notes.

As a godless fornicator, I spent my Xmas with my ankles overhead. I hope you all had a merry holiday as well.

I’m glad to see the AA ads getting press.  I saw that the excellent Refinery29 wrote it up a few days ago, and now I’m seeing blips and notes from NBC, AVN, a few business sites, and some nicely drawn blogs. I’m glad in part because I like the AA ads, but also because I dislike North American nipplephobia. When I lived in Europe, I saw bare breasts sell windows, shower products, and jeans. When I moved back to the States, a woman was kicked out of the National Gallery for breast feeding (yet a museum is not a museum without a solid inventory of bare tit). I want to see more breasts because there shouldn’t be any shame in a conspicuously exposed nipple.

But more than that, I like the candor.  I’m a little tired of the coy push-and-pull that we teach young women, as if they should play up their sexuality but ultimately recoil from sexual activity, resulting in our classically conflicted nympho-puritanical views: we’re sex-saturated (advertising, porn) yet we’re also sex-avoidant (MPAA, morality laws). If we’re talking about depictions of women, I want to see more of this, of women looking you in the eye and fucking owning their sex. I want to see more women like Sasha Grey and Charlotte Stokely.

I’m looking forward to seeing the new AA ad for my site. They’ve got me very intrigued about the next one.

And apropos of nothing, except maybe the holidays, I’m getting a lot of mileage out of Gabriel’s headboard.  It’s made of steel bars, which means I can reach back and grip it when I’m on my back, or reach forward and hold it for leverage when I’m straddling his hips at strange angles. It’s good. It’s solid.  It’s making me rethink my position preferences.

Happy New Year to you all.   Me, I have some resolutions to draft.  Among them, more posting.

sale at jimmyjane.

Like Jimmyjane?  Of course you like Jimmyjane.  You love Jimmyjane, because they make beautiful vibrators with excellent inscriptions like this:

I just got word that they’re having a sale. It’s 25% off orders of $100 or more (so, most orders).  You just need to include the code “Enjoy” and do it before January 5th 2009.

Buy one of their superlong blindfolds, tie up your fucktoy, and have your way with them.

Or buy a vibrator, get it engraved with something dirty, and slip it into your lovefriend’s purse.

Or build a private pleasure arsenal.

Or tip your favorite blogger.

dirty talk.

I’m alive. I’ve been derelict. And flu-ish. And busy, but in the best of ways.

Prague was phenomenal.  It’s hard to give much of a summary of the experience, since my memory is a strange superimposition of daytime treks through museums and evening drinks with strangers and nighttime dirty talk with Gabriel. It’s an overlay of cobblestones and street lights and fellatio.

At some point I met up with a friend and we went out for Czech food before hitting a Cuban bar. The waiter tried repeatedly to get me to order some kind of animal joint, like a knee or an ankle, and when I paused to consider it, my friend shook his head hard. “Don’t do it,” he said. I guess he’d tried it the night before and it was about as disturbing as you’d expect from a boiled joint, so I went for some kind of meat dish with dumplings that was heavy-as-lead delicious. Later that night, after the Cuban bar and another wander through the city, I fell into a cycle that would repeat for the rest of the trip: I’d have a drink, feel the sudden need for sleep, call it a night, and then wake up promptly at 3am, dazed and horny.

One of those nights, I opened my laptop and found Gabriel online some seven time zones away. “So how many cocks have you sucked?” he asked.

Gabriel and I have been doing this tango.  He loves my slutty impulses, but I constantly question whether I should act on them, even with his support. I’ve run into this problem in the past.

I had a boyfriend with similar tastes a couple of years ago, someone I saw while I slept with clients. I never told him that I was a prostitute, but I did tell him that I was sleeping with other men.  And while it wasn’t the deepest relationship, it worked beautifully for the time that it lasted.  It worked for him because he was emotionally unavailable, and it worked for me because my clients left me emotionally exhausted. And it worked because he never asked too many questions about how I spent my evenings. Except for the sex.

We developed a strange routine. He’d come over to my apartment late at night, when I’d be in the middle of doing something quiet, like reading. A little drunk and a little coked up, he’d strip out of his clothes and pull out his cock. And then he’d ask questions about the sex I was having with other men, and I’d answer him slowly, meting out details while he jerked off to the sound of my voice. He’d ask how many men, how often, what I did, what it felt like, whether I came.

Sometimes he’d open his eyes and tell me to strip, slowly, while he watched.

Sometimes he’d get on top of me and grind against my body while I spoke.

And over time, he got more aggressive, and took that sexual aggression out on my body.  I fueled it, and if he drew back, I’d goad him until I was pinned down by all four limbs.

