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Paypal Strongarms Patreon to Deny "Adult" Content Creators Funding

So I just got an alarming and apologetic email from Patreon, which you can read below. Apparently PayPal threatened to freeze all creator pages unless adult content was blocked from using PayPal via Patreon.

I don't know how many, if any, of you used PayPal as a funding source, but if you can switch it to a debit/credit card before April 1st, I would greatly appreciate it. This was extremely last minute by PayPal, and we get paid at the beginning of the month, so it's pretty scary, especially when my writing is my main source of income now thanks to people like you!

This move to making profiles that are adult private only also means I can no longer show up in search results or be featured on Patreon, making me even more dependent on people like you. Thank you in advance, and I'm sorry for this. Please feel free to email PayPal with your frustrations about their tactics, which are totally messed up-

moldenburg@paypal.com

Here's the letter from Patreon, which, bless them, they're trying hard to work with me to make sure I don't suddenly have a drop in funds:

I just wanted to let you know that we had to change your custom URL and set your Patreon page to “private.” The only difference with private pages is that users must have a specific link to view your page, as it no longer appears in our search results. 

We got a notice from Paypal this morning that they were shutting down their entire integration with Patreon because of "adult content" on our site! As you can imagine, this would be detrimental to creators - hundreds of thousands of dollars were to be "frozen" unless we flagged all adult content pages, made them private, and removed Paypal functionality from their individual pages. Paypal was extremely helpful in resolving this entire issue within a few hours.

I'm so sorry that we had to do this without warning you first, but it was SUCH an emergency! We simply had to take action to avoid a situation where creators would lose hundreds of thousands of dollars of legitimate pledges. 

We have already emailed your patrons who signed up to become your patron through Paypal, and we have asked them to switch over to a credit card. No action is needed on your part, however, if you would like to email your patrons as well, that could be helpful in converting patrons from Paypal to credit card. 

Just so you know, here is our official policy on adult content:
https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201872047

Thank you so much, and please be in touch if you have any questions at all. 

Categories: activism, angry, news, politics, porn

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Review: CrashPad's Guide to Fisting

I'm a huge fan of the sex ed/porno genre, particularly because I think it's more fun for people to learn by seeing people do things. I know it's not the most popular position to take, but I KNOW people learn stuff from watching porn. Hell, I learned about kinky things I might want to try thanks to porn... but it doesn't always show you how you get to that point, only vaguely what happens when you're there.

Well, if that thing you're looking for is fisting (which, judging from the fact it's the most commonly searched for term on CrashPad, you might well be!) then you're in luck! This Guide to Fisting is centered around a lover's discussion between Beretta James and Lorelei Lee, who chat between themselves on how to do it while also watching some of the best fisting moments from the series. It feels nicely intimate and accessible.

I particularly appreciated the diversity of the various couples that were shown both doing the fisting and getting fisted, and the communication that's demonstrated throughout (though frankly when I'm getting fisted I'm pretty nonverbal!) There's vaginal and anal fisting demonstrated by performers (including Maybelline and Mariah Cherry Christmas Special, Jacqueline Woods and Stefani Special, and Red Jackhammer and Javier). I also enjoyed seeing Shine at the end!

You can get a Crashpad membership here (get this video and many others!), or just buy this video on demand here.

Categories: crashpad, fisting, how-to, porn, review

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Special Report: Teens, Porn, and Effects

We live in a culture that has cognitive dissidence about nudity and sex- we see female nudity on television objectified in multiple capacities (from the shaming of fat bodies to the lust for tits and ass), are allowed to see graphic rape but not graphic pleasure in a blockbuster film, are only allowed to see penises when flaccid and not in a sexual context.

There's a lot of fear that the internet has increased exposure to pornographic material, but these stories make me wonder- when there's a will, after all, there's a way, and kids have been curious about sexuality all along. So much writing on the subject is either "all porn is good" or "all porn is bad", or seeks to make seemingly arbitrary boundaries between what's ok and what isn't.

Is  "porn culture" a thing we need to worry about? And is it new, caused by internet porn, or has the internet killed porn? Can porn be a positive force? Does porn make men objectify women (and does it make women objectify porn performers by suggesting they're different from normal women)... and does it do it more than mainstream media? Does banning "violent" porn help? What constitutes violent porn? Or is all porn inherently violent? How can we ensure the performers have safety (both on and off set)? Can you be addicted to porn, or is porn not addictive? Who's watching all this porn, anyway? Men? Women? Children?

And, mainly, why has it taken so long for a porn studies journal addressing topics like these to be created?

I'll be writing a separate article about this topic, but I wanted to create a space to host people's full stories of their first experiences with porn and their experiences now for reference. I think it's important for people to have space to talk about these topics, without feeling shamed for their positive experiences or silenced for their negative ones.  

"I can remember three main avenues to finding porn in my pre/early teens: Friends who had cable TV (and parents who didn't realize what we could figure out to get around the scrambling), trading of various magazines (Club, Playboy, Penthouse, Hustlers) with kids in boy scouts, around the school, etc, and finally the early days of the internet. I think the first actual porn I saw was watching a playboy VHS during a sleepover at a friend's home at age ten or so. I also made a fairly early discovery that if I switched one of the TVs in our house to the porn channels, it "unscrambled" for 30 seconds to a minute at a time, and still gave clear audio even during the scrambling of the video, so I was sneaking down to watch that in the very early mornings or very late nights pretty often. Mostly it gave me a much better idea of how sex worked and what it looked like than school, very weak talks with my parents, or things like TV and "mainstream" films. (My dad was a huge James Bond nut. I think I saw Sean Connery seducing / coercing women into bed before I was going to kindergarden.)

It certainly got me started on masturbating pretty early. (and often!) and started giving me ideas of what I liked / wanted. I really vividly remember actresses or models that caught my early attention. There was an ad for the porn channel on the back of a cable guide that featured a head / shoulders shot of a redheaded woman throwing back her head in what was probably supposed to be an orgasm that I cut out and kept for a couple of months, at least, to look at. I learned a lot more about what women enjoying sex (or at least pretending to enjoy sex) sounded like, and tended to listen for that. If I was trying to find something covertly and heard a guy making a lot of noise and the woman being silent, it turned me off. (I still get anxious if I'm with a partner who is very quiet. I tend to start asking if they're enjoying things and asking for guidance from them because I'm afraid I'm doing something wrong.)

At this point, I think my porn consumption is actually relatively low? Over the last few years (I'm in my early 30s now) I've tended to gravitate towards queer porn / independently made porn when I do consume it, and it's very important to see that the performers are actually enjoying themselves. I'll watch things I like when I'm in the mood, and sometimes with my partner as a prelude to / accompaniment with sex. (I've even had a couple of times where she was asleep and I decided to watch something quietly because I was horny and didn't want to wake her up, and it ended up getting her up on multiple levels...*cough*.) I follow particular performers and directors that I like, and I tend to stick to their work, but if I see something on tumblr / reddit / whatever that catches my eye, I'll go take a look.

TL, DR; It's a part of my adult sexuality, but only part, and after seeing a lot of the opposite as a kid, I tend to focus on porn where I can tell the performers care about what they're doing now that I have control over what I buy and watch." - Matt

***

"The porn that I came across gave me the idea that women were just objects in sex. with no say in how things were to be done. Growing up in the midwest I wasn't exposed to anything and so it was up to me and some fearless googling to find porn. And what I discovered was usually hetero, male targeted porn involving lots of demeaning acts on women. or what I perceived to be. There were lots of cocks forced into mouths of women who appear to be in pain or crying. men dominating women. It just didn't seem like the women were having any fun.

When I started getting sexually active it was brought to my attention that I spent very little time handling a penis. And I realized that I was in a sense "afraid" of them, I wouldn't look at it, I wouldn't touch it, just have sex with it. It wasn't well into my late 20s when i did finally become comfortable around them. I didn't even give blow jobs up until then because visions of those women would pop back into my head.

That kind of porn gave me the idea that women couldn't be powerful in sexual situations. especially when giving head. that fucking fucked with my head considering I'm fairly alpha... so my relationship with sex got really rocky until I finally figured all this out (the exposure to bad porn thing). I didn't like feeling submissive so I never gave head for the longest time, because thats what I associated it with.

Then I finally knew what to look for, and that's when sex got much more fun and penises finally handled. Haha!

But fuck, fuck that awful fucking porn." - Oz

***

Re my own experiences watching porn at 14/15/16 - I'm fairly certain I spent years trying to find sex in everything as a child, but it was a few years after we got the internet that it occurred to me that I could just look for porn there (when my parents where out the house). Spent the next few years enjoying amateur websites (the real stuff was either too crap and inauthentic, or cost money) before I started to prefer something a bit more polished (and where I knew the people in it were ok with videos of them having sex being on the internet!).

Impact-wise, I developed an understanding of the mechanics of sex that I was not getting anywhere else - what people looked like when they had sex, the things they could do, etc., as well as an appreciation for my own sexual tastes. I'm fairly certain that without it my early sexual experiences, which were in my late teens, would've been poorer. Now I enjoy porn from time to time as an addition to the rest of my sex life. I was fortunate to have no seriously bad experiences - a few 'ew' moments but nothing traumatising. I always knew I could click away if I wanted to." - Anonymous

***

"When did you get your hands on porn, what kind was it, and how did you get it? 

I grew up in Massachusetts, my time split between my grandparent's farm and Boston. I knew something about sex from a young age as a farm in it's very nature teaches about life and death and sex is a big part of that. In 1958 my mother and I moved into a small apartment on the top floor of a 5 story walk-up in Boston. Bored, I began to go through the other tenant's trash that they left outside their door every Thursday evening.  I was 8 years old.

