Ah, Bangkok!

AH, BANGKOK…

Leaning back in my chair, I held my whiskey bottle up to the light. The yellowed bulb turned caramel to blood. I gave the bottle some urgent mouth-to-mouth, and almost wept when its last drop of life trickled down my throat.

Holding the glass carcass in my hand, I heard footsteps in the hall. Coming closer. I was too tired to fight. Besides, the only weapon I had was my breath, and the sight of her disarmed me completely.

She had more curves than a four-leaf clover, but her smile said I was the lucky one. She looked anomalous as a hard-on in a convent. Usually the only thing ’round here that takes your breath away is a knife in the chest.

“Hi, Philly, long time no see.”

“Uh...do I know you, ma’am?”

“I’ll give you a hint. I was at your wedding.”

“I don’t recall.”

She shrugged with more grace than a Catholic feast. “Been overseas a while.”

“Oh? Where?”

“Bangkok.” It sounded more like a hobby than a city. 

She moved like a bag of cantaloupes, dropping to her knees between my legs. My zip crackled like an arsonist’s mistress.

“I’m sorry, ma’am...I don’t–”

Her fingers danced like an Arabic princess, charming the hell out of my snake.

“Oh, Philly. It’s just how I remember it.”

“Ma’am, maybe I was drunk, but–”

“Think. I was in the wedding party.”

I swam through the years of hooch and tried to find the faces. The dragon. The dragon-in-law. I shook my head.

“No matter, ma’am. The marriage went south last year.”

“Hmm. Speaking of going south...”

Her mouth swept down around my cock like a hot towel. It felt like a sauna, all heat and moisture, and full of wood.

She hummed like an engine that had blown a rod as she pistoned her mouth on me. I hissed like a locomotive as she brought me from a simmer right to the edge of boiling. She uncoupled from me just as I was ready to burst.

“Remember me yet, Philly?”

“I’m sorry...”

She unbuttoned her blouse and revealed breasts so round they made me dizzy. Her eyes fluttered like a hummingbird’s wings, and my head buzzed like a beehive.

“Honey,” I said, “now I’m sure we’ve never met. You’re unforgettable.”

“Remember your buck’s night, Philly? That threesome in Tucson?”

“Oh...”

What a night. My best man had all the connections. The three of us went off like a laptop battery.

She fell back down on me like I was air. Her tongue writhed like a spitting cobra and in seconds I lived up to the simile. She moaned against the tender belly of my beast and I almost wept as its last drop of life trickled down her throat.

“Philly, I’ve been wanting to do that for years.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, I–hey! That girl in Tucson was black!”

“And sweet.”

I looked closer.

“Brian?”

“Hi, Philly.”

I shook my head. “Ah, Bangkok...”

Did that really happen?

by Giselle Renarde

A few months ago, I devoured a book of funny little stories about living with roommates. The reason I picked up The Roommates: True Tales of Friendship, Rivalry, Romance, and Disturbingly Close Quarters is that I've never lived with people. Well, I lived with family, growing up, but I've lived alone all my adult life.

I was curious about the lifestyle. I wanted to know what it was really like to have roommates. One of my sisters has lived with tons of friends, fellow university students, even strangers. And has she got tales to tell! That's what I hoped to find in this book.

And I totally did! Truth stranger than fiction--that sort of thing. Do you ever experience something in your life and go, "Man, if I wrote this in a story readers would say, THAT COULD NEVER HAPPEN"? I love stuff like that.

(By the way, I just looked up The Roommates on Amazon and it had nothing but poor reviews, so I left a positive one.  Do you ever love a book, then see all these terrible customer reviews and wonder if you're stupid or something? Like, what did I miss?)

Anyhoo...

Next week, my third book of erotic confessions hits the market. The first one was Secret Confessions (a veritable smorgasbord of erotica), the second was Sapphic Confessions (all lesbians, all the time!), and this one will be called Spicy Confessions: 12 Steamy Sex Stories.

I've written a lot of letter-style erotica over the years. That's pretty much how I started my career in this industry. Are all my confessions true? Ummm... no. Are some of them true. Well... yes.

What's the appeal of confessional erotica? It's gotta be the curiosity factor. I'm curious about roommates because I've never had roommates. Readers are curious about sex because they've never had sex.

Wait... that doesn't sound right. Maybe readers just want to know what's going on in other people's bedrooms. Maybe they want to draw ideas from other people's experiences. Maybe they haven't had THAT kind of sex. Maybe they have had that kind of sex and want to read about other people's experience of same--good, bad or mediocre.

I'm upfront in my Confessions books about some stories being true and some being false. Actually, some are in between as well. Some are things I wish had happened.

Ultimately, how much would a reader care if a story they thought was true wasn't really?

If you told me none of the stories in The Roommates were true, it honestly wouldn't matter to me. I was entertained by the book. That's good enough for me.

I'm the same way with ghost stories. I think I've mentioned before that I love those "my real ghost story" TV shows. Do I necessarily believe everything the interviewees tell the camera? I kind of think I don't believe or disbelieve them. I don't think people are lying, but I also know TV is there to entertain me, and a lot of that entertainment involves deception.

So, what's your take on true sex stories, or true anything stories? Why do people crave them? And does it matter if they really are true?

"Hello Sunshine" A CuriousStory

     A young man in a yellow apron moves briskly through the narrow ally ways behind the counter, crafting each cup of coffee with pride.  He is an artist, he knows himself as an artist of the small and perishable.  He has read about about this somewhere in his studies on flower arranging, the Japanese call it wabi-sabi, this quality of perfection and perishability.  His well crafted cups of latte, with chocolate or vanilla or chai spices and the foam formed into little messages like blossums of the heart draw in foamed cream with a toothpick into smiling faces and flowers; these he knows will vanish with the first kiss of a pair of lips.  The transience of these things gives him pleasure.  It is his zen.cubicle that is slowly moving towards a window

He tamps the coffee into the cup of the espresso machine, takes the large tamper knob and gives it an expert twist, which his hands have learned and clamps it into the machine as the customer waits at the counter, dimly aware she is in the presence of an artist.

