she writes about sexuality, culture and gender politics. She is the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs.

  MICHAEL MUSTO writes the popular, long-running entertainment column “La Dolce Musto” in the Village Voice. He’s also a contributor to Out magazine and a regular commentator on channels like MSNBC, E!, and VH1. In 2007, Carroll & Graf published La Dolce Musto, a collection of Musto’s most zany and memorable columns through the years.

  LUX NIGHTMARE has been obsessed with the Internet since 1994, obsessed with computers since 1987, and obsessed with sex since 1982. Career highlights include founding and running That Strange Girl (the first altporn site to feature both male and female models), interning at Nerve (back when it was cool), and keeping the masses educated about sex since 1997. She is the former features editor for Sexerati.com, a blog about sex, culture, and everything in between, and is working on a book about her years in the altporn scene.

  Journalist, author, and screenwriter SCOTT POULSON-BRYANT studied at Brown University and was one of the founding editors of VIBE magazine. His journalism and essays have appeared in such publications as the New York Times, the Village Voice, Rolling Stone and Spin. His books include What’s Your Hi-Fi Q? and HUNG: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America. He is currently working on the first in a series of graphic novels. And yes, there’s some sex involved.

  KELLY ROUBA began her career as a writer before the start of her first journalism class. At the age of nineteen, Ms. Rouba was thrown into the fast-paced world of news reporting when she was hired as a stringer for a major area newspaper. With little experience beyond writing for her high school and middle school student newspapers, Ms. Rouba was determined to prove she could master the news beat. Now, after more than seven years, Ms. Rouba’s passion for reporting the news is still evident as she continues to inform and entertain the public through her stories. She handles public relations projects and volunteers for several nonprofit organizations.

  RACHEL SHUKERT is a playwright and author based in New York City. Her plays include Bloody Mary (NYIT Award nominee) , The Red Beard of Esau, Sequins for Satan, The Blackstone Hotel, and Soiled Linens, and have been produced and developed by Ars Nova, the Williamstown Theater Festival, the Culture Project, the Ontological/Hysteric, the EVOLVE series at Galapagos, and the Omaha Lit Fest, among others.

  Rachel is also a regular contributor to Nerve.com. She has also contributed to Heeb magazine, McSweeney’s, Babble, Culturebot, and Critical Moment. Her upcoming collection of essays, Have You No Shame? will be published by Random House/Villard in the spring of 2008. Rachel holds a BFA from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska.

  TRISTAN TAORMINO (puckerup.com) is a columnist for the Village Voice and the author of True Lust: Adventures in Sex, Porn and Perversion; Down and Dirty Sex Secrets; and The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women. Her new book, Opening Up: Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships, was published in late 2007. She runs Smart Ass Productions, an adult film production company, and currently directs exclusively for Vivid Entertainment. Her award-winning titles for Vivid include Chemistry and Tristan Taormino’s Expert Guide to Anal Sex. She teaches sex and relationship workshops around the world.

  About the Editor

  RACHEL KRAMER BUSSEL is a prolific erotica writer, editor, journalist, and blogger. She serves as senior editor at Penthouse Variations, hosts the In the Flesh Erotic Reading Series, and wrote the popular “Lusty Lady” column for the Village Voice. She’s edited over a dozen erotic anthologies, including Caught Looking: Erotic Tales of Voyeurs and Exhibitionism; Hide and Seek; Crossdressing: Erotic Stories; Naughty Spanking Stories from A to Z 1 and 2; First-Timers; Up All Night; Glamour-Girls: Femme/Femme Erotica; Ultimate Undies; Sexiest Soles; Secret Slaves: Erotic Stories of Bondage; Sex and Candy; Dirty Girls and the kinky companion volumes He’s on Top and She’s on Top and Yes, Sir and Yes, Ma’am. Her first novel, Everything But… will be published by Bantam in summer 2008.

  Her writing has been published in over one hundred anthologies, including Best American Erotica 2004 and 2006, Everything You Know About Sex Is Wrong, Single State of the Union, and Desire:Women Write About Wanting, as well as AVN, Bust, Cleansheets.com, Cosmo UK, Diva, Fresh Yarn, Gothamist, Huffington Post, Mediabistro. com, Memoirville.com, Newsday, New York Post, Oxygen.com, Penthouse, Playgirl, Punk Planet, San Francisco Chronicle, Time Out New York, and Zink. Rachel has appeared on “The Berman and Berman Show,” “Family Business,” NY1, BBC, “Naked New York,” and “In the Life.” In her spare time, she hunts down the country’s best cupcakes and blogs about them at cupcakestaketh-ecake. blogspot.com. Visit her at www.rachelkramerbussel.com.

  Copyright 2008 by Rachel Kramer Bussel.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Published in the United States.

  “The Study of Sex” by Amy André was originally published at Colorlines.com, March 2006. “Kink. com and Porn Hysteria: The Lie of Unbiased Reporting” by Violet Blue was originally published at Sfgate.com (San Francisco Chronicle website), February 2007. “Buying Obedience: My Visit to a Pro Submissive” by Greta Christina was originally published in Other, Issue 12, May 2007. “Surface Tensions” by Jen Cross was originally published in Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity edited by Mattilda, aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore (Seal Press, 2007). “Absolut Nude” by Miriam Datskovsky was originally published in the Columbia Spectator, October 2006. “To Have or Have Not: Sex on the Wedding Night” by Jill Eisenstadt was originally published in Altared: Bridezillas, Bewilderment, Big Love, Breakups, and What Women Really Think About Contemporary Weddings edited by Colleen Curran (Villard, 2007). “Sex in Iran” by Pari Esfandiari and Richard Buskin was originally published in Playboy, May 2007. “How Insensitive” by Paul Festa was originally published at Nerve.com, April 2007. “Menstruation: Porn’s Last Taboo” by Trixie Fontaine was originally published in $pread, Fall 2005. “The Prince of Porn and the Junk-Food Queen” by Gael Greene was originally published in Insatiable: Tales from a Life of Delicious Excess by Gael Greene (Warner Books, 2006). “Battle of the Sexless” by Ashlea Halpern was originally published in Philadelphia City Paper, April 2006. “Double Your Panic�
� by Kevin Keck was originally published at Babble.com, November 2006. “Stalking the Stalkers” by Kelly Kyrik was originally published in Penthouse Forum, January 2006. “Sex and the Single Septuagenarian” by Liz Langley was originally published at Salon.com, December 2006. “Dirty Old Women” by Ariel Levy was originally published in New York, May 2006. “The Glass Closet” by Michael Musto was originally published in Out, May 2007. “The Pink Ghetto (A Four-Part Series)” by Lux Nightmare and Melissa Gira was originally published at Sexerati.com, January 2007. “The Hung List” from Hung: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America by Scott Poulson Bryant (Doubleday, 2005). “Tough Love” by Kelly Rouba was originally published in Playgirl, May 2007. “Big Mouth Strikes Again: An Oral Report” by Rachel Shukert was originally published in Heeb, Issue 9, Fall 2005. “Dangerous Dildos” by Tristan Taormino was originally published in the Village Voice, February 2007.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  p. cm.