On the floor below us lived a woman who was a nurse, or as I began to call her, The Sex Professor." She read and threw away a wide range of books from Shakespeare to The Kama Sutra, and all kinds of erotica and pornography in between. Mixed in with Giovanni's Room and an unexpurgated version of 1001 Nights were detective novels with explicit sex on every other page, magazines with girl on girl sex, very sloppy and inefficient rope bondage, and red bottoms from (pretend) spanking, and more novels with man to man sex. She liked almost everything.

Until she moved out 4 years later I read everything she threw away. Around the age of 9 I asked my mother what a few words meant from 1001 Nights. She defined the words, asked where I learned them, looked over the other books I'd rescued, and asked how much I understood them. This opened up discussions about the farm and animals, people and sexuality of all kinds, archaic and slang sexual language, and fact and fantasy. That was the end of it till about 3 year later. My sexual education was matter of fact; she too had been a nurse and in her 20s had lived in New York City in the late 1920s before the crash. In my family there has never been any shame regarding sex, a fact I deeply cherish.

When at 12 I broke my hymen in an accident on a boy's bicycle my grandmother said "Oh at least it won't hurt when you get married." I remember not saying a word and secretly smiling at her innocence, knowing I was going to have intercourse before I got married. it was 1962 and the sexual revolution was just beginning. I also began menstruating that year, and even though I was only 12, my mother began talking to me about pregnancy, birth control, and not allowing myself to be in challenging circumstances where I might be pressured to have sex. Teen pregnancies were common in the small farm town and she didn't want me to be uneducated.

What impact did it have then? What impact does it have now?

Due to my early wide and matter of fact sexual education not only was I able to correctly inform my friends who were confused in their very early teens, I was also able to set boundaries when pressured to have sex, and when I did decide to do so I was the one who choose time, place, and person. Through the years  sex life has been happy and fulfilling, as have my relationships including my primary one of 26 years which is stronger than ever.

What's your relationship to porn now?

I actually have rarely used porn as titillation. At 17 I began to be sexually active and found that while having intercourse and masturbating the sensations of the acts were more arousing to me than the images and ideas of other people.

I don't use porn as for me it takes away my focus on what I'm doing and who, if anyone, I'm with. I've nothing against it, have participated happily if a partner wishes to use it, and have found myself turned on. Yet the only "porn" I still seek are mid to late 1960s and early 1970s Frederick's catalogs. Those sexy drawings of beautiful women in girdles, high heels and lingerie will get every time!" - Sybil

***

"I was a boy of 12 when I first encountered pornography. I had a friend about my age and was hanging out his house as I frequently did, and he along with his brothers (one older, one younger) told me that they had something to show me that was "1% educational, 99% fun." They pulled out a videocassette from its hiding place in their dad's easy chair, popped it in, and we watched several of their favorite scenes, along with commentary from all of us.

I remember telling them as we shut off the tape that they had "lied to me -- that was 100% fun!" And I meant it. It was a pleasant and pleasurable experience! The older brother walked me back home, and along the way in conversation the topic of erections came up, and he described the process of masturbation -- without using the word itself, just a description of the mechanics -- as something he liked to do when that happened to him.

I know that over the next couple of years I ended up looking at various friends' magazine stashes, or attempting to use the dial-up connection on the family computer to look at porn online, though more often I sought out written smut (public libraries FTW!)

As far as impact then, it was a positive impact, though it clashed with the religious guilt and shame that told me I should hate myself for enjoying porn. Now I can look back and see that the sexually explicit materials I had access to in my early teens and onward was rather tame compared to my current tastes -- though I can certainly see that a few things have remained rather constant about my interests!

I regularly take in pornography now, and I have no shame about doing so. It's just another healthy part of daily life!" - S

***

"When did you get your hands on porn, what kind was it, and how did you get it?

I would watch porn when my parents weren't home on the computer. They weren't very computer savvy for a while. Although that changed when I one of my friends mom's showed them how to track my internet use, even after I cleared the history and tried to cover my tracks. That didn't really stop me though.

What impact did it have then? What impact does it have now?

I never saw very many fat people of color. I didn't realized it at first, but it really did have an impact on me. After I realized that I wasn't seeing very many fat people of color I wondered why this was. That experience directly influences my choice to do porn. I would like to see more fat people in porn. Especially in situations where we're not being fetishized. Just fat people being sexxxy and shown in porn the same way thin and regular sized people are shown.

What's your relationship to porn now?

I make it! YAY!" - Cinnamon Maxxine
***

"When did you get your hands on porn, what kind was it, and how did you get it?

I had several instances when I first saw porn.

One was at a girls overnight b-day party. We were supposed to be watching ET but instead put on some of their parents porn. I honestly do not remember the age (maybe 10?) or what it was like. There was too much giggling to really analyze my feelings/thoughts about it. I do remember it being very pink and slimy(?) but I was not offended or turned off by it.I think the porn ended right before the parents returned home. so we were lucky about that.

I found my step father's porn around the age of 12 or so. I was actually quite thrilled the first time I watched it and masturbated to the first trailer. It was really graphic and I could not even get through this trailer before I orgasmed. I panicked and rewound the tape back to the beginning and put it back. After that, any chance I was alone I went back to it many times. Once again, I rarely ever got to the actual movie (it was a teen camp in the woods setting, so very 70s or 80s) but enjoyed the hell out of masturbating to it.

The third was at my dad's house at a party we had while they were out of town. I must have been 14 or 15. It was actually more about amusement, because it was a vampire porn where the vampire never undressed (he just whipped it out any time there was sex).

What impact did it have then? What impact does it have now?

I think the impact was thrilling and I felt personally that because it felt good, that it was okay to enjoy it. I also felt a bit of shame or guilt, but mostly because I acquired the porn without permission and not because it was bad (my mom was usually pretty open about her sexuality and that sex was a good thing). The impact now is similar in that it is thrilling to know I got to witness and enjoy porn at a fairly young age but without so much shame. This carries into my thoughts about it today and that it is never a bad thing if the young person discovers the porn on their own. Purposefully showing porn to kids would not be okay, though.

What's your relationship to porn now?

I love porn and watch it when I am in the mood. I feel no shame or guilt. It is an easy way for me to get turned on and has been useful in settings with my partners as well. I have even made my own personal porn in a way and will go back to that occasionally, too." - Anonymous

***

"As a child I would snoop in my parents stuff when I could get away with it, and found rather easily the couple of sex toys that Mom had in her underwear drawer and that Dad had a stash of porn and random sexy board games and a rabbit fur glove in his bottom drawer....I never got up the guts to try and watch Dad's porn, just looked at the covers.  Also they had the 'Joy of Sex' books on the shelf in their room, which a friend and I snuck off the shelf one night she was sleeping over and spent several hours giggling at (while we were trying to smoke cinnamon sticks because her brother told her it would get her high, lol, those things are a bitch to keep lit)....Mom later told me that was quite deliberate that those books were easy to find, she was always very straight forward about that sort of thing.  I did however actually see video porn once when I was at another friend's house, in 6th grade, her parents were gone and she had found her Dad's porn so we got a tape and put it on....we watched for maybe 5 minutes, decided it was kinda gross and then tried to rewind it back to it's original spot :)

I don't think any of this affected me negatively at all, I think that it taught me that it was normal and not a bad thing to have porn around.  It was obviously not something that you were supposed to share your interest in with the world at large but it was fairly normal to be into visual sexy type stuff.  Having grown up and learned a lot about this sort of thing and been involved in the porn industry now, I realize that what I saw as a kid was probably terrible mainstream style stuff, but it did teach me that it wasn't the worst thing in the world and was something that most people were probably into in some way or another, even if they kept it in their underwear drawers.

I don't think it affected my fantasies at all though, because I was certainly thinking about how nice it would be if all the cute popular boys at school were lined up to kiss me long before I knew what a group scene was all about." - Lacey

***

"When did you get your hands on porn, what kind was it, and how did you get it?

I am 50. I discovered my parents porn stash while I was in Jr HS. They had several years' worth of Playboy & Penthouse. For 2 years they belonged to the Playboy clubs. That came with a subscription to another magazine. They also had Alex Comfort's book, "The Joy of Sex." The stuff was in the closet. So I read it several times a week.

What impact did it have then? What impact does it have now?

I liked to read. So I got introduced to a lot of good authors at a young age via Playboy. Penthouse introduced me to a lot of edgy / kinky porn. That opened my eyes to a lot of kinks at a young age. Many of them I still do now. The "Joy of Sex" taught me a lot of the fundamentals of sex & relationships.

What's your relationship to porn now?

I still read some magazines. Over the years I bought several subscriptions that cater to my kinks. Kept them and still look / read them. There are a few kink porn sites that I regularly follow. There are also a few select people that create porn that I regularly follow. Being a male sub, I have served several Fem Donnes. Some have taken pics of me and taped me. I look at those tapes / pics. I have also shared those pics on Tumblr & Flickr so others introduced in porn or the lifestyle can get turned on. " - Randy

***

"I distinctly remember buying my first porn magazines from a guy on the street, who had a variety of household and other objects strewn across a blanket and was selling them all.  I was twelve, and out of a sense of gender obligation I picked up Playgirl and Torso because both of them showed men’s bodies and I at the time understood myself as a little girl.  He sold them to me, bless his heart.