As the coffee presses through, his hands are already busy crafting the steamed milk.  He is thinking of of years ago in the Cafe Du Monde in Jackson Square, crafting the cafe au lait in the late hours of night, his apprenticeship for this, his shop.

Milk steamed.  Flipping off the huge brass eagled espresso machine at exactly the right moment to draw two ounces, which he dashes into a huge 16 oz china cup with a saucer.  Then goes in the foamed cream, the latte, carefully preserving the foam.  He takes a toothpick and with a flourish draws a rose on the foam.

He brings the cup to a table where a man is seated with a notebook, looking off and thinking.  Around him people are talking. This is a wounded soul sitting silent and looking off.  He has just come from a bad conversation which has poisoned him.  He is thinking about the power of conversations and now looking for a cure for the darkness that threatens to grow in him.  A woman has wounded him.  A woman has refused the intimacy of question and deeper talk and no longer wishes to be his close friend and he is struggling not to brood which would be to enter into this darkness that shadows his thoughts.

And he is a curious man who has learned to write with a pencil very fast.  His eyes follow the waiter who sets a cup down on the table to the right of him where people are talking -

"Hello Sunshine.  Here you go."

He listens to the table next to him, where a young woman and a man are talking.

"Once you lose trust," says the young woman, "its like you're thrown out of the garden of eden.  Its like there's a wall and you're searching for that trust again.  You're on a quest."

"Are you on a quest?" says the young man across from her.

"See, you ask questions like that.  Why should I tell you?" says the young woman.  "I am a whole person.  I am myself.  I know myself.  But you, you're like a chameleon.  You're always changing, who are you?"

"That's what I am, says the young man.  "I'm at least an adaptable person."

"But its like I don't know you!" she says.  "How can I trust you if I don;t know you?  You're like a ghost.  A Phantom.  After what happened to me, how do I trust life again?  How can I tolerate the unknown?"

"Now you sound like one of the existentialist poets."

"Oh, that's so dreary," she says.

The dismissal in her voice reminds the young man sitting alone of his pain and his ears return to another station, the one behind him.  Two women are sitting.

"When I got the diagnosis from the oncologist I was afraid Allen would be so distraught he'd start drinking again in despair for me."

"And did he?" says the other woman.

"No!  He did not.  And you know the strange thing?  I can't forgive him for it.  For not drinking.  For not being distraught."

"You wanted him to drink?"

" I wanted him to grieve! I wanted him to beg God for my life.  But he took it so much in stride.  That hurt.  Some things should not be taken in stride.   Its a bad sign.  It's like I'm already a ghost woman in his eyes. 

"What does he say?"

"He says we'll get through this.  He's not the one who got his fucking tits cut off.  That was me."

"Oh my god.  No."

"If he had drank again, I would have forgiven him for that.  Loved him for that even as I'd fight again to get him off the bottle.  But no.  His calm.  I want to poke his eyes out for being so calm."

The young man has the feeling as though he were a child walking into his parents room while they having intercourse.  It is a feeling of having stepped blindly through a door and discovering something shameful without knowing why.  His ears scan the room, find another.

  "Unpredictability!" declares the old man at the other table, to the old man sitting across from him.  "That is the stuff of nature, the very stuff of youth.  The dazzle of evolution.  You can tell that creationism is a myth because compared to the reality of nature,it's just so small."

"But people find it comforting."

"I think its something like fifty percent of Americans believe the earth is only 6000 years old."

"It's so dull!  The old mythologies.  Have you read The book of Job?"

"Once, a long time ago."

"God answers Job out of the whirlwind.  Job asks for justice and God answers him - where were you when I created the world?  He just sort of batters him down with words.  What do you know, little man?  What do you know about anything? God says. And Job backs down, I don't know anything he says.  I hated that for years, but I've grown to understand it.  That's actually a very good answer.   You have your Einstein and Carl Sagan, these people, who say their idea of the sacred is that there are things in the universe that are just too big,  just too vast.  You don't have the braincells to understand how things work.  They see the sacred in the mystery of what cannot be understood and that's what God is saying and what Job is saying."

"Its a good answer."

"It's a very good answer."

"I've gotten used to not having breasts anymore," says the woman behind him.  "What feels strange is not wearing a bra.  I'm so used to feeling that little wraparound hug all through the day and then being free of it at night.  Now its gone."

"I used to hug fire hydrants when I was a kid."

"That's crazy."

"Can I ask you?" says the other woman.  "When someone loses a leg or an arm, they feel phantom limbs.  What's it like?  Do you feel like, phantom breasts?"

The young man hears silence.  And then -

"What?"

"You know."

"Yes I know.  But that's kind of crazy."

"Crazy?"  Says the other woman.  "Oh I can tell you about crazy, you don't know a soup spoon of the crazy I have in my skull."

The young man thinks of Job.  Thinks of God speaking from the whirlwind and even the room seems to turn as thougha breeze moved in it.  As though he sat, in his wounded state, in a whirlwind of human voices, moving, moving.  I can't go home, he thinks.  My house is haunted.

He sits and the voices go on and on.

Curiosity can still kill by J.P. Bowie

The door loomed before him. Locked... it was always locked.

Why the hell could he not know what was behind there... in the room.

Forbidden, he'd been told. All the more enticing

He touched the dark oak, ran his fingertips over the smooth, solid surface.

He pressed his face against the wood. It felt warm, inviting...

'Come in,' it seemed to whisper.

He pushed gently on the fine paneling and the door swung open.

He inhaled a sharp breath of surprise, yet still stepped inside the room.

The door clicked shut behind him.

His eyes narrowed as he tried to make out the various shapes in the dark.

A chair? A couch? Something tall, shrouded. A wardrobe perhaps?

He felt drawn to it; his trembling, curious hand stretched out.

A chill touched his spine and he drew back.

The tall shape moved... towards him. 'You're here,' it whispered.

'I've been waiting...'

He shrieked, he stumbled, and backed up against the door.

He fumbled for the doorknob, turning it, twisting it, pulling, pulling...

The shape reached for him, enveloped him in its darkness, muted his screams.

***

The door loomed before her. Locked ... it was always locked...