But he was always conflicted after he came. He’d apologize and fumble with his clothes, or he’d feel depraved and worry that there was something wrong with him and his kink.  At one point, I asked him about this, why he felt so much anxiety after sex, and he said that he hated that I wasn’t faithful, but the thought of it turned him on, and he hated that, how much it turned him on. Even when we were apart, he’d call (drunk and a little coked up) asking me to talk.  (”Tell me stories,” he’d say.)  And even when we broke up and he entered another relationship, he’d call with his cock in his hand, hoping to hear that I’d been on a sexual rampage.  But that night, when I asked about why he felt so conflicted, he said something I’ve remembered ever since: “After I come, I just want you to tell me that everything was a lie.” He wanted to hear about the men I’d slept with - he just didn’t want any of it to be true.

Gabriel is turned on by the idea of me sleeping with other men, and I’m turned on by the fact he’s turned on.  He’s my perfect perverted complement - I like being overwhelmed with cock, and he likes the idea of me being railed from all angles.  I like the idea of him watching and jerking off, or fucking me with the memory still fresh in his mind and mine.  We talk about sleeping with other people and sharing the experiences with one another, and I love his intensity when we talk about this. When I think through the possibility of carrying it through, I always stop short and wonder if he’ll regret it. If anything, I’ve learned to question the things that men say when they’re drunk or hard, and while Gabriel is never drunk, he is always hard.

Which might mean that he’ll never regret it at all.

I suppose we’ll never know until we do it.

czech notes.

I’m usually pretty disciplined about managing my jet lag, but a short nap turned into a long, nightmarish sprawl and I woke up to the imagined sound of a shrieking cat.  I’ve been in a semi-sleep state ever since, and my memory’s a motion blur of architecture and art nouveau typography.

Prague’s a great city.  My legs are sore from walking up and down cobble-stone hills, from standing lock-kneed in front of paintings, and from wandering in and out and through labyrinthine streets, mostly dodging the tour groups that fill the squares. It reminds me of when I lived in Venice, that need to duck into side-streets every time I see someone raise an unopened umbrella.

Fucking hell, those tour groups are obnoxious.

I’ve been subsisting on palačinky, a kind of thick crepe with a sturdy, satisfying texture, usually folded with Nutella or jam. And I’ve also been reading the memoir of Václav Havel, a playwright who played a role in the non-violent Velvet Revolution in 1989 that led to the overthrow of the Communist government in Czechoslovakia.  He went on to become president, and while politicians don’t usually interest me, non-violent dissidents always do.

When I was walking with a friend last night, we were approached by someone encouraging us to enter a cabaret featuring a “banana show.”  I wasn’t sure what a “banana show” was, so I asked, thinking it involved a lot of cock.  The guy’s response: “Japanese midgets!  And the monkey fucks the midgets!”  Convinced he was just making shit up at random, I had to go in (you get in for free!, he said), but my friend shook his head and said, “I’ll wait for you out here.”

I decided I would go in on my own later, at least until I got back to the hotel and looked up “banana show” on the internet. Now I’m pretty glad I didn’t go in.  I like weird shit, but I also like fruit.  That show would’ve put me off of bananas forever.

pre-dawn.

I’m in Prague right now, struggling to learn a few basic terms like “please” and “thank you” and “I really need some coffee” and failing. I think one of the books I brought with me said that Czech is one of the most phonetic languages, which is great, but I’m hung up on the phonetics.

Děkuji

S dovolením

Nerozumím

I’m too jetlagged to grab a full night’s sleep, so I’m up in the middle of the night with CNN/Sky/BBC on in the background. They’re cycling through the same Mumbai updates, how many Americans have died, whether the bombers were British (they say no), what this means for the cricket teams. Bloomberg has something on about tanked economy. Rai’s got a documentary on about Native Americans. TV5 Monde is covering Mumbai - earlier, it was an arts documentary. Sky News is calling the Mumbai situation “India’s 9/11.”

The German channel has an infomercial for ProActiv. One of these channels, maybe a local channel, is showing images of topless women.

I have a browser open to FGT, the webby lovechild I’ve formed with Kasia that we’ll launch just after the holidays (can’t wait). I have a copy of New York Magazine on the bedside table open to the article on the burlesque venue The Box (online here), and I’m pretty intrigued by what’s happening there. I’m meeting up with a friend later who’s in Prague to shoot Czech models for a Latin American sex magazine. Sex is on my mind; reminders of death and mortality drone loudly in the background. What I should be doing is going over these Czech flash cards.