I took them home and read them over the next few weeks, showing them to my (mostly guy) friends.  Playgirl I found kind of bland, with it’s limp dicks and almost preppy looking boys.  But Torso was something else.  At the time I didn’t realize it was a gay man’s magazine; all I knew was the cocks were huge and erect, most of them oiled.  I stared at them.  I also read the stories, although I realized about halfway through that there were no ladies in them it didn’t turn me off.  In fact I found it fascinating.  But even after I understood the gender of the characters the mechanics of the sex still eluded me; I remember puzzling over a story about navy sailors…unable to understand what part of the body the euphemistic words “red, wet hole” could be referring to on a guy, or how someone could be fucking him there.

I also ordered the free, vibrating dildo; one of those plain, slick plastic ones that looks like nothing on the human body.  It was advertised in the back of the mag by Adam and Eve, and if you allowed them to send one of their free catalogs to your house they would also send you the dildo for free, discreetly wrapped in kraft paper.  I tried to use it a few times (I had already started masturbating around that age) but it was too big to fit inside me, and I didn’t know about lube then, or to put batteries on it and use it externally.  I kind of wish I had; I could have had a lot more fun a lot earlier if I’d known what a vibrator actually felt like on my body.  But the catalogs were awesome, and I loved looking at all the pictures and filthy descriptions with my friends.

As for impact; the items themselves mainly just confirmed and allowed a sexuality and sexual curiosity that was, for me, previously pretty lonely.  I felt like they were proof that other people thought about the things I did, and my friends reactions told me that it was just as fascinating to them as it was to me (well, maybe not AS fascinating, but close).  However the biggest impact came not from there but from what happened when Adam and Eve continued to send me catalogs that came unwrapped, and in my name.  My parents got ahold of one of them, and I still remember the shameful way my Dad read some of the raunchy descriptions aloud to me and asked what I could possibly be doing with something like this.  It was awful and frankly I’m still pissed off when I think about it, because I internalized the idea that I was doing something wrong by being sexual and curious.

I remember in his ranting that he latched on to one particular description of a butt plug; the anal intruder or something like that.  I am SURE this had an affect on my sexuality later on, like a double dose of the automatic programming we all get that says anal sex is shameful and dirty, tinged with homophobia.  My mom was mellower about it, but still made me throw the magazines out (I didn’t tell them about the dildo).

I do remember that this incident caused me to go underground with my early sexuality.  Later that year when I saw a picture of Madonna topless in a magazine and felt the first recognizable stirrings of queer lust, I was terrified.  I hid the picture inside a conch shell in my room, and contemplated asking my mom if I could go into therapy in order to eradicate these scary thoughts. I didn’t come out for another 4-5 years.

I also remember in my late teens and early 20s having a kind of subtle, persistent squick about M2M anal sex.  It mostly showed up in my feeling extra traumatized by watching simulated male rape in movies, in a way I wasn’t upset by scenes of women being raped; but it also emerged the first time I dated a boy who was bisexual and had bottomed to another man—I thought of myself as bi at the time and open minded, but I couldn’t really think about my partner being fucked in the ass without metaphorically covering my eyes.

Now I’ve worked through that stuff and I actually prefer anal sex, and I love watching gay porn.  But it makes me a little sad when I think about how that experience at 12 could have been the beginning of a vibrant, self actualized adolescent sexuality had it been handled better. " - Lauren

***

"I saw my first porn video when I was 19 years old. I stole a package that was left for my neighbor. It ended up being gay male porn. My male friend came over to sell me drugs & we did ecstasy & oxycontin & smoked weed & watched some lumberjack looking men from the 70's fuck each other on a table in a log cabin in the woods. The impact it had on me then was that it made me uncomfortable. I only watched porn a few times since then. Everytime it makes me uncomfortable & is not something I enjoy. I always feel like I'm doing something wrong & like the people in the porn are unhappy & being forced & that it's not something I should be watching. I feel like other people having sex is non of my business & I feel sad when I think of people having sex for money. I don't allow my husband to watch porn as I consider doing so would be cheating on me."  - M

***

"I was raised in a pretty sex-positive household. My parents made sure I understood the biology long before I hit puberty, and generally painted sex as something to be kept behind closed doors, but a wonderful thing nevertheless. I didn’t see hardcore porn until I was in my late teens, but by the age of 13 I had discovered my fetishes via barely family-friendly T&A material briefly touched on in evening network television shows.

I didn’t discover the porn magazines until I was fourteen or fifteen. I was in the upstairs attic trying to figure out what my parents had down with some of my Classic Star Trek Toys when I discovered the box of Penthouse, Playboy, and a couple of Hustlers. The erotic novelty of the photographed ladies wore off quickly - I could appreciate that they were attractive women, but they seemed impossibly remote and unreal. But it was the erotic fiction and sex tips that did me the favors later in life.

This was thirty years ago, so the specifics are fuzzy. The most important thing I learned from those magazines was that paying attention to the lady’s pleasure in bed would pay major dividends. Not necessarily insisting that she come, even, because that doesn’t always happen; but a more general focus on making her feel good. Sensual touch, appreciation of her body and mind, attention to the things that push her mental buttons: the best way to have a lady wanting to drive you crazy is to make her highly motivated to keep you coming back. That may sound a little cynical, but I didn’t take it that way then or now, and the results of that strategy have been mind-blowing!

I learned a few other useful things. For example, sometimes it’s nice to play with a little pain during sex. Having a foreign object in your butt can feel a lot nicer than a 14-year-old might immediately think, for both boys and girls. Learning to use my tongue properly on a lady would take me far. Some people’s sex fantasies (such as some of mine, I later found) weren’t going to happen in real life without a lot of pre-arranged role play.

So that’s what I can pull out of that dim past. I can’t think of a single thing that came from those magazines that has harmed my sexuality, or given me unhealthy expectations; but I think it helped that my parents had already given me a skeptical, critical eye and taught me that other people were humans to be respected, not my playthings. (… again, I figured out later that was okay too if it had been agreed upon beforehand.)" - Shok

***

"My first experiences with pornography were all through the Internet; before then, I wouldn’t have even known where to look, or even really that it existed.  But the arrival of the Internet into our home happened to coincide with the summer before junior high.  I can’t recall if my mother had already started working at our family business before then (she raised me as a stay-at-home mom), but even if she had, the primary difference was that I now had the entire summer home alone (a novelty, as my elementary school had been year-round).  And so, the boredom of endless days to fill by myself, plus the Internet and a lack of parental supervision (not to mention the porn filters that only really seemed to gain popularity/prominence later), basically set the stage.

I can distinctly remember the first pornographic image I saw online- a photoshopped (not that I knew that at the time) image of a breast-baring Gwen Stefani, who was my idol at the time.  To my best recollection, I was less “ZOMG there is nakedness on the Internet!”, and more interested in making sure my collection of printed-out Gwen Stefani pictures was exhaustively comprehensive, which of course required looking up more naked pictures of Ms. Stefani.  Or at  least that must’ve been what I told myself- certainly curiosity played a part.  And from the slippery slope of the celebrity nude came the actual porn.

I’ll stop here to say that I can’t remember very much of what I viewed as a young teenager, and while it’s possible that’s the result of the passage of time, I much more suspect that the trauma of later being found outsort of blocked it from my memory.  I remember the circumstances- I would spend hours online, and soon figured out that I didn’t even have to use my hands to masturbate, but could simply rub myself back and forth on the computer chair (which eventually developed a clear and obvious stain, one that was later made more painfully obvious by the larger discoloration laid over it in my attempt to clean it off).  My dad would sometimes come home in the middle of the day to grab something he needed, so I always had one ear out to hear for the sound of the garage door opening . . . even with the computer somewhat ensconced away in the den, the inability to simply close out the porn sites typically meant I needed to force the computer to shut down before anybody coming opened the door.  What little I do recall seems like generic mid-90’s porn- mainly lots of site tours with strategically-placed stars.  I can’t remember if I ever looked for specific content, but one detail has long stuck with me: I had no idea what the word “hardcore” meant, but I knew that when you typed it in, you got the sex stuff I was looking for.  It just seemed so strange to me when I finally understood the actual meaning of the word, something I’d been using as a key to gain access for so long.

I had no clue at the time about how to be Internet-savvy, or that things like viruses existed, so I fell prey to a lot of old tricks.  On one hand, it was great- I don’t think I had to do much searching; once “hardcore” brought me to a website, it was almost guaranteed I didn’t have to do anything more than let the pop-ups and other links take me on a journey.  On the other hand, it was a nightmare- particularly because I didn’t know the rules governing shady pornsite tricks.  There was no rhyme or reason to me why some websites would let me close them or go back to the previous pages while others didn’t respond to my frantically clicking the “X” or “back” button, or why porn would sometimes show up unbidden upon opening Internet Explorer.  Like I said before, it usually meant cutting off these sessions short when someone came home unexpectedly, desperately clicking or sometimes shutting the computer off.  Looking back on the experience, I am just so very curious about today’s young kids, ones with effective anti-virus/malware/spam software and a keen knowledge of how to navigate the web . . . if their Internet isn’t filtered or heavily supervised, what do their porn experiences look like?  Mine was so very much about loss of control with the way porn just popped up and websites didn’t act right, compounded by the fact that I couldn’t very well ask anybody about it.

Who knows how long it took for my dad to find out (I can’t imagine long if he was at all smart), but one day, he took me aside in private and told me- not angrily or disappointed, but matter-of-factly- “I know you’ve been looking at nasty stuff online.  You need to stop.”  That’s the one thing I remember (and beginning a negative association with the word “nasty” for me that’s taken a long time to shrug off).  I suppose it’s possible that he said other things, but I sincerely don’t believe he did (and if he did and I just don’t remember, suffice to say, it never gave me any positive feeling that what I had done was normal).  I do know that I burst into tears, apologizing.  I was also pretty unaware of browser histories, too, so I’m sure I was even more shocked that he knew.