Research

By Lisabet Sarai

 
“Miss Meriweather. Increase the gain by another order of magnitude. Ah—oh, by Newton’s apples!—”

“Is that too much, Professor? Shall I dial it back?”

“No, no, we must continue. Another notch, please.”

“But your face is scarlet, sir. And your member—Oh, God, are those sparks?”

“To be expected when experimenting with electrical forces, Miss Meriweather. Adjust the rheostat as I’ve instructed. Argh—that’s good, excellent...Oh! More. More...!”

“Sir, the boiler will blow. The needle’s halfway into the red zone already.”

“We need more power—more steam—oh, incredible! Amazing! We shall be the first to chronicle the detailed response of the male organ to various levels of electrical stimulation—oh, by Aristotle, turn it up, girl! Don’t stop now!”

“I smell burning. And you’re drenched with sweat.”

“All—all the better—ah! Enhances conductivity—what? What are you doing?“

“Protecting you from excessive scientific curiosity. I don’t want you hurt.”

“But—I was so close to a breakthrough... Unstrap me immediately, Miss Meriweather. If you won’t assist me, I’ll have to man the controls myself.”

“Sorry, Professor. I can’t do that.”

“You disobedient little hussy! And where—oh, by Pythagoras, you’re not wearing knickers!”

“Before you research artificial sexual stimulation, sir, shouldn’t you investigate the real thing?”

By the Numbers

by Annabeth Leong

I can't think about the topic "over-sexed" without going for the data. From an early age, I felt weird about myself whenever I heard about women and sex—whether I was hearing what women are "supposed" to be like, what women are actually doing, or listening to what other women said they were doing.

In Alfred Kinsey's 1953 Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, he reported that unmarried women had a mean of 0.5 orgasms a week, and married women had 2.2. By that definition, I'm not over-sexed—I'm exponentially sexed (expo-sexed?).

For basically my whole sexual life, I've averaged a minimum of an orgasm a day, and often many more. I masturbate to fall asleep, so that's how I know it's at least one. I'm sure I've missed days here and there, but I definitely made up for those with recreational masturbation or experiences with lovers. Also, being coupled has often caused me to have fewer orgasms than I do when I'm single—when you live alone, it's not awkward to randomly masturbate on the living room couch, but when your lover's around, unless they're into that, it might be.

So, basically, when I read numbers like Kinsey's, I get pretty damn confused. Are all these women being surveyed telling lies? Or am I just that much hornier than everyone else? Do I need hospitalization? Or perhaps a shock collar? (Damn it, the idea of a shock collar turns me on…)

But Kinsey's book came out in 1953. Maybe those low, low numbers are the result of patriarchal oppression. If you don't know to call your sex organs anything other than "down there," and you're told you'll definitely go to hell if you dare to feel around down there, maybe it's hard to find the clit.

Modern numbers don't make me feel much better, though. Here's a clip from Jesse Bering's book Perv:

In a 2006 survey of 1,171 Swedish women, 80 of them (around 7 percent) were labeled "hypersexual." Why the researchers settled on thirteen orgasms per month as the critical dividing line between "normal sexuality" and "hypersexuality" in women is something of a puzzle (there's nothing special or catastrophic about that figure so far as I can tell), but nonetheless any kvinna finding herself on the wrong side of that line was considered "hypersexual." The bar for the Swedish male respondents in the same survey was set somewhat higher. Men needed a minimum of seventeen orgasms a month (another dubious figure) to be classified as "hypersexual."

Bering takes an appropriately skeptical tone about what really seem to be arbitrary definitions of hypersexuality, but I don't even need to get into that argument to feel like a weirdo nympho. Only 80 of those 1,171 Swedish women have more than thirteen orgasms a month? I shudder to think where my personal slice of the pie would be if I were in that survey. Would I have any company at all, or would they delete my figures because it's often a good idea to remove extreme outliers?

I want to pause here to emphasize that I'm not humble-bragging. I don't mean to imply that the frequency of my masturbation is somehow superior or even sexier. And I don't mean my incredulity at these comparisons to come off as shaming other women. I truly don't mean to throw any shade on women who choose to orgasm less often than I do.

I think maybe everyone is wondering what normal is. If we could remove our societal value judgments about normal or abnormal sexuality, maybe we could all just be ourselves and please ourselves without worrying so much.

Others have brought up the slut/frigid bitch dichotomy. Women are punished for both too much and too little sexual desire, and "too much" and "too little" are often defined in relation to the amount of sexual desire a male partner has.

My experiences, though, are all with the slut end of the spectrum. Frequency of orgasms isn't the only number that matters there. There's also number of partners. There was a movie that came out in 2011 called What's Your Number? It's about a woman who freaks the fuck out in response to a magazine article that correlates having more than twenty partners and having trouble finding a husband. She's been with nineteen people, and she thinks she needs to be sure that the next man she gets with is her husband.

I'll just say that I found the number twenty…quaint. I'll never forget going to a clinic to get tested and learning that having more than three partners in a year was considered promiscuous. That particular year, I'd had thirteen.

These numbers about partners are another vector along which I've always felt bizarre and over-sexed. Part of what's always been strange to me is that I can't imagine being any other way. How else would I fall asleep? And as far as the number of partners, aside from issues of coercion and the way people treat you when you're known as the town slut, I've just never seen the point in waiting when all parties involved know what they want to do. I've never been sure how people manage to hold back so much.

And I think this gets me to a very similar place to where Jean ended up. It would be so great to live in a world where we could be our true sexual selves without shame (assuming consent and safer sex practices). What if we stopped counting these things? What if I stopped counting?

For a long time, I tracked lovers according to several complicated systems. I lived in fear of discovering I'd forgotten a lover's last name, or wasn't sure exactly what I'd done with them. I obsessed over what did and didn't "count" as sex. But I think all that was part of the effort to be normal when I didn't feel normal, or to cling to whatever sense of normal I could.

What isn't normal, but should be, is to learn what's right for oneself and go with it.