Děkuji. That’s “thank you.” I’m going to repeat that expression over and over with the hope that it’ll stick before dawn.

since I’m pressed for time…

Since I’m pressed for time and since American Apparel’s sexy sexed-up ads are a revived topic of conversation here and elsewhere, I’m going to leave you with my favorite AA ad, which can be found on the back of S Magazine:

My general feeling is that all ads use sex to sell. AA just does it unusually well.

bohemia. whoremania.

Whoredom, whoredom, everywhere. Sawyer’s interviewing Dupre, McLennan just released a book, Quan’s got a series coming out, Showtime’s sniffing around for a reality show. I also just read the line, “Sawyer’s ongoing and extensive investigation of prostitution” and realized that she was only just getting started with her first broad-stroked swing at American hookerdom. I’m curious to see how her interview with Dupre goes, though I have a feeling I already know exactly how it’s going to go.

I’m itching to leave town and it’s probably because of all of this, or because it’s winter, or because of the holidays, and I’m thinking about going to Prague. I’ve always been interested in Central European art and architecture, kunstkammers, and the history of the Habsburg Empire (especially under Rudolf II), but, more importantly, there’s a sex machine museum. So, in a sense, it’s my calling.

—-

Celestial Globe by Gerhard Emmoser, 16th c.

cnbc.

A few people have asked for my thoughts on the CNBC doc last night on high-end prostitutes, and I can only give a partial response. I caught it for about fifteen minutes, then stepped out, hailed a cab to Brooklyn, and watched the rest at my destination.  From what I saw, it seemed decent.  It didn’t seem to have the same all-prostitutes-are-victims agenda Diane Sawyer had in her 20/20 documentary (a term I’m using loosely), and from what I saw, they did their research and talked to the right experts, like Amanda Brooks, who wrote a handbook to escorting on the internet, long-time activist and advocate Carol Leigh (Scarlot Harlot), and Martha Nussbaum, a phenomenal philosopher/scholar specializing in law and ethics, who’s given considerable thought to sex laws. The documentary also acknowledged the range of experiences and degrees of autonomy when it comes to sex work, something 20/20 failed to do in its attempt to be as reductive as humanly possible, and it touched on the decriminalization movement and the weird warped way its opposition continually conflates trafficking with prostitution (two vastly different crimes). And they did a much better job at concealing the identities of their anonymous interviewees. If I have any complaint, it’s that it did glamorize sex work a bit, but then that tends to happen whenever you cut to someone fingering a wad of hundred-dollar bills in a nice hotel room. That said, they did address some of the risks, like arrest, the IRS, physical danger, and social isolation.

Seeing that, as well as the piece up on CNN.com, which considers two very different sex work experiences, I’m starting to think that it’s finally coming across that sex work is too broad and complex for reductive, finger-wagging blather. To me, that’s a positive step.

As an aside, I really love Martha Nussbaum. I recently finished her book Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law, which examines these emotional responses in legal judgments. It’s hugely interesting, relevant, and - to my mind - important, since we see disgust and shame frequently inflect legal and political judgments concerning pornography, homosexuality, prostitution, and so on, even though the response is irrational, subjective, and inappropriate for a society that places importance on the social equality of its citizens.

There’s been a lot of prostitution-talk in the news lately. I think I’m burned out. I feel burned out. I think Gabriel’s burned out by proximity. So here’s a photo of a topless man (probably Louis Garrel) by Hedi Slimane:

calendar girls and sex worker awareness.

A great group of sex writers and bloggers recently posed for a pin-up calendar to raise money for Sex Worker Awareness, a non-profit which works to improve understanding of sex work and advocates for sex worker rights. Needless to say, I support the fuck out of it, but it also makes me happy to see people who aren’t directly involved with sex work being so supportive of sex workers. In some circles, it’s a divisive issue, but here I’ve seen it embraced with intelligence and open-mindedness.

The pin-ups include Tess of Urban Gypsy, Lux Alptraum (founder of Boinkology and editor at Fleshbot), Audacia Ray (author of Naked on the Internet and co-founder of SWA), Twanna Hines of Funky Brown Chick, Jamye Waxman (author of Getting Off: A Girl’s Guide to Masturbation), Desiree of Baser Instincts, Rachel Kramer Bussell (editor of Spanked), Diva of Debauched Domestic Diva, sociologist and activist Elizabeth Wood of Sex and the Public Square, Riese of A Girl Called Automatic Win, Mariella of In Medias Res, and Sinclair of the excellent Sugarbutch Chronicles. You can read more about the pin-ups/bloggers here.

