Remittance Girl's Blog, page 23

Unsafe Sex and the Representation of Ideals

by TheStrange87

We’ve been having a very vibrant conversation on twitter about whether or not a writer of erotic fiction has an obligation to write their sex scenes as ‘safe’, i.e. with the participants wearing condoms.  In a way, this is somewhat related to an earlier post I had on the pressure to write sex-positive erotica, to represent all queer characters as good guys, etc.

This is my take on the issue. This is not what I think other writers should do. It simply explains my thinking when I write. There are a couple of issues that cross over.

Firstly, it is my opinion that writers should not be conscious propagandists. The word propaganda is usually perceived negatively but I am using the term to mean any promotion of an ideological position, whether you consider it to be a good or a bad one.  I’m making a rather subtle argument here, so bear with me.

As a woman in the 21st century, I am very supportive of sex educators, health professionals and public information that promotes the use of condoms and safe sex practices.  It is the promotion of a way of thinking about sex and of encouraging best practices. It is information that is disseminated with the purpose of making people act and think in a certain way. This is a type of propaganda. I don’t think it is bad propaganda, but it IS propaganda. There is an agenda to its dissemination.

I do not believe that fiction writers have an obligation to participate in the dissemination of propaganda. And, in fact, I find it a little disturbing when they do.  Because the agenda of a writer should be to tell a story – not to change people’s behaviour. The story may be a persuasive one, and it may cause a reader to reconsider their thinking on something. That’s fine. But when a fiction writer sets out to ‘sell’ a point of view, that disturbs me.

Secondly, I have very little interest in writing stories where people are safe. My interest in the erotic lies in places where characters are, in fact, not safe. This may be a physical danger or a psychological one. But for me, good stories have conflict. If all your characters are safe, you have none.

It is worth remembering that sex has never been safe. Before birth control and modern medicine, the percentage of women who died in childbirth was staggering. Until the invention of antibiotics, people died of syphilis and gonorrhea and urinary tract infections.  Until the mid 18th Century, women seldom had a say in who they married, and technically spent the whole of their married life being ‘raped’ by the definition we use now. Most did not consent to sex because they were not asked or expected to consent to it. And please don’t forget, for a quite high percentage of the world’s population, this is still the case.

We have come to a place in Western society where we have an overwhelming urge to represent everything we find pleasurable as safe, and to re-write safe activities as pleasurable.  But the truth is that sex is sometimes still dangerous. Many people still don’t wear condoms during penetrative sex. Few people use dental dams or condoms for oral sex.

Humans very often take unwise risks. Especially in pursuit of transcendent experiences. That’s usually what I’m writing about in one form or another, because that’s what I find interesting to explore.

When I write about cutting, I don’t have my characters pulling on gloves, although most BDSM practitioners do. On a very personal basis, I’m not interested in being cut by someone I have a casual relationship with. By the time I have let someone near me with a sharp edge, I’m a long way past needing to worry about infectious body fluids.  However, I also have to say that… people sometimes choose not to act safely. And this is a part of their personality. These are characters I find interesting to explore and write about. Not to make them heroes or villains, but just to explore them. Similarly, I’m not interested in writing porn because I’m not interested in writing about ideal sexual experiences either. It’s the complex, contextual and problematic ones that interest me enough to put pen to paper.

I expect my readers to be adults who understand that the function of fiction is not to model real life ideals, but to explore areas where, in fact, most real, sane people seldom go.

Now, that being said, you may have noticed that some of my stories do contain condom use, and some characters quite pointedly use them and discuss their use.

I think there is an eroticism to condoms. I think pulling them on is an unspoken admission that sex isn’t safe. I think there is a curious and sometimes very sexy semiotic to rolling on a condom. It says ‘I’m going to fuck you senseless now’ without dialogue.  Similarly, having one character tell other to “For god’s sake, put the fucking condom on,” is just as good as saying ‘I’ve been teased out of my mind, fuck me, now!’

It is entirely possible to write smoking hot sex scenes with condoms and I flatter myself that I’ve written a couple. But never with the agenda of trying to persuade my readers to behave in a certain manner.