I'll end with a plug for the best book of sex science aimed at women that I've ever read. Emily Nagoski's Come As You Are is the first book I've read that explained things I experienced, treated a wide variety of sexual personalities as normal, and never once made me feel like a slut. What if I'm not over-sexed at all, but properly sexed for me? I highly recommend that book.

(I'm posting on the weekend to make up for missing my normal day in this cycle. Back to normal next time, everyone!)

Rolling In It

by Jean Roberta

I recently reviewed a scholarly book, The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565-1830, by Susan Lanser. As the author shows, “woman + woman” (primary relationships between women) were described during the period under discussion as 1) impossible (especially if they included any activity that could be called “sex”), 2) new and “modern,” despite the general belief that the poet Sappho, from the Island of Lesbos (circa 600 BC) was the original foremother, and 3) a dangerous epidemic that could destroy civilization. This book includes evidence of “the sapphic imaginary,” including much speculation by anxious conservatives about the debauched practises of women who supposedly had too much freedom.

There needs to be a book about the “slut imaginary,” and maybe there is. At various times in my life, most of the people closest to me have accused me of “wanting it all the time,” and even of doing it all the time, presumably with no breaks for eating or sleeping, let alone earning money by holding down a non-sexual job. According to some men (e.g. my late ex-husband), too many women are Biblical demons who have no other function except to tempt men to spill their seed.

Accusations of sluttery are often motivated by political bias other than contempt for women in general. Queen Jezebel in the Old Testament wasn’t necessarily an adulteress or a nymphomaniac. According to the story, she was the foreign wife of a Hebrew king named Ahab, and she brought the worship of “false gods” to her husband’s people. In the centuries since her story was first written down, it has been assumed that such a “pagan” woman would be a slut. Most visual images of her focus on her lush, sinful curves.

Skip ahead to the late 1700s, when Queen Marie Antoinette of France was still known to her enemies as “the Austrian woman,” a foreign invader who married the dauphin of France when she was a teenager. On the eve of revolution, written stories about her “furious womb” (uncontrollable need for sex) circulated widely.

Note that King Charles II, who ruled England from 1660 to 1685, was a famous “libertine.” Historians estimate that he fathered between 12 and 19 children outside of marriage. (He had a wife, but she couldn’t carry a pregnancy to term.) Apparently no one suggested that he was unfit to rule because of his prolific sex life. At the time, more of his Protestant subjects seemed shocked by rumours that the king was a closeted Catholic!

When I was still fairly young and horny, I learned from experience that no one can really do it “all the time.” (I’ve also been accused of writing “all the time” as well as reading “all the time.” If there are only 24 hours in a day, how can time be multiplied?) Males, in particular, have a disadvantage if they want to do it “all the time.” Most guys, no matter how healthy and full of juice, need some reloading time after ejaculating before they can fire again. Girls/women are capable of multiple orgasms, but not for hours at a stretch. Human energy is limited.

The general Western (Christian?) fear of “excessive” sex really seems like fear of the impossible, much like a medieval fear of having one’s crops or general well-being destroyed by a witch’s curse. Nonetheless, I’m sure I wasn’t the only girl whose parents recommended “therapy” of some kind (medical or psychiatric) to eliminate those inappropriate feelings. The only alternative to being a “fallen woman” who presumably wanted it all the time was to be a “nice girl” who was supposed to do it only with her husband, but not to like it.

The flip side of traditional fear and dread of uncontrolled lust (especially in women) is desire for unlimited pleasure. My earliest “porn” stories (as I thought of them) were about some other country – it might have to be on some other planet – where my sexual ability would be admired, not sneered at or punished. I could have high rank (i.e. be an earthier kind of Disney princess), be initiated into sex in some public ceremony, and not lose any status because of it. Au contraire; my “people” would love my sexual generosity.

The surrealistic plots of Lewis Carroll’s fantasy novels, Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872) seem like reactions to the Victorian social order, and even though they don’t include any mention of sex, they do include a surprisingly assertive young heroine. In my fantasy story, “Becoming Alice,” she accelerates through puberty by drinking a magic potion (one of the bottles labelled “Drink Me”), and then makes her debut, her presentation to the King and Queen, in a sexual sense. In Wonderland, this is all as it should be. (This story appears in my single-author collection, The Princess and the Outlaw, and in The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 13.)

For a brief time in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I thought a Sexual Revolution might really be on its way, and it would liberate people in general from undeserved guilt and shame. That revolution never arrived, and I probably won’t see it in my lifetime, which is probably more than halfway over.

In the meanwhile, I can only imagine a world in which sex would never be considered a problem unless 1) it was forced on someone who didn’t or couldn’t give meaningful consent, or 2) it resulted in unwanted consequences (pregnancy, disease), or 3) it interfered with other aspects of life (eating, sleeping, working). Otherwise, an “oversexed” person could be considered an “overachiever,” someone who accomplishes more than the rest of us.

Oversexed (in three disparate parts)

by Daddy X

I recently saw an article about a guy living in a senior facility outside Philadelphia who was caught with a prostitute (very much alive) under his bed. He was in his 70’s and selling booze to other seniors who paid—so he could play.

My kind of guy.

Although I developed crushes on girls all through grammar school, I didn’t discover masturbation until turning 13.

Wow.

But it was wrong. So wrong, according to the Catholic belief system. I had, of course, been long aware that there was no Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny and no Tooth Fairy, but some old folk tales did persist. I still thought playing with my pecker was wrong, wrong, wrong. After all, somebody who lived in the clouds was judging me. When I got up the gumption to confess those sins, the priest ordered five Rosaries as a penance. You  Catholics know how long that takes. Fuck! I had things to do, for Christ’s sake.

Well, I did it. I did the penance. Not long after that, I stopped going to church. I figured that the harmless, benevolent act in which I was indulging with my own body, in my own bed, with nobody else to know… was nothing to feel guilty about.

For what it’s worth, here’s the Catholic catechism answer to “What constitutes a mortal sin?”

First, the sin must be a ‘grievous offence’. (Hmmm… no grievance there.)

Second, you must know it is wrong. (I don’t think so, not so much.)

Third, you must do it anyway, knowing it’s wrong. (In the words of Tweety Bird: “If I dood it, I get a whippin’! … I dood it.”)