After that, the biggest thing I remember is a reign of sheer terror.  I wasn’t looking at porn any more, but I was petrified that my dad would tell my mom that I had.  Looking back on it now, I’m split on whether he had actually told her or not (I could honestly see it going both ways, now), but as far as young me was concerned, she had no clue.  And my fears really weren’t just imaginary- every once in a while he would make smirking comments or insinuations.   At the dinner table, watching a TV show, suddenly my stomach would drop and I would become a ball of panic, desperately worried my mom would understand what he was insinuating, or ask a question and everything would come out.  I still don’t know if that was innocuous or malevolent.  It could very well be the case that my parents both knew and felt pretty at ease with the knowledge, joking about it slyly without ever realizing it was tearing me up inside.  Or maybe he knew exactly what he was doing, trying to shame and torment me in a mean-spirited dad way (I do want to clarify that my father has never been abusive, neither physically nor verbally/emotionally).  Whichever the case, I honestly do feel like I must have become more withdrawn.  I remember distinctly lying on the floor one night with the news on, when they did a promo for some 60 Minutes-esque investigation about kids accessing pornography.  I remember well being paralyzed, needing desperately to be so still, so unresponsive in my face that they wouldn’t even notice me there, that I couldn’t get up and leave lest it look suspicious.  It wasn’t just something that on-the-nose, either.  Anything sexual on TV (and we’re really just talking PG-13 here; basic cable with my parents) made me feel extremely uncomfortable if dad was around.

Fast-forward a bit (I honestly couldn’t tell you how long) and I stumbled upon what was eventually to become my salvation: my parents’ porn.  It might have been accidental (putting away their laundry, perhaps) or deliberate snooping (I’d found- and tried on- my mother’s lingerie a while back), but smushed back in my dad’s chest of drawers were exactly two old (80’s-ish looking) Penthouse letters.  Not to be outdone, I found two books in my mom’s closet- Nancy Friday’s “My Secret Garden” and “Forbidden Flowers”.  (At least, I assumed ownership was divvied up this way, although who really knows for sure?).  It was an amazing moment.  First off, I had porn again!  But more importantly, I had protection.  Now, if my dad ever threatened to let my secret spill, I could toss it right back in his (and my mom’s) faces.  They’d be hypocrites!  How could it be wrong for me to do it if they did, too?  I just remember such . . . relief.  A small part of me probably felt reassured in my normalcy, too, but really, my reaction was just knowing that I didn’t have to be so fearful anymore.

The second best thing about my discovery was Nancy Friday.  I haven’t read any of her other books or revisited those two since, and I imagine I’d probably find them problematic now, but at the time, they were amazing.  I read them over and over again, spending the same long hours that had once been in front of the computer now in the bathtub, pages slightly wrinkling from repeated exposure to the steam.  I can even still clearly recall some details, like the fantasy where a woman playfully swipes grey paint on a man’s balls.  Who knows what would have happened if I’d only found the Penthouse magazines- they were basically a print version of the type of porn I’d seen online, with a bit more text.  But the Nancy Friday books were something I’d never encountered before- a frank, honest, and analytical exploration of sex and sexuality, specifically from the viewpoint of women.  (If you’re not familiar with them, both volumes were comprised of women’s sexual fantasies solicited by the author, and then analyzed and commented upon).  It wasn’t that they were tame- not by any stretch of the imagination (I remember bestiality, abduction/rape, and incest)- but they were diverse and open and though I still got off on them, they weren’t quite erotica/porn.  They were real women, sharing, and then the author, talking about those fantasies without judgment.  Finding a book of tasteful erotica might have been nice, but reading what was basically a sexologist’s educational material about sexuality gave me a certain sense of power.  I didn’t know it at the time, but I sincerely believe all the kernels of my best sexual self that would later blossom were planted here.

After that big turning point, nothing of much substance happened.  I must have eventually started seeking out Internet pornography again on the new family computer, albeit with much less frequency, duration, and Internet insanity (I was starting to get the hang of navigating it successfully).  At some point I was gifted my own laptop.  Who knows how for sure, but somehow I encountered and found I really, really liked gay male porn.  And when someone in the Bisexual.com forum where I had been hanging out gave a glowing review for a movie called The Crash Pad, I made my first actual porn purchase (can’t recall if I was still in high school or already in college and away from home at that point).  That, as I’m sure you can figure out, started me on a whole path into queer/ethical/feminist pornography, the sex-positive movement, and my own identity, which I’ll always credit.  Sex-negative/radical feminists can complain all they want about the problems with SEXY! feminism, but how long would it have taken me- the reading-Ayn-Rand-in-high-school girl raised by politically conservative parents- to come around without this amazing porn leading the way?  I was struggling but still fairly hostile to a lot of basic liberal ideas in my first college sociology class . . . sex-positive porn snuck up on me, funny as it sounds.

Now, I like to think I have a pretty good relationship with porn; I consume it regularly, use it as an erotic outlet as well as a way to support those aforementioned queer/ethical/feminist and usually indie pornographers.  I don’t feel any shame about it.  But I do still wonder how many of my sexual interests may have been forged in my youthful porn-viewing days, particularly since I can remember so little of what I actually saw then.   And I am still angry at my father (and my mother, too, if she knew), angry and sad that nobody thought or wanted to sit me down and talk to me at length about what was going on, why it was normal and that I wasn’t a bad person, and explain why I shouldn’t look at that sort of stuff any more.  Later on when I was older, I’d learn that we basically fell out of contact with my dad’s sister over an alleged sexualized incident between my toddler brother and his cousin that ultimately resulted in my aunt’s insinuation of child abuse as evidenced by a demonstration of “learned behavior” (possibly CPS involvement?  It’s still spoken about so evasively by my family).  I do wonder if that might have had something to do with my dad’s reaction- something that traumatic only to be followed some years later by another child seemingly far too sexual, in a way that was frightening and made him want to keep at a distance?  Or maybe he was just like so many other parents, and really shitty at or apathetic about competently discussing sexual issues with his kids.

So yeah, that’s basically it in a nutshell.  On the surface, it sounds so boring- girl discovers Internet porn, dad finds out and says stop it, she does for a while, finds real (i.e. not “how babies are made”) sex education and gets on with her damn life.  But of course, that hardly captures all the intense emotions I felt at the time." - Anonymous

***

"My first encounter with porn was discovering my father’s November 1975 Playboy stashed in a hamper where we get extra blankets and sheets. The magazine absolutely electrified me. Actually, it was more like a nuclear detonation behind my eyes that rocked every cell of my being—like being blasted off to and absorbed by some previously unimaginable nirvana. 

And so it began.

My childhood was largely defined then by an obsession with stealing glimpses of porn—not difficult in New York City of the 1970s. I studied and memorized the names and images of newspaper ads for big-screen X-rated films. I’d endure endless shopping trips with my mother for the reward of a Mad magazine and, of equal importance, frantic visual consumption of skin mags—which then could feature nipples on the cover—exploding all over the newsstand. Trips to Times Square nearly made me pass out. And this was all before—way before—puberty.

As child porn became a very hot topic in the news, I actually fantasized about becoming a “child pornography star” by the third grade. I imagined I would be getting naked and having sex with really pretty eight-year-old girls in actual movie productions. This fantasy endured and got more elaborate until by around 12, I figured out that kid porn didn’t work that way.

One detour: the 1978 Hustler scratch-n-sniff issue turned up in the Our Lady Help of Christians schoolyard when I was ten (and a very bad student). The open vaginas shocked me, but I wanted more of them. I wanted more of everything naked and female. What severely jolted me in a different direction were the violent images in the cartoons and article illustrations. It made me think: “Couldn’t they use that space to show more naked ladies?” Also: I couldn’t IMAGINE what the scratch-n-sniff centerfold was supposed to smell like.

We got a VCR during my first year of high school in 1982. A purloined cassette of the XXX film “Little Girls Blue” hit me the way that first Playboy had. Shoplifting porn mags and knowing other teens at the video store who’d let me rent porno flicks kept me high on home video porn throughout adolescence. I got extremely obese and hopeless when it came to dating girls. Coincidence? I don’t know. I only lost my virginity, at 17, when a cheerleader said she’d have sex with me if I bought her boots like the ones Madonna wore in “Desperately Seeking Susan.” She got her boots. The following year, 1986, I lost more than a hundred pounds and went to college, but I remained terrified of females. Drinking booze, eventually, helped.

Throughout this all, and into my early 20s, I developed a philosophical stance on porn. Remember that at the time—from NOW’s anti-peepshow marches on 42nd Street in the 70s up to the Meese Commission in ’86—the political left and the political right were 100% EQUAL in their vehement opposition to pornography.

Punk rock overtook me early on, although not the lefty strain of it, but rather the decadent, nihilism of the Butthole Surfers and the Ramones’ anthem “I’m Against It” (“I don’t like Jesus freaks/I don’t like communists…”). So, to me, if porn was the ONE issue that could unite the two political poles against it, then it had to be THE TRUTH. Or, at the very least, My Truth. Because I was “against” everything (to a degree, I still am and I think that’s a healthy impulse).

At 23, I began publishing a sleaze-culture zine called HAPPYLAND that wallowed in and celebrated extreme sex, extreme music, extreme films, extreme art, and, in every extreme sense, porn, porn, and porn. HAPPYLAND enabled me to charge through the fourth wall that had always separated me from all those women and all those acts in the pages on the screen of XXX entertainment. I then wrote for and eventually got editing jobs Hustler and Screw and half-a-dozen other sex businesses, on up to Mr. Skin. As a result, I have been involved with sex workers, personally and romantically, ever since (although my wife, who I married when I was 42, has no skin biz connections… except me!).