However, I do like the juxtaposition of a character who may act safely from a physical perspective, but dangerously from a psychological one. But that’s just me. I like paradox.

Ribbon Tales: Two: The Token

Once upon a time, long ago in a land far away (so keep your feminist panties on) there was a wise and powerful king. As despots go, he wasn’t a bad one. Within the context of his time, he was as benevolent as kings get. He cared for his country and his subjects, took his responsibilities as a ruler to heart, and if he was a little distant and formal and war-like – well – you have to take his culture and environment into account when judging him.

He ascended to the throne after his father, a much less amiable man, died choking on a partridge bone. Being an only son, the transfer of power went off without a hiccup and the country prospered. Sure, there were border skirmishes, and the new King put them down with all the bloodthirsty gusto of a monarch of his time, but for the most part peace prevailed. Crops grew, taxes were paid, loyalties pledged. He was so busy being a reasonably good king, he put off marriage for a long time.

One day, after the successful suppression of yet another border incursion, the Baron whose land straddled the troublesome border traveled to the capital bearing a token of his appreciation for sending reinforcements to protect his land. He arrived at the King’s court, resplendent in his best velvets and trailing a young, lovely golden-haired girl – his first-born daughter. The girl was demure and rosy-cheeked and her wrists were bound, in the charming and traditional style, with a pink silk ribbon to symbolize her purity, her innocence and her femininity.  With a formal flourish, he led the girl behind him up the central runner in the royal receiving room and, after asking the customary permission to approach his royal personage, handed the tail of the ribbon over to the King.

“Your Highness,” said the Baron, “please accept this token of my loyalty to you.”

The token looked terrified. She had not been consulted on this at all. At sixteen, she hadn’t been consulted on anything. But when she looked up at the King, who appeared ancient to her, it was only her fear of decapitation that prevented her from bursting into tears or running from the throne room screaming her pretty little head off. It’s not that he was ugly, but he was just old. Really old. And he had a scar that ran from the outer edge of his left eye down his cheek. It made him look bad-tempered.

Emilia – for that was the girl’s name – had only recently started fantasizing about who she would marry. In all her reveries, the man was always young and brave and handsome. More often than not, she imagined him mounted on a horse, which was a safe way to picture him, since it allowed her to avoid imagining him mounted on her – something that still frightened her considerably.

Although she knew, pragmatically, that it was some great honour to be married to the King, and you got to be queen when that happened, she couldn’t find it in her heart to be delighted by the situation.

The King took the ribbon with a bit of hesitation. He knew he had to marry sometime, and he guessed this was as good a time as any. Lord knows, the girl looked healthy, didn’t have a squint or a limp or an overly hirsute upper lip. It could have been way worse. But he’d always imagined he’d settle on someone after giving it due consideration. Nonetheless, the Baron standing in front of him was a very loyal chap. He was his first line of defense at the most troublesome of all his borders.  And the girl was not bad looking even if her hips were a little narrow and her breasts a little modest. Nature would probably take its course and she’d grow to look a little more womanly in time.

And so the transfer of the ribbon happened, a date for the royal wedding was set, and the formal mechanisms of tradition and custom kicked into high gear. There was a very solemn ceremony in the cathedral on a chilly October morning, a generous and well-watered banquet that lasted until well after dark. At eight o’clock in the evening, the King took his new bride to bed.

Things didn’t go badly. The King was not a virgin, of course, but neither had he spent any time in the arms of love. She lay there as instructed, with her legs spread, looking up at the brocade canopy. He got between her thighs, broke her hymen and the deed, after a short furious burst of thrusting, was done.  Patting her flank as if she were a well-behaved horse, he pulled his breeches back on, and left to rejoin his companions drinking in the banquet hall. The ribbon with which Emilia had been presented to the King was stored in an ornate carved box in the King’s council chamber. Emilia herself was stored in the Queen’s royal chambers. All the King’s belonging’s were secured.