It was obvious by the heavy penance that the priest considered masturbation a serious sin. What business did he have informing me that what I did was a grievous offence? He, in a sense, was attempting to create that sin for me in my own mind. And happy to do it.

I wanted no part of a god who saw such an innocent pleasure as evil. Or a clergy who decided what was my sin. Especially from some turkey who’d embraced a life of abstinence.

So I embraced masturbation in a big way. I’m talking blisters, open sores. Was I oversexed? Were the turkeys right after all? I pleasured myself every single day, every night, sometimes six, seven or eight sessions a day. When I learned that most boys my age wanked a lot, I felt more comfortable with my strong libido, but in talking candidly with friends, it seems either that I did it a whole lot more than they, or the others were too embarrassed. 

And fuck if I was going to waste any jerkoff time reciting rosaries!

In retrospect, what the experience did accomplish was to jump-start a proclivity for critical thinking. Was all I’d been taught just plain incorrect? Everything I learned in Catholic school? Where the accepted intelligence was that you got a better education than in the secular system.

When the kids from public school were dragged in for religion classes, they seemed so stupid to us, not having memorized the basic catechism, fumbling for answers to questions with no context in experience. Baloney. It was years later when I realized that much of what I had been taught in parochial school was patently wrong. Just plain bad information: Evolution didn’t exist. God lived in the sky. It was a mortal sin to eat meat (in those days) on Friday or fail to go to mass on Sunday. (Ever wonder what happened to all the poor fucks burning in hell for eating a meatball before Vatican II?) Hell was under us. How would that be possible on a round earth? How many non-Catholics who've lived since the dawn of mankind were stuffed down there?  

If a kid questioned these tenets, they were told “That’s one of God’s mysteries,” by the more reasonable teachers. Or we were punished by the zealous kind. Beaten up.

Those seeds of rebellion set me up for a life of guiltless sex. I have always seen sex as a positive, and have not (to my knowledge) made enemies with my dick. After all those fuck-happy years, I began writing erotica at 64 years old. I’m now 70 and still like to play, whether on the page or in the sack (although these days my mental appetite tends to be larger than my genital stomach). Guess that appreciation is still working, at least on some level.

Wow. This post went sideways. I was going to write about a guy I knew who once told me he wanted to bed 100 women within a year.

I don’t have that many words yet, so I will tell the story:

First, I should say that the guy was absolutely gorgeous. Tall and of good physical proportion. His face came off somewhere between James Caan and a young Marlon Brando.

I worked with him at a restaurant where we were both lowly line cooks, so it wasn’t a matter of sexual harassment of underlings. He screwed a waitress after his first shift. He wound up sleeping with the majority of them. A new girl would be hired, and he’d bed her within a few days. Saw it happen time and again (not literally).

I turned him on to an apartment for rent, located in a building where I knew three sisters who lived in two other apartments. He screwed all three of them the week he moved in. One time I covered for him while he and a coworker dallied in the walk-in.

What this guy had was charisma. As far as I knew, none of the women wound up hating him—despite his indiscriminate carousing. He was a fuck toy, happy with the fat ones, skinny ones, uglies who’d never fucked before. Beautiful ones threw themselves at him with abandon.

I didn’t know him long enough to learn if he ever hit his goal, but I did (and do) wish him well.

Again, my kind of guy.

Romanticide by Suz deMello

I had a mad crush once on an art history professor. I was a seventeen-year-old freshman and he was twenty years my senior. I had gotten laid exactly once before we met—a disappointing experience that took place the first weekend I went away to university. I did not bother repeating it for months until I found myself crushing on...let's call him James.

I turned into a madwoman. From where had all this passion come? I didn't know, but what I knew was that I wanted him more than my next breath. 

I made my interest clear and he did the same. But he didn't seduce me until his class was over, so it wasn’t until the next semester that we finally got what we both wanted—sort of.

One memorable night, I found myself thoroughly fucked in a cozy bed aboard a houseboat—very romantic. He was great. I felt as though I was flying, in total bliss and joy.

Then he said, “So, you have trouble coming?”

I crashed to the earth and couldn't fly again for years.

Oversexed Erotica?

Sacchi Green

Too much of a good thing is apt to be indigestible. I won’t try to define “oversexed” when it come to individual people, but I see all too many stories that I’d class as oversexed. Bear in mind that the operative term here is “I’d class,” so this is all a matter of my own possibly jaded opinion

It’s not exactly a question of too much sex, but of too many actions, “dirty” words, sexual paraphernalia both organic and mechanical, and anatomically improbable acrobatics crammed together with little or no focus to draw the reader into the experience. Gay porn writer Lars Eighner, in his book Elements of Arousal (a fine writing guide even if you’re not writing erotica/porn,) uses the example of a circle-wank scene where one super-stud after another shoots his load, but there’s no one viewpoint character for the reader to identify with. Switching from one viewpoint to another and then another and on and on irritates me just as much, as happens in many an orgy scene, but that may say more about the inflexibility of my aging mind than about the general appeal of such hopping between heads and sets of naughty bits.

There are plenty of other ways for a story to be oversexed. A good story needs pacing, and flow, and varying levels of intensity, with sexual tension that builds toward a literal climax. If there are multiple climaxes, a chance to breathe now and then gives the next wave time to swell. There’s also a tendency to throw so much into the mix at once that the writer has to strain to think of ways to top what’s already been written, sometimes with results that cross over from the stimulating to the ludicrous, or even the baffling. “Wait…she was bent frontwards across a solid table,” the reader thinks. “So how can anyone be biting her breast?” Or the eternal question arises of how many limbs doing what where at which angles can any two people (or three, or whatever) manage? But that one isn’t directly related to too much unrelenting sex.

“Unrelenting” of course brings to mind BDSM and various flavors of power play, but in some ways the elements of dominance and submission and other forms of edge play provide enough of a range of experience besides basic stimulation of sex organs that they may well be over the top, for individual values of where the top is, but not precisely oversexed. (The whole matter of how closely sex and power differentials are related could make for an interesting discussion, full of debate about definitions, but let’s not go there just now.)