No one ever sexually abused me, but I have always exhibited the “symptoms”. So the question stands: did porn corrupt me? Might I have gone another way had I not seen that Playboy at such a pivotal moment of my development? They are interesting and, of course, unanswerable queries. I also developed severe alcohol and narcotic addictions in my 20s from which I have been clean and sober for nearly 15 years (due to active, daily addressing of the situation). Porn, to which I was every bit as compulsively powerless over in times past, remains active for me. But, you know, I’ve long been cool with it.

The various strains of porn to which I have been most drawn were, first and foremost, depicted lesbian sex (and that's still what does it for me most). As a teen, I obsessed over facts and figures in magazines such as Adam Film World and Erotic X-Film Guide regarding the big screen porno movies of the 70s and 80s; it was an extension of my general cult/exploitation/B-movie passions.

"Girls Gone Wild" really blew my mind when I first discovered it because I want to live in a universe where I see EVERY WOMAN NAKED. And, on those tapes, that's what happened—you saw a female, you saw her bare body. The shortcoming, of course (beyond any ethical issues of drunkenness and naiveté), is that all the women were very mainstream types (although that, too, packed its appeal).  The emergence of alt-porn in the 90s and Kink studios seem to develop right along with my own libido's appetite for "what comes next." 

In terms of body types in porn, I am severely drawn to massively voluptuous fat women and (by contrast, I suppose) to skinny, flat-chested women (particularly redheads) who have long, thick nipples (my affectionate name for them: doorbells; Madison Young is a supreme purveyor of just such a pair). I also love extremely pale skin, but that sounds, uh, uncomfortably indicative of something it shouldn't (and doesn't) when you single it out. " - Mike

***

"So I started looking at porn right around the time I learned how to read.  My brother is 12 years older than me and was about to graduate high school right as I started kindergarten.  I was a snoopy and curious kid who never slept well and was always prowling around my house when everyone was at work or while folks were asleep and so i remember finding his porn stash when I was really little.  I remember he had a lot of Hustler and a lot of Penthouse and he had these little "specialty" magazines- one of them I was particularly fond of was called "girls on girls" and another one that featured a lady named "Lotta Topp" I think and was just fascinated with her enormous clitoris, even though at that time I didn't really know what a clitoris was... I just remember being confused a bit but really excited about the fact that I had a hard time figuring out whether or not she was a girl or a boy, because she seemed to be a little bit of everything to my child-mind.  At any rate, I figured out that the men in the family generally had a stash hidden somewhere, and that wasn't limited to my brother.  My grandfathers, my dad even.  Though when I got caught sitting in the bathroom with a copy of penthouse "hidden" in the phonebook and my hands down my panties, my mom flipped out and my dad got rid of all his porn and told my brother to do the same (he basically just moved his stash, which i eventually found again.)

My first visual flash of porn on video was when i walked in on my grandfather watching some video of 2 people fucking.  All I remember was an extreme closeup of some intense PIV action going on and that the lady had this awesome hairy bush.  I backed out of the room slowly and thought my grandfather hadn't noticed me come into the room. Found out later that he had.  And he had talked to my OTHER grandfather (my mom's dad) about it.  Both sides of the fam lived in the same neighborhood in E. TN, on the same hill in fact, and we lived in a trailer between their two houses, so I was always around them.  The summer after I turned 7 was when my grandfather caught me going thru his porn stash (I mean it was pretty obvi, he kept it in the end table next to his recliner) and when he found me looking at it he did shit like ask me if I liked the pictures, if I wanted to do the stuff that was happening in the pictures... basically grooming me  to be molested, which he did end up doing after a time, and while he was doing it he used the fact that he had caught me looking at his porn as a sort of "keep quiet" tool and as a justification for his actions- he'd say he "knew I wanted it" because I'd been looking at his magazines, that sort of stuff.  The molestation part of things only went on for a few weeks because on the day he tried to make me give him a hand job something in me snapped and i started screaming and yelling at him and threatening to tell on him and all that kind of stuff. He laughed at me and told me no one would believe me but he did stop doing it.  I think it surprised him that I protested or something. Anyway, after that I tried to tell my mom what had happened and she basically just hid it from my dad (my dad never found out about that, or that my grandfather had also molested other girls in the family, some of them for years) before he died.  Anyway. At least my mom didn't ever let me stay unattended with my grandfather. I think she believed me but didn't really know what to do or how to handle the situation.

Anyway...

Looked at porn all the time as a teenager, mainly thru magazines, then got  really into videoporn when I met my first long-term relationship, a guy, who was really into s & m and all kinds of kinky things.  There were abuse issues in that relationship that I won't go into now but that's the relationship where I was introduced to Joe Christ, this indy film maker who also had a side business making fatgirl porn so i made some movies for him (4 of them, solo stuff.) I never got paid all I was owed and the guy died a few years ago (I slept with him too, it was kinda expected to be part of the filming if that makes sense.) Not to be a name dropper but thought it's an interesting tidbit/piece of trivia that Joe Christ was married to Nancy Collins, the person who wrote the novels that the Vampire the Masquerade characters are based on.

All that stuff happened in my early twenties.

Because of the above-mentioned abuse and other types of abuse, including emotional abuse and neglect by other family members, I've struggled with depression that I have always felt was really crazily tied to my sexuality.  I have gone thru phases where I have been against the porn industry hardcore but I have realized that activism against that industry often becomes backlash and respectability policing of the folks who work in the industry and I think that is really fucked up. I kinda think of the porn industry like I think of, like, Wal-Mart.  Huge businesses that exploit people for profit aren't ever cool.  I believe in the power of sex and eroticism and porn, even, has revolutionary potential to me but I have only found very few superqueer superindy porn things that don't just carry so many of the same tropes into them that it's hard for me to watch just about any kind of porn.  That said, and this is the thing that fucks hard with my mind, I note the physiological effects that watching so much pornography thru my life has had on my brain and my body... basically, I can be as dry as the Serengeti and having all kinds of sexual dysfunction but can go search "amateur lesbian" and watch a five minute mainstream regular porn video of some cunnilingus or whatever and boom. Waterworks.  Orgasm in 2 seconds.  It kind of disturbs me because it feels like I can't control that physical response.  I want my sexuality to be my sexuality and sometimes it feels like I have let video images take over the part of my brain that is sexual.

I just came out of a relationship that was intensely mentally abusive and in that relationship there were a lot of sexual issues.... I was sexually assaulted during that relationship, repeatedly, and repeatedly compared to younger, thinner afab people and porn stars when it came to sex.  When I entered the relationship i was in a very highly porn-critical phase that was sort of coming to an end- not that i'm still not critical of the sex industry, and I can talk more about that if you like. The approach I took in the relationship was that I just didn't want to watch porn because I didn't like how watching it made me feel. That would turn into very long discussions about why I didn't like it, which would then turn into my former partner getting angry with me for even talking about it and accusing me of trying to control her sexuality.  I never did that, not once I just tried to have boundaries around my own experience of sex .  So we would have these long arguments. It was really bad.  I would never tell anyone whether or not to watch porn, it's never been something I thought was useful or effective to do even when I was at my most porn-critical.  Now I think it's just kinda a thing, like fast food or what ever--- there are issues with the way the businesses are run but the most important thing is to understand the experience from the POV of people who are  working inside it.  I guess the one question that hasn't ever been satisfactorily answered to me, is one that Andrea Dworkin asked, and don't run away just yet... the question she asks is simply why there needs to be an endless supply of people available for men to fuck on command, why does that have to be assumed to be just "part of nature?" can we question that?

It makes me happy to see people out there producing queer porn that's fat friendly and all that stuff.  I think that for me, there is so much standard porn imagery tied up in my own PTSD around being abused that it's really hard for me to deal with and at the same time sexually arousing to me to a degree that disturbs me.  It's that automated response that really really bothers me and makes me feel like I have a chip in my head, like I've been programmed or something.

I read your posts about going to orgies, etc. and I so wish I could get to a place where I felt like I could do something like that.  I have had my heart broken in so many ways over the past year that I really would like to find some nice sweet person to get under so i can get over some of the heartbreak and rejection I've been feeling but now I just can't.  I have a friend who tells me that she is super attracted to me and I think she is super beautiful but every time she wants to be affectionate I absolutely freeze.  I just want my sexuality to be mine again.  I feel like too many of the wrong ones have barged in past my defenses and now I can never know if I can trust someone with whom I share my physical body, if that makes any sense.  Meh. " - Anonymous

***

"I started seeing porn early on. I think I was four or five when I found my dad's playboy and hustler magazines and was caught looking at them under my covers. Then I think 11 or 12, I found my dads vhs porn collection. I would watch it everytime they were gone. And I would rewind the vhs back to where it was on timer. It made me very sexual at that age, I had sex with a boy in neighborhood at 12. But when I watched it I always wanted to be the girl in his str8 porn. And I also remember trying my step moms vibrator in my ass like I seen a girl do in one of his porn. But I don't think it made my life bad, it just made me accept sex and love sex. I have always been free when it has came to sex. I love sex and I love porn. Am I addicted to it? NO, but I have seen almost every kind of porn in my 33 years of life. I think it was educational to me as a teen. " -Michelle

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How Politics Got Me Laid: or, my first experience with PIV

I lost my virginity during an argument about socialism.

I was always a pretentious kid, so in a way the fact that a political argument got me heated in more ways than one wasn’t surprising. And the guy I was with, Jesse, was everything a teenage girl could want- tall, dark, handsome, older… and obsessive compulsive, but never mind. Even at 16 I knew sometimes, in love, you had to overlook the little things. At least I knew his hands were always clean and well-manicured.