Three years passed. The King made a point of visiting his Queen and having congress with her once a week, but she did not conceive. This was remarked on and physicians were called. They examined Emilia dispassionately and thoroughly and proclaimed her to be in good health and perfectly capable of producing an heir. However, another year passed and still she was without child.

One would think that after a number of regular conjugal visits, the atmosphere between the King and the Queen would have warmed up a little. But it didn’t. He fucked her the same way every time. Patted her on the flank and took his leave. No whispered endearments across a pillow, no post-coital libation, nothing.  In fact, it’s fair to say the visits got more tense with time, especially on Emilia’s part. She was never ready when he mounted her, and it was over in a matter of minutes. On the few times she attempted to engage him in conversation, or prolong the encounter it became obvious the King was simply not interested.

In the fourth year of her marriage, Queen Emilia, feeling very much like just another horse, went down into the King’s stables and, after inquiring and discovering that the King’s favourite stallion was ready to stud, positioned herself beneath the horse. The beast did what beasts do. There were, of course, unfortunate consequences. Emilia died of a perforated bowel and massive blood loss, but, it is fair to say, the whole thing was entirely consensual.

The incident was hushed up, the behaviour of the Queen put down to dubious ancestry, and the ribbon was moved from the ornate box in the council chamber and deposited on the dung heap.

A new queen was sought, and this one was more robust. She gave him three children and, eventually poisoned him to put her firstborn son on the throne.

 

Ribbon Tales – One

This pretty pink ribbon

coils like a snake in my hand

its power conserved like a spring

waiting to strike and bite

with the venom of

a true story.

This simple pink ribbon

slides through my fingers

a silky glide of flesh-coloured celuloid

a hundred rose-tinted frames

of nostalgic nightmares.

This taut little ribbon

binds my beating heart

like a captive package

its knots dig into

the sore spots

of fictions I write.

This whispering pink ribbon

mine and yet not mine

is a reminder of how little

time or distance matter

as long as you hold tight

to its tale.

 

 

Porn, Consent and the Singular Integrity of the Sexual Experience

There is a very interesting article in the Atlantic, “The Ethics of Extreme Porn: Is Some Sex Wrong Even For Consenting Adults“. Being the Atlantic, although thorough, it also relates some very dogmatic and (to me) quite offensive responses. But the author has written a fairly well-reasoned piece.  It is all in response to this essay by Emily Witt on N+1 “What Do You Desire”

I don’t want to spend a long time summarizing either the article or the essay. If you are interested in examining the impact of certain kinds of sex and its remediation (porn) on the concept of sex itself, cultural constructions of it, and personal experience, it’s really worth your time to read both. Nonetheless, the essay in question is basically an account of the writer who witnessed and interacted with some of the participants in the production of a piece of porn vaguely reminiscent of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel “Snuff” – but perhaps a little edgier and with far less narrative. One girl, an audience of willing participants, and the appearance of pretty much anything goes that isn’t life-threatening.

It’s funny how the presence of sex blinds us to looking at something dispassionately. Because the narrative of the essay contains sex, society dictates that we must view it and dissect it in a very specific way. We must talk about it in terms of morality, of feminism, of how it colours are perceptions of sex. In reality, there’s very little difference between Public Disgrace and what the Romans used to do for entertainment at the Forum. What Public Disgrace shows is that a lot of us haven’t moved on much, emotionally or intellectually, in terms of what we find entertaining. Luckily, we don’t require the death of the participants anymore. The symbolic and very public decimation of identity seems to be enough. So, one could say, we’ve become more nuanced.

For me, there are two interesting and rather disturbing aspects to the articles and to the production of things like Public Disgrace itself.

The first is this insistence that the public decimation of identity is a perfectly acceptable entertainment commodity.  There is a blatant hypocrisy going on with the producers of the porn. The unspoken sub-text is that this is all good clean fun and there is no lasting damage. If it were all good clean fun, it wouldn’t turn us on. Sporting a sign saying ‘I am A Worthless Cunt’ is a lot of things, and it may be entirely consensual, but marketing it as spectacle which has no lasting impression on either the recipient of the sexual degradation or the participants and witnesses to it is disingenuous. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not condemning someone’s penchant for sexual humiliation. I’m condemning the selling of it as superficial entertainment. Because you’d have to be almost brain-dead to walk away from that spectacle, whether participant or witness, unchanged.