It occurs to me that I could just as easily argue against everything I’ve just said. I know perfectly well that a really good writer could make an all-sex-every-instant story work, and that plenty of readers get off enthusiastically on non-stop fucking. “Oversexed” as applied to stories is every bit as much in the mind of the beholder as when applied to people. I don’t have just time now to argue with myself, though. I have to dive back into erotica submissions for the anthologies I’m editing, and try to overcome my urge to skim past any long, long paragraphs packed with sex to see whether there’s any framework of an actual story there.      

What is this "over" sexed you're talking about?

My little half-baked dictionary on my computer defines oversexed as "having unusually strong sexual desires". That seems a beige and generalised definition to me. For it to have any relevance, then we'd need to establish a baseline as to what usually strong sexual desires might be.

(Side note: I'm aware all kinds of studies have been done. I'm also blissfully and wilfully unaware of statistics in these matters. Some things can be measured and quantified, and for me, some things shouldn't be. After all, it's not how big it is, it's what you do with it...right? Am I right? I'm right, right? When you're right, you're right...right? Right.)

One of the issues with that particular definition of oversexed is its apparent focus on quantity or frequency of feeling. What about quality? Or range of tastes? A person can feel a completely normal amount of lust, yet feel it for an enormous range of people (and/or objects). A bisexual person has twice the range of lust objects a heterosexual person has. Polyamory, just as a word, sounds oversexed. Yet none of those examples automatically fits the definition. A person can be bisexual but still have a low libido, for instance.

Personally, I gladly and wholeheartedly confess to being utterly oversexed. At least in a mental and emotional sense. Like most people, I don't act on it physically every time I feel the urge. Hell, I'd never get a scrap of work done.

And it's not the bikini-clad models on billboards or the ice-cream-licking strumpets in advertisements that work me over. Blatant overuse of sexuality to sell crap has been pounded so hard it's gone numb.

But it's partly being a writer which has honed my particular oversexedness. A need to try and understand more people, and understand people more. The need to make educated guesses about motivations. Essentially, to sound overtly and tritely male, to get inside them.

Every day, all around me, I see desirable women of all sizes, shapes, ages and colours. Those with a finely tuned fashion sense, and those who, like me, think Jimmy Choo is a character from Thomas the Tank Engine. It's clear, too, that as I've aged, so my tastes have expanded.

Nowadays it's the subtle and unsuspecting sexiness of people around me which gets me all worked up. People as average as myself. In comments with the previous round of posts here, I discovered I was not alone in finding small, rogue slivers of skin to be one of the sexiest visual treats ever (hi, Annabeth!) That moment when a woman takes off her sweater and her blouse rides up a little, revealing a gorgeous plump belly, maybe with a few little stretch marks she'd normally take great pains to conceal. The velvet skin of a throat either side of a black choker. Or the holy grail; the sweet skin of a curvaceous thigh between a skirt and a three-quarter-length stocking.

As a means of contrast...a drunk woman running up to me in the street, pulling out her breasts and shaking them at me would be a sensory assault. A businesswoman removing her glasses and rubbing the bridge of her nose is way sexy. It's those intimacies which really set my pot a-simmerin'. Little nothings that hit hard because that person has let you into them just a little, without even realising it in most cases.

Living in a subtropical city, with its barely-there winters and free-wheeling spirits, those moments arise so very often. On the bus, at the shops, in the park. Taking into account the vast array of feminine physicality which appeals to me, I simply cannot go anywhere without seeing a hundred different moments which hit me.

Moments which provoke in me an unusually strong sexual desire.

"Did your father ever... touch you?"

by Giselle Renarde

Here's me in bed. I'm twenty-two and tiny and tight as they come.

Here's me in bed with my ex.

Except the year is 2002, so he isn't my ex yet. He isn't my boyfriend, either. He's the man whose mistress I am. That's the best way I know how to describe him. You remember this guy--he's fifty-three and married to somebody else.

I'm the best he's ever had.

I love hearing that, and he tells me all the time. It's nice to get my ego stroked. It's not a favour I really return--except by sleeping with him every other day, I guess.

We've been at it since just after 6. Did you know they have one of those in the morning now? I never did, until he started letting himself into my one-room apartment, undressing at my kitchen table, then slipping between the sheets on my Ikea futon.

He joins me in bed just after 6 in the morning because 6 in the morning is when he usually goes to "the club." That's what he calls his gym. If he comes to my apartment (which is conveniently located only blocks away from "the club") instead, then his wife never asks where he's been. And if she never asks, he never needs to lie. It's like he isn't even cheating at all.

Almost like I don't exist. 

But if I didn't exist, how could I wrap my little hands around him? How could I take him in my mouth?  How could I roll with him in the muddled sheets while the cat runs and hides in the closet?

I'm here. I exist. And I'm sure his wife knows, because I hear wives know these things--even if they don't know they know.

But I don't think about the wife while I'm sucking her husband's cock. I'd probably feel guilty, if I did.

The sun hasn't even come up yet and we've already got one good fuck under our belts. We'll probably get another one in before he leaves, or maybe half of one. He doesn't usually finish the second time. After all, he is pretty old.

I feel tiny in his arms, and warm and precious. He traces his fingertips up my spine and down my side. He touches me everywhere and it feels so good that I simply enjoy the sensation. I never reciprocate. I don't consider that he might appreciate those tender touches. It doesn't even cross my mind.

And then he asks me, "Were you ever abused by your father?"

I don't know how to answer that. I don't know what he means.

He says, "Did your father ever... touch you?"

No. No!  Why would you even ask me that? No!

"Well, sometimes the memories get buried and you only remember later on, in adulthood."

He's asking if I was sexually abused as a child, and I find the question shocking because it's so far from my experience. My father was a mean drunk who was abusive toward my mother, but even that abuse was rarely witnessed by us kids. My sister likes to say we were emotionally abused, and I'll concede to that, but never anything physical.

My father is far from my favourite person, but I guess there must be a trace of care left in my heart, because I don't want people thinking he's a child molester. My best friend was sexually assaulted throughout her childhood. It's a life-altering torment I'm relieved not to share.