I had known him for years. We met in an alternative school, when I was a twelve year old depressed Goth-in-training and he was the moody poetic genius I read about in my dogeared Anne Rice novels. An Armani-wearing “poor little rich boy cliche, Jesse was the excitingly older age of fifteen, and of course knew everything about everything. I was smitten from the beginning, but he was always out of reach. We talked all the time but I worried I had become his friend with no hope of anything more, especially as I was insecure about my body. It had betrayed me, going from slender and prepubescent to hourglassed, which, to a teenage girl, means fat. So I crushed in silence and hoped in that terribly Goth way that one day he would see my suffering and tell me he loved me back.

Four years went by with me holding a torch for this boy. We changed schools, and, as it was the days before everyone had internet or mobile phones, we constantly wrote letters to each other. He had a penchant for the dramatic, writing on luxury paper with calligraphy pens and sealing them with wax stamped with his own, personalized seal. It was all stupidly romantic, with us discussing worldly concepts and our plans to change the world. Jesse was born into a wealthy family, while I was fighting through on my own- with his money and my passion, we thought we could do important things.

One letter in particular changed everything.

He wrote to me while I was in boarding school, saying that someone he knew had a dilemma. This person loved three women- one was his soul mate, but it was unrequited, one was familiar but the passion was lacking, and one was an enigma. Who should his friend pursue? I was no idiot- I knew this was about him and, potentially, me, if I could figure out which one I was. I took a stab in the dark and wrote back “He should go for the enigma. Why chase the girl who doesn’t want him, and why stay with someone he doesn’t love?

Soon after we had our first date. I was ecstatic and probably overeager- I hadn’t yet heard that Cosmo propaganda that all men prefer to pursue, and so was refreshingly upfront about my excitement. Our first kiss was deep, and sweet, tinged with sexual desire without being overwhelmingly lustful. I felt safe, mostly, with just a touch of fear of the unknown to keep it interesting. He asked me what I liked and didn’t like, what I wanted, giving me agency in a way I hadn’t experienced with other boys. Slowly dates turned to snuggling at his home, discussing the political news of the day.

And that’s how I lost my virginity- crosslegged on his bed, spouting idealistic nonsense about how socialism could work if only we tried hard enough. Jesse deftly refuted my argument, I’d retort, and the next thing either of us knew we were kissing, hard. My shirt came off, then his, then we tried to remove each others pants but gave up and, giggling, removed our own. He kissed my neck, biting gently while I moaned and writhed under him, my nails digging into his pale skin. His lips pressed against mine as he slid his hand into my bra to feel my breasts.

I remember not feeling self conscious. I felt safe. I had known him for years, forever in high school time, and I loved him dearly. I didn’t try to cover my belly as I would later in life, when I again struggled with body image. I just let him touch me, and touched him back, marveling at how soft his skin was or how sensitive mine was. One hand slid into my panties, and he looked at me, as if asking for permission. I nodded, and he slowly pulled them off me, kissing my thighs as he went. My foot got tangled in them at one point but they were eventually removed and on the floor.

He put a condom on without asking, without being cajoled. Years after I would realize how precious this behaviour was, and how it demonstrated a respect for me and my body that was rare. Jesse had a small bottle of lubricant next to the bed, and used some on his fingers to get me even more aroused and ready. His cock head pressed against my opening, and a few kisses later, he thrust in, slowly but firmly. I don’t remember there being pain, just a sense of overwhelming relief and smugness that I was having my first time with someone I actually loved.

Well, he was just getting started. That boy fucked the living hell out of me. He was gentle at first, sure, but it didn’t take long before I was clawing him and nipping at him to get him to go harder and faster. We broke the headboard off his bed, which made for amusing discussion with his parents later. And I loved my first time so much I insisted we try it a few more times that night. He taught me how to ask for what I wanted, and that my pleasure was important and valuable.

I knew I was kinky even back then, and it wasn’t long before I tried to get our play a bit darker. Jesse was the one who eroticised vampires for me, having bought these metal fangs that scarred me in a delicious way for life. But I remember trying to get him to experiment with spanking, and how hurt I was that he couldn’t stop laughing at how silly it was. Soon our sex devolved to that ultimate low- in front of the TV while halfheartedly watching VIP or the Knife Show. It was downhill from there, if you can imagine a downhill from there.

I remember that relationship being my first real lesson in classism. His parents worried about our relationship because they were certain I wanted to get pregnant and claim some of their fortune. I, meanwhile, was one of those kids who didn’t even want to babysit kids under the age of 6, so this was a ridiculous fear, but there you go- that’s classism at work. It was as hard for them to imagine I was happy living my gutterpunk life as it was for me to imagine justifying shopping at Dolce and Gabbana. Later I would get angry at Jesse for whining about his lack of a vintage car while I struggled to make food from the food bank last for the week. Mine was a world he would never really know.

So, it wasn’t made to last. We split up eventually, I moved away, we lost touch. My cat, romantic as always, peed on his love letters in protest. I wonder where he is, sometimes, but he’s not on Facebook so I’ll never know. But Jesse will always be special, and I’ll always love him for making my first time memorable. He taught me so much about loving my body and being an active participant in my own sexuality. But thank god, in a way, that we lost touch- if he thought spanking was weird, he would be shocked at my life now, a whirl of kink and clowns and sex work and sex parties. I've found him online, or traces of him, so at least I know he's alive.

I hope he’s happy now, wherever he is.

Categories: activism, boundaries, boys, consent, female sexuality, personal, sex

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"Femininity is for Sissies": or, the Queering of Forced Feminization

When I was working as a Domme, I got a fair number of requests from men who want to be “sissified”, “forced” into frilly girly undies and makeup and turned into an “objectified slut”. Sissification is one of those things I encounter often, both in the Femdom scene and the AB/DL scene, and while I love the dresses, I wonder about the intention behind this kink. I find it all kinds of problematic on multiple levels.

First of all, I don’t see how putting on women’s clothing is humiliating, by itself, unless you think it symbolizes being less masculine, and you think that’s humiliating (Bitchy Jones has some great things to say about this). Though, that said, I notice with sissification it’s never just putting on women’s clothing- it’s generally women’s clothing that is either over the top sexualized or over the top infantalized, both problematic statements on male impressions of female desirability. Their sissy personas are generally inclined towards heavy makeup, ruffled underthings and too-high heels, unlike many of the femmes I know. Rather than expressing a positive, healthy femininity, men wishing to be sissified seem to be more interested in being either innocent, helpless little girls or sexually available sexpots. Madonna/whore complex, anyone?

This request is most often verbalized like this; “I want to be your slave. By which I mean, I want you to dress me up in impractical clothes, tell me how embarrassed I should be for wearing them, and then objectify me, treat me like a cheap date”.

I generally respond with “you want to feel like a woman? I’ll strip you naked, put you in front of a mirror and you can cry about your body for an hour.”

It feels like there’s such disparity between what men fantasize the female experience is like, and the reality. Men I’ve spoken to speak longingly about having women look at them the way masculine-leaning people look at feminine-presenting folks- leering, in other words. That sounds fun in theory- in practice, try being a little extra wary every time you walk down the street, because someone might decide that because you look female you’re a target for attack. And it’s great to have more freedom to express your emotions… until you’re told that your anger is probably just PMS, or that crying proves that you’re not as emotionally strong as men are. And men are rarely challenged about their masculinity if they choose not to breed, while women do deal with these prejudices. Dare I say, I bet it’d fun to playact "being a woman" when you can go back to your male privilege at the end if the day!

Trans women do not get that privilege. Cis women don't get that privilege.

Never mind the disparity between going to a professional Dominatrix to be sissified- a woman in power, a woman you plan to submit to. And yet your service is to basically tell me that my gender is one you feel embarrassed to look or act anything like. Wait, where’s my power, again? Even stranger is how Mistress Lorelei of the Charm School for Sissy Girls puts it- “In fact, in that situation we have three genders: male (what the sub started out as), Female (The Domme in all her splendor), and sissy (what the sissy becomes)”. So being female is (or can be) powerful, but to be a man engaging with his femininity is to give up that power, I guess. Why can’t a man be femme and still powerful? I mean, drag queens aren’t sissies. And men don’t have to be femme by going all the way into having passable femininity as a goal, anyway, do they?

Don’t get me wrong- I adore genderfuckery. I love men in skirts- a-lines tend to look nice, though I’m a sucker for petticoats- but I don’t see that as taking away from their masculinity in any way. And no, I don’t mean just kilts- and neither does the fashion world, which gives men in skirts a go every now and again. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are pretty much the hottest bunch of activists ever, if you ask me, with the glitter in their beards and their personalized habits. And David Bowie. Can I just mention David Bowie? Or Noel Fielding? Definitely a couple of guys in touch with their femme side, and yet the way they reflect that doesn’t come across as encouraging stereotypical female roles. They mess about with gender in a way that comes off as sexy, confident, and playful. That’s really sexy. And it’s worlds away from images of forced feminization.

So I like crossdressing and genderfluid men- I love a boyfriend surprising me with women’s lacy underthings, for example, under a suit or jeans- but I also think that the way sissification is viewed as a fetish indicates that a man dressing/acting like a woman (and how does a woman act, exactly?) would be intrinsically humiliating, which I disagree with. Rather, I think that being, shall we say, in touch with your feminine side, is something worthwhile and important, as is having a healthy relationship with your masculine side. I don’t think that women are sissies, or that men should be made to feel like womanhood is something they should be embarrassed to emulate. Shouldn’t they be proud with their ability to move beyond their physicality and society’s expectations and decide what’s sexy to them?