And before you start feeling smug (“Well, I’d never watch or participate in anything like that”), you should stop and think. Because if you’ve ever watched a reality TV show and felt the shiver of pleasurable Schadenfreude to see someone get publicly torn to shreds on American Idol, or any other program where a set of co-participants or a panel of judges take great pleasure in proclaiming how abysmally the participant has failed, then you’ve dipped into that rather murky pond yourself. Don’t let the absence of explicit sex fool you.

The other thing that disturbs me is a pattern I’ve seen emerging for some time, facilitated by our technological ability to remediate things fast and broadcast them to a wide public.  At the reveal of this comes at the end of the “What Do You Desire” essay, in the form of a snippet of interview – when the girl who features in the porn was asked what she liked the best about the experience:

PENNY

Probably, uh, just the getting handled by everyone and not really knowing how many hands were on me, or who was touching me . . . And then the—I don’t know, did you get your fist in my butt?

DONNA

I did.

PENNY

Well, that was awesome. Yay! I can’t wait to see it!

Buried in this interchange is a creepy little statement. That having a fist in her ass was not the ultimate experience. Viewing the video evidence of it will be.

For me, it is not the mainstreaming or openness of explicit sex or kink that is the problem. The issue is that there is something inherent in its marketization that shifts the value off the interior experience of the sex itself and onto its status as a publicly remediated product. This is no longer about the pleasure or intensity of the lived experience. It is about the broadcast of its evidence.

It is as if the gaze of others, the knowledge that others have consumed the remediation of your experience that has become the only real site of pleasure.  As if we no longer simply require sex organs to experience erotic pleasure. We require a viewing audience to confirm that we felt it.

 

 

 

Abyssal Depths – The Art of the Mindfuck

The topic of the mindfuck has been on my mind of late. I’ve had ongoing discussions with @DarkGracie on the subject, and a lovely face-to-face conversation about it with two people from different ends of the power spectrum: MisterGryphon and Mollena.

I’d like to state up front that what follows is a very personal understanding of what a mindfuck is. Other people may have other definitions. This is wholly mine.

A good mindfuck requires three things on the part of both participants: intelligence, imagination and superb communication skills. In a way, it is very much like writing extremely personal erotic fiction – because good erotic fiction skates close to reality in terms of the way it portrays the workings of the mind. It doesn’t require physicality, although it’s certainly easier if you have it and if you use it to good purpose. And, the better you know someone’s psyche, the better the mindfuck.

It’s easy to confuse a mindfuck with roleplay. They’re not the same thing. In roleplay you can explore being someone completely different, although I would argue that you do have to identify, at some fundamental level with the role in order to really get off on it. A mindfuck, however, is not about being someone else or taking on a role. Quite the opposite. From the point of view of being on the receiving end, it’s about vulnerabilities at the core of your own identity. So there is no armor, or the protective coating of a role that you can discard.

From the point of view of the …er… mindfucker, it really requires taking erotic delight in manipulation and dabbling in the complexities of the mind of the other. It might look like objectification at times, but there has to be a significant level of seeing the recipient as subject to be truly deft at it.

Really good mindfucks are never safe. I don’t care what rules you make or how many safewords you decide on, you can consent all you like, but the reality is that mindfucking as about playing with triggers. There are times, inevitably, when it is going to go wrong, or too far. And the consequences can be fairly serious.  If someone gives you one cane strike more than you can take, the pain is fleeting and welts heal. It can take considerably more time to recover from a mindfuck that has gone too far. And since a really spectacular one always lies at the edge of your tolerance, you are playing with fire. I hate using the word ‘aftercare’ because we’re not talking a glass of juice and a pat on the back here. And it isn’t just the person being mindfucked who may need it. There is a real need to regain balance and step back into the rational world for both parties. Personally, I’d never do it with anyone who I did not believe had some deep level of affection for me. Things can get very raw and very ugly. There needs to be a underlying framework of trust and genuine care to fall back on if things go wrong, or even if they go spectacularly right.