But this man in my bed thinks he's on to something. He gets all Jungian on me. Freudian, too, and he only ever brings out Freud in desperation.

"Because, really, a young girl like you who's sleeping with an old man like me... well, you're obviously seeking a father figure."

Okay, I'll concede to that if you don't make me think about it too hard. This relationship starts to feel like a boot-sucking quagmire once you really start to THINK about it. But that's just psychological icky-ness. What's it got to do with abuse?

"Well, it's just that you seem to ENJOY sex so much."

Yes. Yes I do.

"You're so EAGER, and you're GOOD at it. You want it just as much as I do--maybe more."

Yeah. So?

"So I'm not sure it's natural for a woman to crave sex quite the way you do."

I see...

"Behaving in an overly sexual manner is a classic symptom of child abuse."

In children. I'm twenty-two, in case you haven't noticed. Hormones have kind of taken over. Sex is my God now.

"You say you weren't abused, but maybe you've blocked it out. It'll all come back to you, one day."

Doubt it, old man. But I'll always remember this conversation.

~

"Night Games" An oversexed story

 (The story I originally tried to write for this week fizzled on the runway.  This story was originally published on the Grip in 2011.  I've shopped it around but, not surprisingly, no publisher will touch it.)

“Night Games”

By

C.  Sanchez-Garcia

            She came out of the walk in closet holding a dark paisley neck tie and held it up for him to see.

            “That’s my good tie,” he said. “Hell, no.”

            “What then?” she shook it impatiently.

            “Use the gold tie with the green stripes.”

            “I gave you that gold tie,” she said, wounded. “You don’t like it?”

            “It doesn’t go with anything.”

            She walked back into the closet and came out with a rayon gold tie with hideous green bars like a school crossing zone. “Anyway, it’s made strong,” he said. “You can’t rip it, no matter what.”

            “You just don’t like the stuff I pick for you, I know better than you. You get your shitty taste from your mother. Jesus Christ, that woman.”

            He took the tie from her. “I don’t care, this is the right one for this kind of thing.”

            She stood petulantly in the closet doorway. “You ought to consider what I want once in a while,” she said. She was already dressed for the evening. She wore pink bunny slippers and a tattered, pink bathrobe. Her hair was in curlers, maybe so he couldn’t grab ahold of a hank and drag her around by it. The curlers were hidden under a red Rosie the Riveter kerchief with white polka dots. The old bathrobe was tied off with a cloth belt in a simple loose slip knot, one that could be undone with one swift solid yank as he slammed her up hard against the bedroom wall screaming “Give it up, bitch!” so loud it always made his eyes pop.

            Under the bathrobe he knew she’d be wearing her oldest pair of panties, probably with a small tear along the seam to facilitate one handed ripping while he squeezed her neck with the other hand. And her breasts would be bare. He liked that part. It was sexy, but practical too, just like the belt. As they grew older her breasts changed; swelled, sagged, saddened and the big down pointing nipples had become a little more wall eyed pointing away from her chest in opposite directions. They’d tried it the first time with a bra and discovered how very hard it was to rip it from her while running down the hallway, thrashing and fighting, all those straps and tiny buckles and damned little hooks. The movies made it look easy. In the real world it was like trying to rip the bridle from a panicked horse, until it became impossibly tangled around her ears and she’d laughed and cussed at him for ruining a pricey Toulouse Chez fashion bra and the moment was just hopelessly lost. Also it was nice without a bra. It was more exciting – more satisfying – to be able to tear her robe open and just have them hanging down there, ready for him to go to work on her with nothing in the way.

            “So where you wanna rape me at?” she said. “Garage?”

            “Garage floor is cold.”

            “I don’t mind.”

            “Last time you hit your head.”

            “Don’t mind.”

            “I changed the oil yesterday. Hard to get engine black off your back. And if you get skinned up, its bad for the wound.”

            “Goddammit, Henry, did you get oil on the garage floor and just put that goddamn kitty litter on it? Did you? Don’t you clean up after your shit? Are you a grown man?”

            “Nobody gets raped in a garage, Fran.”

            “Plenty women get raped in garages, I’ll bet.”

            “Those are parking garages they get raped in.”

            “So?”

            “It ain’t, I don’t know, authentic, trying to get all raped to pieces in your own damn garage. It’s silly, is what. How about I go ahead and rape you on the bed?”

            “Like that’s authentic? That the best you got for me? The bed?”

            “Women get raped in their beds once in a while, more than the garage anyway.”

            “Henry.”

            “I mean I want you should be happy and all, but come on. The garage?”

            “You don’t want to haul off and rape me in the dark when I’m getting out of the car?”

            “There’s cockroaches in that garage, Franny. You know about me and roaches.”

            “I don’t know what kind of crazy grabasstic motherfucker rapist you think you’re supposed to be.”

            “I’ll rape you up good and plenty on the bed just fine, you’ll see and I’ll give you a nice massage.”

            “Ain’t no mean ass hell fire rapist ever gave a massage I ever heard of.”

            “You might need one.”

            “Oh bullshit. You wouldn’t know how to rape a damn chicken if somebody was holding it up for you. Okay, bed then.”

            “Good,” he sighed. “I’m sort of tired anyway.”

            “Some hellacious scary motherfucker rapist you are.”

            He wrapped the tie around his left fist and looked over at the bed. What was the matter with a perfectly good bed? It was solid brass, with heavy vertical bars on the head board you could tie a woman’s hands to, nice and tight. Took two men to lift it. Franny wouldn’t be going anywhere tied down to that thing. Hell, you could hog tie a woman like Franny to that headboard and go to town on her up one side and down the other. Tie her legs up to the foot board too if that’s what she wanted. Rape the holy shit out of her all night long if she wanted it that way. What was it about some dirty garage that seemed to get her off so much? Any sensible woman would rather get it on a nice clean bed any night. She’s plain crazy.

            “What do you want for work tomorrow?” she said. “I got to get my ironing done first.”

            He went in the closet and picked out a blue cotton dress shirt and navy khakis. And that blue paisley tie, to tick her off. He handed them to her. “Back in a few minutes, honey, you know I won’t let you down,” he said. “Just be ready.”