By the way, check out Jamye’s Wonder Woman outfit.  Love that.

The calendar is $20 and all proceeds go to SWA.  You can buy a copy here.

Better yet, go to the launch this Friday, November 14, from 6.30 to 9.30 at the White Rabbit (145 East Houston, NYC). Performing at the party will be Jezebel Express, Weirdee Girl, The Luvley Rae and Darlinda Just Darlinda, plus you’ll have the opportunity to meet the pin-ups in person. And there will be gift bags and a raffle with excellent prizes (like the SaSi and the Njoy Eleven) and, no doubt, a sexy and open-minded crowd.

For more information, see the NYC Sex Blogger Calendar website.

so, spitzer’s free and clear.

It looks like Spitzer won’t be charged, and you can find Susannah’s write-up for Boing Boing here. If only gubernatorial hypocrisy were against the law.

And San Francisco? Securing 42% of the vote is great news. You’ll get there.

american apparel and harassment.

For those who aren’t familiar with the American Apparel controversy, here’s the gist: the CEO and founder Dov Charney has been hit with a few sexual harassment suits, and everywhere he goes, there’s a trail of curious anecdotes involving cocksocks and vibrators and colorful cotton briefs.  Not many facts are known but there’s plenty of speculation, which is stimulated in part by the company’s super-sexual image (see the banner on the right), with ads depicting young twentysomethings in various states of undress, often looking horny and hungover. It’s sort of reminiscent of Terry Richardson’s early campaign for Sisley with its sexy-sleazy hotness.  That Charney took the photos himself and used regular women as models only contributes to speculation.

So, I’ll tell you what I think. I think sexual harassment is wrong. I also think it’s complicated. I think we’re a highly litigious country. I think any CEO who walks around the workplace wearing nothing but a sock on his cock is going to get sued. I think there are more rumors than facts. Most of all, I think sites like Jezebel use topics like sexual harassment to trigger discussion before the facts are known, and not rational, informed discussion but bitchy, snarky one-sided discussion that begins with the vilification of one figure and ends with attacks on anyone who feels otherwise.

Claire Salinda wrote a piece for Radar describing her experience modeling for American Apparel, and in it she defends both Charney and the work atmosphere, stating that she never felt uncomfortable and that there was never any coercion or pressure. The Charney she describes sounds sexual and eccentric, politically incorrect but not particularly threatening.  One detail that sticks in my mind is when Salinda saw photos of herself on the American Apparel website and came across an exposed nipple:

So I called him, woke him up, told him I was freaking out. Immediately, he replaced the pictures with ones sans nips. [...] “Claire,” he told me, “I would never use pictures you weren’t completely comfortable with, you know that.”

And that struck me because Charney wasn’t obliged to change anything. The fact he pulled the photos suggests to me that there was a real concern for the woman’s comfort level, and that’s something to take seriously when the man’s conduct around women is being judged.  Of course, it’s perfectly possible that while Salinda felt fine around the man, someone else may have felt threatened. Until I see that story in front of me, I’m not going to speculate, especially when I have something else in front of me that’s equally offensive, if not more so.  Here are some of the comments in response to Salinda’s piece:

Dov didn’t need to give you any money; you’ve already been payed in boosts to your crumbling self-esteem. (Radar)

Oh. My. God. When she was asked “Ass or Brains” we see which line she got in. (Jezebel)

Does anyone else think her ass looks…odd? (Jezebel)

Man, she is so dumb I can’t believe she’s not doing porn. Well, high end porn anyway. (Jezebel)

I wonder which “good college” in the Hudson Bay she goes to? I doubt they want to claim her after this charming little piece. (Jezebel)

The only reason she (or anyone else) would say something like that is because she has low self-esteem. (Jezebel)

This seems to me to be a much more important and pervasive problem, this wholesale dismissal of a woman’s personal account because it doesn’t sync up with popular opinion. And this is significant because it mirrors the experience of any harassment victim, whose voice is ignored and whose character is attacked, who’s treated with derision for telling her own story. If we’re talking about harassment, that’s the form that concerns me the most, and that’s the form I see most often, and frequently by women who consider themselves feminist. So, honestly, if I’m going to boycott anything, it’s a site that encourages this sort of catty, cunty discourse, not a company run by a perv.

road trip.

We went for a road trip over the weekend as a kind of pre-election release. It was interesting watching the regional politics shift in the signs posted on the front lawns. Just outside New York, we saw plenty of Obama but as we traveled northward, it was increasingly McCain country. Eventually, we ended up north enough to be surrounded by stale snow drifts and sleepy livestock and open fields, and once the sun set, we pulled over into a motel and screwed.