So, now I’ve done my due diligence, here goes with the nitty gritty:

What do you fear? What do you fear you are? What do you fear someone sees in you or believes you to be? What turns you on and turns your stomach at the same time? For me, good mindfucks are really about the dark recesses where you fear to go, and yet they have an irresistible allure.

There are personal mindfucks that I’m simply never going to write or tell you about. They’re far too private. But one I feel okay about discussing is the one I wrote a short story about: Blindness. (You might want to read that quickly and come back to this post).  The story grew out of a very short interchange I had with someone.  It’s a good example because it happened very fast, the impact of it took me by surprise, and I didn’t know the person well enough at the time to express how much like I felt I’d been run over by a freight train, and I don’t think he was fully aware of how dramatic the fallout would be at the time.

I was being a mouthy bitch and told him I’d drug him and fuck him with a strap on. He replied that he’d tie me down, blindfold me, and let multiple men fuck me. Then he’d kiss me and call me a whore.

To a lot of people that would just be a giggle-worthy interchange. But to me, because of the particular way my psyche is constructed, the idea of having someone I care about let other people fuck me is truly horrific. It lit up all the parts of my brain where arousal meets disgust. But the coup de grace was the kiss. Because the combination of scenarios creates a very upsetting paradox. I don’t kiss lightly. I’m not a casual mouth kisser. That gesture of affection coupled with an act I would consider a blatant statement of disregard sent me right over the edge.

It took 15 minutes to get my heart to stop racing. It took me an hour to stop crying. Nothing had actually happened. They were just words. But those words, those images had burrowed so deeply into vulnerable parts of my psyche, it took me quite a while to recover. It took me months to actually bring up the impact incident to the person because I was embarrassed about my reaction.  And yet, it was a tremendously erotic experience and it has stayed with me for years – it took me two to get up the courage to deal with it fictionally. It was not precisely the content of the imagery in itself, but the fact that this person could affect me so dramatically with it, could dabble in the dark corners of my identity so skillfully. And that I had let him (probably without his knowing it) to do it. The whole interchange took a matter of seconds. No orgasms were had. But it was as memorable and had more impact that most physical exchanges I’ve experienced.

A huge percentage of my edgier stories have a strong element of mindfuck in them, in that the characters are in some way either willingly or unwillingly / knowingly or unwittingly participating in them. In Blindness, the mindfuck doesn’t take place textually or verbally, or between relative strangers, and it doesn’t end well. Well, it’s a story, it required drama and an interesting ending. I chose to fictionalize and write about this particular example of a mindfuck because it shows both the eroticism and the danger of them. And that, for me at least, it’s not possible to have one without the other. There has to be paradox. It is never a wholly pleasurable place. But perhaps that’s just me.

For one of the most forceful, terrifying and sublimely written accounts of a mindfuck, please read Gryphon’s “La Vie en Rose” on Fetlife.

What’s your definition of a mindfuck?

 

 

 

Death Comes to the Poet

When death came to the old poet, it came not as a pale horse or a scythe-bearing monk. She came on an August afternoon, after the angry sun had nestled behind the ancient fig tree outside his window. No breeze stirred, despite the open doors. The poet sipped ragged breaths from the still and humid air of the shadowed room as he lay on his daybed, dreaming of nymphs frolicking in ornate water features. But it was just the garden sprinkler turning on.

He knew something was afoot, because the water nymphs had taken a turn for the worse. They’d stopped splashing each other’s naked bodies and began gorging in a very uncivilized fashion on the family of golden koi in the ornamental fountain.  Their giggles had turned shrill and they opened their needle-toothed maws and took feral bites from the golden bellied fish. Blood and fish guts trailed down their ivory bodies. Moreover, the distinct and acrid tang of tobacco assailed him, even though his doctor had forbidden him to smoke anymore.