            “You be ready,” she said. “Get your pecker up good or you’re gonna have a long night, I guarantee.” She turned to him as he was leaving. “Henry.”

            He looked back, “Yes, Franny?”

            “You’re good to me, Henry. Love you.”

            He closed the bedroom door and heard her inside setting up her ironing board and turning the TV to Miami CSI. He listened to the voices hum as though underwater.

            He rolled up the tie and put it in the back pocket of his jeans and began going around the house methodically turning out the lights. He checked the cat’s dish to make sure it had Purina and let himself out the back door.

            The cool early October air was sharp and refreshing. He felt a little more alive. He walked to the end of the backyard and stood in the dark looking up at the moon and stars. The house was dark now except for the light in their bedroom. The windows were closed so that she could scream for help and howl and beg for her life and raise hell generally without the neighbors down the road getting the wrong idea.

            Close to the moon he picked out the Big Dipper. He followed the dipper’s leading stars and picked out the North Star, there it was, and over there, that was Orion. Orion was the second constellation he’d learned as a Cub Scout. He pointed and followed down Orion’s belt to the sword holder thing – there. Now, that star, the second star, that wouldn’t really be a star at all it was a nebula. Hell, he thought, that’s where they make stars. Ain’t nature something?

            He saw the light change in the bedroom. She’d have packed up the iron. She was ready, but he wasn’t. His pecker wasn’t up at all. . He unzipped his pants, felt the cool air on his balls and felt them retreat into his body. He spit in his palm and worked it a little, trying to get it up but it wasn’t cooperating.

            He imagined a scene, maybe in a women’s prison and he was the only man, locked in among the women by mistake. The only hard dick around for a hundred miles. A murderously horny, vicious, Mexican drug dealer lady, big breasted and hairy. Standing naked next to him in the prison shower yelling at him - “Get it up, bitch!” She’d holler insults at his manhood, stepping her legs wide apart. “Get that pecker up bitch!” That got a little bit of a rise. He tried to imagine terrorized Franny tied to the bed weeping and pleading, nononono, please no, not me no, but with legs cooperatively spread eagled, as he shouted threats at her. He got a little harder. But still. Well. He spit in his palm and worked it a little more, imagining himself satisfying the hairy horny Mexican murderer lady up against the wall of the shower room as the other women masturbated and cheered him on.

            That worked. That usually worked.

            Here we go. Got it up bitch.

            He zipped up and moved silently across the lawn, taking his shoes off at the door. He turned the knob slow and opened it carefully, wondering at himself, knowing he could raise a huge din and she’d never hear him coming over the TV sound. He closed the door behind him and passed the kitchen table. Pile of mail. Huh. He opened the refrigerator a crack for the light and picked up the envelopes and sorted through them. Junk. Junk. Junk. Gas bill. Shit. He tore it open, listening for the sound of the bedroom door but it remained closed. He always came in through the adjourning bathroom door anyway. Just more stealthy somehow. Fuck this bill. It’s way up for this time of year, he thought. Its laundry. Running that damn laundry machine every damn day like hot water grew on trees – she think we’re running a hotel here? Why she gotta do laundry every day? Talk to her about that later, big man. Gonna go show her what happens to women who think they gotta do the laundry everyday. Show her good and righteous, fuckin’ A big buddy.

            Give it up, bitch!

            He tossed the mail on the table and took a step away and his foot hit something on the floor that rolled to the wall, bounced and rolled back. Snowball’s red rubber ball. He picked it up. He held it to his face and opened his mouth, touching it to his lips. Just right. Now that, that was a real nice touch. She’d love that. Hell, next time he’d put chocolate syrup on it.

            He rinsed it under the faucet and dried it with a paper towel, in case she asked later. His pecker had sagged considerably in the meantime, mostly because of the gas bill, and he had to conjure the hairy horny hideous Mexican drug dealer woman, banging her hard against the shower wall tiles while women prisoners cheered and bringing himself back into the spirit of the thing. He continued down the hall. He was inside the bathroom. He hesitated outside the connecting door to the bedroom, readying himself to burst in. He put his hand on the door knob.

            Give it up bitch! He mouthed the words.

            In the kitchen something fell on the floor. He froze listening. He waited. There was only the TV. He stood listening.

            Had he locked the door? He thought he had. Did he? The hall seemed somehow a tad brighter. A light?

            “Somebody there?” There was no answer. He stood still and waited. Maybe nothing.

            But why was there light?

            Hunching slightly he padded silently down the hall towards the kitchen, listening.

            The refrigerator door was ajar, the light was on, shining dimly in the kitchen like a candle. But he’d closed it. He was sure he’d closed it. Pretty sure. Well, maybe sure. Sometimes stuff pushes it open. He stood still, listening to the far away voices in the bedroom, thinking of her in bathrobe and curlers waiting. Grabbing. Resisting. Tearing. Breasts swinging – give it up bitch!

            Standing in the kitchen, he felt in his heart, deep inside something he would have thought impossible. A gathering darkness, a quiet flowering of evil.

            This is how its done, he thought. Real world. This is what it’s really like to do this to somebody. Goddamn, it . . it . . . feels powerful.

            The stranger’s sleeping house. The woman alone. The fear, the leering thrill of standing and listening, waiting for the inner signal to take the next step. The rubber ball in his fist. The unbreakable necktie rolled up in his back pocket.

            I want to hurt her, he thought. It seemed like a revelation. He felt the darkness move and for a moment he feared for her.

            He pushed the refrigerator door closed with his fingertips. He stood still, listening in the dark, tasting it. He’d never been this urgently erect in his life. Oh, he was ready now. Oh amen, yes Franny. Daddy’s coming.

            He turned to the hallway, stepped away from the kitchen. Unfastened his belt and dropped his pants on the floor in a heap and kicked them away. Felt a sudden cold breeze that made him turn.

            The back door was open. That couldn’t be.

            Hot breath on his neck. A hand on his shoulder. Sharp metal sticking the skin of his back. Burning as it went in.

            A man’s hard voice in his ear.

            “Time to give it up, bitch.”




Copyright 2011 C. Sanchez-Garcia