Then, let’s add another layer on here- small penis humiliation. Regardless of the size of the sissy’s penis, they always want to be told how small and useless their cocks are. Personally? I prefer average sized cocks, no question, hands down. I have a shallow pussy. Being a size queen would damage my cervix. I was told by one person into this kink that being in panties was more about him feeling humiliated about “not being a real man” rather than it being humiliating to be a woman. But women who wear boxers don’t get the same reaction of being humiliated- which suggests to me that to invoke the feminine, even by just wearing panties, is to enact a subservient, less powerful role. Problematic, right?

And finally, the last ARGH of the whole sissy thing- sissy maids. Now I’ll be the first to admit I have a personal vendetta against sissy maids to begin with. I’ve been training service submissives for a while now and sissy maids are almost exclusively the worst applicants ever. They wear impractical clothes to clean in, faff about doing very little in order to get punished (how’s she gonna clean the tub in this outfit?), demand, often, that I dress in Proper Domme Wear to make their useless work sexy for them, and then whine when I dismiss them rather than discipline them. Worst. Workers. EVER.

But let’s move away from my own weeping at service submission being destroyed by male privilege stomping on it in pink satin heels. The other huge issue is the idea that the sissy maid is the ultimate sissy- doing women’s work. By which of course we mean housework. Because men never do housework unless it’s sexualized for them and when they do the dishes it is oh-so-humiliating because they’re not man enough to get their woman to do it. Personally, my fantasies around labour involve digging pointless holes only to fill them and dig them elsewhere. If I have a man around and I want to give him a useless task, he’s going to be digging, or lugging a log around, so I can watch his muscles strain. Not scrubbing my toilet in a fluffy gown or shiny maid uniform that’ll melt when it touches caustic cleaning chemicals.

Thinking about this in terms of genderfuckery, queer sex, and the idea of female-2-femme, I wonder if I’m partially making a distinction between femininity (these stereotypes and assumptions about sexual passivity, lingerie and makeup) and femme, which I see as empowered and claiming girliness for yourself, defining what you want that to be.

Or is it something else? Am I recoiling at the idea that this is a fetish based on ideas about femininity I find bothersome? The fact that no one ever asks me to validate their girly self, but rather chastise them for having that inner femme, suggests that it’s expected that these clients would feel negatively for it. I guess it’d be like if I said “I want to role play being a man- I want to fart, drink lots of beer, not talk about my feelings, be sexually aggressive, be homophobic, and watch sports”… except in that role play, would I be ashamed? Probably not, if I was playing my role right. I’d be like, “look, this is how I am, deal”. Shame seems to be something linked into the feminine in this way. Why is that? We can say “oh, because it demonstrates weakness in a man, a tender side”, but why is that really? Why don’t these “sissy” men want to be empowered? Why is it still so shaming to be feminine?

A book I really enjoyed on this topic was "Why Are Faggots So Afraid Of Faggots?", which speaks to male femme experiences really well. I was told on Tumblr that as a queer woman I'm not allowed to identify as femme because it's a lesbian term, something that I sideeyed rather strongly. I do believe that anyone can identify as femme and self-define what femme means to them. Maybe it's that lack of critique that ultimately makes me resent the whole "sissification" thing. I would love to see masculine-leaning folks exploring femme playfully and with curiosity, rather than from a place of deep shame and misogyny. I think that trans* misogyny absolutely comes from the same root, that femme is bad, that to "choose" to be a woman is bad. And it's past time to critique that attitude.

Categories: activism, ageplay, best of, female-to-femme, feminism, fetishes, gender, male objectification (or lack thereof), male privilege, personal, queer, rape culture, sex work is work, sexism

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Packing for the Feminist Porn Awards and Conference

Thanks to the incredible generosity of a particular secret sponsor (who will simply be named Pornbot) I'm going to be heading out to my very first Feminist Porn Awards in Toronto to cheer on IndiePornRevolution (up for Best Website) along with various TROUBLEFilms titles including one I'm in with the luscious Betty Blac, Hard Femme (see the whole list here).

As the PR/social media kitten for TROUBLEFilms I'm getting to livetweet, blog, and take behind-the-scenes photos of all the action, which is really exciting! I'm hoping it'll give me a chance to get to know various IPR Foxes who will be present as well, such as Wolf Hudson, Arabelle Raphael, Zahra Stardust, April Flores, Michelle Austin, Tobi Hill-Meyer and others who aren't Bay Area based. I'm having all the usual high femme flutters about what to wear, whether to bring my laptop or just my tablet, how to do my hair... I'm certainly bouncing up and down, but I also want to make a good impression. I've got a list in my head of what dresses to wear though I'm a bit afraid I'm going to freeze my nipples off!

The Feminist Porn Awards is in its 9th year, having been started by toy store Good For Her as a way of acknowledging porn that was feminist in its production, gaze, and values. It's the largest and longest running awards ceremony of its kind. I'm glad to be a part of something so iconic, especially as I had such an interesting and fun time at the BBW FanFest.

After the Feminist Porn Awards, I'm also going to be presenting at the Feminist Porn Conference with Tina Horn, Siouxsie Q, Pinky Lee and possibly other performers on porn and privacy, a subject I've written a lot about and experienced my own clashes with. I'm particularly interested in privacy as it pertains to behaviour on and off set, and if someone acts unethically off set, is it the place/responsibility of an ethical or feminist porn director to take note of it? I find the topic multifaceted and very interesting.

Other topics I can't wait to sit in on would be Maggie Mayhem's  lecture on porn before WWII, Loree Erickson facilitating Queercrip Politics of Re/Making Feminist Porn, Feminist Pornography: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and Why It Matters with a panel made up of Lynn Comella, Courtney Trouble, Ms. Naughty, and Tanesha H.D... I think it's going to be a fantastic experience all around. I hope to learn a whole lot and network with some of the best trailblazers in the feminist porn world.

I've really only had experience with porn companies that care (or claim to care) about feminism and ethical values, so to take those experiences into the realm of this sex worker space promises to be really intriguing. If I'm honest, I'm kind of nervous- I'm pretty shy and so many of the people I know are all buddies so I'm a little nervous about being left behind! But I'm also happy that I'll be getting to see my girlfriend from out in London, who lives in Toronto and will be a really lovely, supportive anchor for all the social madness. Maybe I can persuade her to come with me on all these adventures!

Interested in any of this? Well, if you're in Toronto (or can make it out!) then register for the Feminist Porn Conference here,  or check out the various events (starting April 2nd with a fisting workshop!) by clicking here. If you can't make it out, you can follow the Awards at @fempornawards, the conference at @femporncon, or TROUBLEFilms livetweeting on @IndiePorn. I'll be making sure to post regular updates, so if you have questions, keep in touch!

Or of course you can follow me - all my social media contacts are on the sidebar! --->

Categories: activism, awards, feminism, I'm a feminist too, parties, porn, reflection, toronto

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Review: Kinky Kitty Kit

I've loved kitty play in various ways for years. I grew up a cat person, with cats as my friends and companions. If you've followed this blog for any length of time you'll know about Foucault, our adopted cat with extra toes, who we spoil rotten. He's got everything you want in a cat- playful, affectionate, curious, friendly, a little off, kind of dangerous. Oh, right, and ginger, which I have a soft spot for. He's kind of the evil cousin to a cat I adore who scarred me for life, Teddy, out in the UK.

So when I got a chance to review something from body-positive toy boutique SheVibe, I couldn't resist this adorable set of hot pink cheetah BDSM accessories. They're super cute, they match, and they're surprisingly practical.  Oh, yeah, and they're vegan! The material is a soft vinyl, which feels comfortable against the skin (if perhaps a bit sweaty).

With this kit you get multiple things- a set of two cuffs, a plastic mask that ties on with ribbon, a breathable ball gag, a collar with a removable nylon leash attached, and a small but stingy flogger. Probably an ideal collection for someone just experimenting with kink, as the cuffs and collar are all velcroed together, so easy to put on and remove and pretty secure. The ballgag does buckle rather than velcro!

The collar part itself is about 17" long, though can adjust up (it may not be as sturdy at that point because less of the velcro will be in use)  and down (you can always cut off excess nylon). There's a metal O-ring in front with a 21" nylon leash (not including the handle).

The cuffs are about 9 1/2" when closed all the way and are adjustable a couple of inches in either direction. There's a chain between them that's permanently attached on one side, and clips onto the other, allowing you to put them around a bedframe (if you're into that sort of thing) or just restrict your kitten's movement as they crawl and play with catnip toys.

I was pleasantly surprised by the ballgag, which has a metal buckle and 10" of length on one side. The other side is about 15", so there's a lot of leeway for as tight or as loose as you need. The ball itself is about 1 1/2" I believe, so on the smaller side. It also has holes in it, making it easier to breathe while it's in. It's pretty comfortable to wear and can be worn at the same time as the cat mark if you feel so inclined.

The mask is a hard plastic and ties on with ribbon. Honestly, while it's cute, I doubt I'd get much use out of it except for maybe at a costume party. It's fairly big and would make it difficult to kiss the wearer- so, while good for dehumanizing someone, perhaps less practical for many kinky play sessions.

Finally there's a small flogger. It's got a 5" handle and 9" laces coming off it that are made of the same material vinyl as the collar, cuffs, and gag. It's pretty stingy when used with force, though it can also offer a sensation that's pleasantly painful without being too harsh if used a bit more lightly.  It's cute, and not badly made for a beginner toy- I don't get the impression it's about to fall apart and, being vinyl, you can likely sterilize it with a bleach and water solution if you feel so inclined.