Why are motels so sexy? Maybe it’s the spontaneity. No reservations, no paper trail, and that faint aura of creepyness. Turns me on.

Eventually we grabbed something to eat at a restaurant with dishes that ended in ™ and ® and returned to the motel to play and talk and screw some more. I woke up sore with chapped lips and a bruised cunt, and then we spent the morning in a strange museum full of dead animals. Like a hunting museum. There were bears and two-headed calves and I bought a print of an angry wolverine which, I learned, is the largest land-dwelling member of the weasel family.

*

I have some thoughts on the American Apparel topic.  I should mention that taking their ad was a conscious decision. I’m familiar with the harassment talk and Jezebel’s patent disdain for Dov Charney. I’m also familiar with Claire Salinda’s piece for Radar defending Dov Charney (and I’m all kinds of disgusted by the comments she received). So I’ve got thoughts, and while I wasn’t planning on getting into it, maybe I should.  So I will in a bit, once I come down from my Obama buzz.

a few changes.

So I made the move to debauchette.com.

I’m still tweaking the template and I’m not 100% happy with it, but for me, it’s an improvement. It gives me a lot more flexibility, and it lets me post bits and notes on what we (Kasia and I) are working on for FGT in an area called “asides” on the front page. There’s also a gallery area in the first sidebar - I’ll probably get a lot of use out of that since I’ve got a mountain of photos to play with. And then you’ve probably noticed the naked blonde unzipping her bodysuit for our enjoyment over in the sidebar on the right. That means I’ve taken an ad, but a good ad, a naked ad for a company characterized by sex and controversy and sexual controversy, but especially sex.  And clothing.

I’m going to see how it goes.

More soon.

housecleaning.

I desperately need to clean house, clear out old history, bad memories and assorted detritus.  Used clothing.  I’m also in the midst of moving this blog to a new location with, I think, a new template (same-ish domain). As I’m preparing to do that, I’m going through the hundreds of drafts I never posted, either because they felt too raw or because I never finished the thought.  And god, there’s a lot of them.

I’ve been reposting some of the old stuff, mostly previously published posts that I pulled down for reasons that no longer apply. I think one of those posts appeared briefly as a new one for some reason, though it was actually well over a year old, something about my engagement and my fuckbuddy.

It all reminds me of how much things have changed in a year.  This time last year, I was breaking off an engagement.  Or pseudo-engagement.

sunday morning.

Sunday morning, I was walking through Williamsburg when I saw a book lying in one of those patches of dirt that pass for a bit of urban greenery. From a distance, it looked like a bible or a copy of the DSM-IV, maybe because it was thick and hardcover, but when I got closer, I saw that it was a copy of The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir.

I walked by, and after a few steps I decided to turn back and snap a photo.  I’m not sure why - maybe it was just the weirdness of seeing a classic text lying in a patch of dirt outside of an appliance shop. After I took the photo, I bent down to see if the last owner took any notes in the margins (they did), and before I knew it, I was engrossed, squatting in the dirt-square (or urine-patch), sipping coffee and holding the book open with my fingertips.

Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy has influenced me the way it’s influenced most women, whether they realize it or not, but I also admire Beauvoir as a brilliant woman who chose to live a very unconventional life. She followed a path of difficult choices, and some of those choices worked, and some of them left her conflicted, including her open marriage with Sartre. I respect her fearlessness.

(The American edition is famously fucked, so much so that a group of scholars pled with Knopf to get its act together and release a new translation.  Since Knopf owns the distribution rights in the US, we’ve been stuck with what we’ve got, a clumsy fifty-year-old translation by a zoologist who misunderstood key philosophical concepts (because he was a zoologist), and translated accordingly.  Plus, a large chunk of the original text was cut out completely. More here.)

While I was reading in the street, my phone vibrated with an incoming text message.  It was from Gabriel; Colin Powell had just endorsed Obama on Meet the Press.  It made me eager to get home so I could read about the endorsement (here), and since the book had no suspicious stains (liquor, urine, blood), I decided to take it with me so I could read it on the subway.

While I was standing on the platform, the woman beside me asked if I’d just come from church.  I looked around to see if she were talking to someone else, and then said, “Me?”

She smiled and pointed to the book under my arm.  “I saw your Bible,” she said.

*

I think I’m making progress on this social site of some sort.  There are a few options, and I’m leaning toward the options that would be simplest and easiest to execute, though I’d like a little more than a forum (if possible).  I’ll keep you posted.  In the meantime, I’m reading and re-reading your comments and emails.

Featured Post

Asides