All in all the Kinky Kitty Kit wouldn't be a bad toy set for me to bring to a play party where I want cuffs but don't necessarily want to bring my pricey leather ones. I think it would hold up to light bondage rather than a more intense scene. It's certainly very cute and could be fun as an access point to petplay if a couple was interested in exploring!

Thank you SheVibe for sending me the Kinky Kitty Kit in exchange for a fair review! Check SheVibe out for a myriad of other toys, both kinky and not!

Categories: bdsm, bondage, Shevibe, toys, veganism

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Orgy of the Wallflowers - Getting It On While Shy

I know, I know, right, I talk about Orgy and Wallflowers and no doubt you think "bands of the 90's". And while I did wear a short floral dress and docs, I'm actually talking about a queer orgy I went to last night with a bunch of the cutest and some of the shyest porn stars I've ever known. And it went incredibly smoothly, so I wanted to offer up some insight as to what I think made it flow.

Having sex with one person is hard when you're shy and not a porn performer. Having sex with one person when you're shy and a porn performer can be harder, because often the other person wants to you break out the Moves and be the aggressor, because you're sexy for a living, right? but being shy, we just sort of smile, and shift our feet, and don't speak to the people we like because it's terrifying. You can absolutely be a porn performer and able to have organized sex on cue and still be really really socially anxious, which a lot of people don't seem to realize.  I've been on casual sex dates where, if the other person didn't remove my shoes for me, I'm not sure we' ever have gotten to sexyfuntimes. I've certainly had moments where I've kicked my legs and pounded my bed and screamed into my pillow "I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU WANT FROM ME" and then in person just wished for a "would you like to have sex? y/n" index card.

There were a couple of things I think worked well last night. One thing was going around in a circle to allow people to offer their names, preferred pronouns, and anything they wanted to do/hard limits they wanted to state. What was even nicer was creating space for people to say "I'm shy! I would prefer someone else to be the aggressor tonight", which I certainly took advantage of. Definitely don't assume that this person or that person would approach you if they were interested- a lot of people may seem super outgoing and confident but are actually shy and would love to be approached. It was also great to have a bunch of different safer sex supplies easily available (if there aren't safer sex fairies at your party, make sure you have bottled water, gloves, lube, and at least one condom, just in case! And possibly a puppy pad if you're a squirter....)

Knowing who was looking for things I wanted to give or have done to me also really helped, because then we could connect and begin asking questions while we played tentatively- "is it ok if I touch you here? May I play with this? Oh, you want to top? I want to bottom" etc. And yes, you'll both probably blush a bit and giggle when these questions are being asked! Just try to think of it as charming instead of embarrassing. I found it easier to get close to someone's ear and ask them quietly if I could kiss them, or play with their cock, leading to hot making out fairly easily. As for how to move it forward from there? I asked "is there anything I could do for you?" in order to figure out if the person i was playing primarily with was interested in topping, bottoming, or something else. Speaking slowly/lowly and with a bit of a smile is super sexy! And it is totally ok to snuggle, or just makeout, or stroke someone's skin, or give/receive massages at an orgy, or (depending on the feelings of the group) eve just watch- don't feel like you HAVE to have sex if you aren't into it. It was nice to sometimes just stroke skin after asking if it was ok, or kiss someone's back or neck while they fucked someone else. There's lots of ways to participate and feel involved!

Also, practical consideration- have a plastic supermarket bag you can put dirty toys in for cleaning when you get home.  This means you can enjoy the evening instead of having to worry about sterilizing them at the venue, or having no way to separate used toys from the rest. I also tend to like to tuck my panties and glasses into my boot (makes them easier to find later, hehe!)

Do you have any particular orgy tips? Share them below!

Categories: communication, consent, nonmonogamy, parties, porn, queer, sexyfuntime

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Review: "Hairy Twatter"

"Hairy Twatter" had one thing going for it- it didn't have a laugh track. But other than that, this was not an easy porn parody to get through. I was bored most of the time. The SFW trailer was pretty much all the non-sex stuff that happened in the entire porn, so I don't know how they made a non-sex version for the DVD!

We start off with some really terrible and kind of seasickness creating graphics, only to get to a non-ginger Ron (Tyler Nixon) and Harry (Seth Gamble) talking about the dream Ron had the night before. In his dream, all the girls at the school are suddenly able to grow pubic hair, which they currently can't (?) and he's desperate for this to be true. So Harry goes looking for the possibly not evil Hella Trix (Katie St. Ives), who apparently got this spell from a wizard that allows her to grow a bush. It's very trim and manicured, mind, but there!

Hella shows this to Harry, and tells him he can have the spell if he goes down on her, so, well, he does (which is nice). Hella finds his signature glasses uncomfortable so she removes them, causing Harry to say "I can't see anything!" so Hella shoves his face into her cunt saying "you don't need to see anything" which I enjoyed. There's a lot of spanking, which was fun, but not a lot of talk in character, which bummed me out. Somehow during the sex that ensues his glasses are back on, which is actually kind of nice as there's not a lot of guys with glasses in porn. The sex scene is all right, but not really the magic I hoped for.

Harry goes back to Ron and tries the spell to give everyone a bush. Apparently it works, because Hormone (played by Jesse Andrews, and I'm not making this up, that's what they called her) comes in later and shows Ron her hairy pussy. He's delighted, she tells him he's an idiot, they demonstrate how British slang doesn't really work with a Valley accent, and they're off, making out a lot before a long blowjob. There's sex that happens, which... I mean, she's cute, but I was kind of bored already. It's all pretty standard heterosexual porno sex.

Then we have Winey (Sammy Grand) who is supposed to be Ginny I guess?, and Neville (what a strange choice... played by Logan Pierce) meet up on the stairs and she shows him... wait for it... YES! her bush. Of course. He eats her out, she gives him a blowjob which kind of lacks interest, and they have sex. She tends to look at the camera a lot during the scene like she's trying to figure out what to do next, which suggests to me not having the greatest sex ever. I fast forwarded a lot.

At this point, I pretty much can anticipate how the scene will go. Girl (this time "Janine", played by Nora Skyy) meets boy (this time Harry), flips a minuscule skirt up and pulls panties down, shows boy her bush, and they have sex. It's only blow jobs and hand jobs in this one, until he comes on her face and uniform. Again, she's cute, but there's not a lot of creativity here.

Oh god. Two performers decided to fake British accents in the last scene and it's really bad. Really, really bad. Draco (Michael Vegas) wants to tell on Harry, of course, but is persuaded not to by Luder (Tara Lynn Foxx) who tells him they can have sex if he doesn't tattle. This is the first scene where they actually seem glad to be there and enjoying the sex, which after the first four scenes is a nice change of pace. This is also the first scene with any Harry Potter related banter at all during the scene, which made it more interesting. Still, the acting was a bit over the top during the sex, which was distracting.

I mean, honestly, most of the porn actresses seemed not to be really *into* this. I don't get the impression they liked Harry Potter a lot, or their co-stars, or the fucking. This would've been a great porn for girl-next-door types, but they didn't. The set was pretty terrible (understandably) and the costumes were cheap. I feel like if you're going to do a porn parody, you need to put effort in, or just don't bother.

I can't really recommend "Hairy Twatter", as the sex was all right but not remarkable and the parody part was minimal.

Categories: parody, pop culture, porn, think of the children!

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Review: Plunge Paddle from Tantus

When I opened my treasure chest from Tantus the Plunge Paddle was honestly the first thing I went for. A silicone paddle that's got a streamlined dildo on the end as a handle? Yes please!

It's got a beautiful flexibility to it which is both a blessing and a curse. The curse is that it can take a minute to develop a rhythm with this toy, as it rebounds more than you might be used to in a paddle. The blessing is that once you're working in that rhythm, you can deliver a hardy spanking without much effort. And I mean HARDY. This is an intense paddle for those who like something both thuddy AND stingy.

Dildo-wise, the handle is amazing for g-spot stimulation. The curve and stillness are both ideal, plus it's this velvety soft silicone that feels really nice. The paddle allows for a reasonable thrust, too, making it relatively practical.  I imagine it'd be workable anally too though I'd recommend using a condom (both because I've noticed silicone can cling to butt smell and because of the handle's tiny hole).

Ok, so, the stats: the flat part of the paddle is 6.75″ long, 3″ wide, while the dildo handle is a total of 7″ (about 5.5″  insertable). The bulbous head  measures just over 4″ around  while the rest of the shaft is between 3.25 to 3.5″.

Because it's all silicone, this toy is boilable and dishwasher safe, making cleanup a breeze. The only thing I'd warn about is that the dildo end has a hole through it for hanging- not really noticeable when used for penetration, but a place where potentially lube can stick, so be aware when washing! You know those tiny bottlebrush things you can get for brushing around braces? Those would be perfect for scrubbing.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who has a thing for making a submissive kiss the implement I'm about to use on them. Being able to make them suck the handle without worry is really nice (with leather or wood... it's just not that sanitary). In fact I can imagine giving a lover a good thrashing before fucking myself with the handle and making them clean it off for me. That sounds nice.

I can't wait to redden someone's ass with this paddle. I love how it looks- all one colour, so sleek! I can totally picture bringing it as my one toy for a hookup or to a play party, as it's got plenty of sexyfuntimes value in one instrument that can fit in my purse. I also like the idea of experimenting with the temperature properties of silicone- how does a warm paddle feel vs a cold one? What if it's wet? I'm excited to find out!

As the Plunge Paddle is silicone, don't forget not to use silicone lube with this toy or it might start to break down. A good water based lube (I used Hathor Aphrodisia) will serve you well playing with this toy.

Thank you, Tantus, for sending me the Plunge Paddle in exchange for a fair review!

 Buy your own here!

Categories: bdsm, female domination, sexyfuntime, Tantus, toys