She came as a silver-haired succubus. This in itself was a paradox, he thought. Weren’t succubi supposed to be the epitome of sexual desirability? And yet she wasn’t a hag. Her dark eyes still held a sparkle, but a knowledgeable one that spoke of a benevolent familiarity with the obsessions of men. Unfortunately, inherent in that benevolence was the depressing reality of just how small most of those obsessions were. The sparkle wasn’t as pleasant as it might have been.

“It’s time, poet,” she whispered.

“But I’ve still got to fin…”

She pressed her withered lips to his and inhaled, stealing just one of his precious last breaths. “Don’t demean yourself. There is no finishing life, only leaving it undone,” she said, unzipping his trousers and freeing his cock.

The erection surprised him. It had been a decade at least since his tumescences had abandoned his flesh and taken up residence exclusively in his brain. He smiled like a child with a lost toy restored.

With a surprising flexibility that belied her age, she gathered up her skirts and straddled him in one graceful motion. Her cunt was scorching, ravenous and tight enough to make the poet’s eyes water.

Or perhaps it was the visions that made him cry. For each roll of her hips pushed gouts of memories to the fore. A slow and relentless tide of imagery flooded and receded. Some sweet, some painful, some proud and many filled with shame. The poet realized that, far from being a peaceful man of words, he’d broken many hearts. At the time, had been rather pleased by these accomplishments, but in reliving them, they came to him laden with all the anguish they had engendered.

“But I didn’t mean…”

“Oh, yes you did,” the succubus said, lust tainting her words a hot crimson. “And you loved it.”

At first death’s maiden had seemed light upon his hips, but with each downward plunge onto his cock, she became heavier. She bent over him, her silver hair draping his face, her hands cupping his head. She fucked him until she’d stolen every panting exhalation. Until the weight of his own poetic charms crushed his chest and he could take in no more air.

On a hot, still afternoon in August, the poet died, choking on the misery his words of love had inspired. Like so many poets before him, he kept faith with his tradition and did not go gently.

A Second Innocence

Beyond debauchery

lies a mute innocence.

Not of a child,

but of senses burned so raw

that experience is reduced to

the hiss of a dead television

and only silence feels new.

I’ve been a pilgrim

in the searing desert

of that soundless place,

my heart burnished,

my hymen restored

and I wonder

the purpose of the passage

if only to end up

in Eden

alone.

 

A Mortal Fascination for Volcanic Eruptions

Silence cannot do away with the things that language cannot state.

G. Bataille, Eroticism

Darkened for atmosphere, the museum visitors move in whispering clutches, like clumps of reed in river water, through the artfully constructed maze of ancient destruction. Like all good exhibits, it has a narrative: a before, a during, an after.

There is a beautiful mosaic that once graced a house in Pompeii while the volcano above it growled its intentions. And on the tiny, lit screen of my phone, you are also rumbling, embarking on the confession of a smaller, more intentional cruelty. This is the art of foreplay.

The picturesque, charming Mediterranean town and the pretty, guileless, lovesick woman. I cannot keep the two separate. The earth is cruel and so are you, and I have no words to explain why both these things arouse me.

If I had no pity, no empathy, it would be easier to explain. But I do. Just as surely as I feel the fear of the impending cataclysm for the long dead of Herculaneum, I fear for the woman whose heart you’ve already wounded, here in the dark passageways of this grim exhibit, as you recount your personal atrocity.

It turns me on. Not the atrocity, but its confession and reverberation. The hypnotic inevitability of the sequence of events. The knowledge that you are torn in two by the pleasure of the act and the wretched guilt that envelopes its aftermath is so much more alluring than the mindless wrath of nature. It’s left you with a hunger to fuck your way through it. And I want you with mindless ferocity.

And so there, in a darkened corner of the room that houses the calcified remains of innocents overtaken by events, trapped in the infernal and relentless lava, I drink in the words of your penetration, of your envelopment, and I am trapped as surely as they were, covered like they were, turned to empty casts by the heat. I am drenched in the presence of their dry and crumbling corpses. I come silently in the shadows, thighs pressed together, trembling with the tension of the paradox.

Although I have no words to describe the  fascination I hold for volcanic eruptions, my silence doesn’t lessen its iniquity.

The Sublime Angst of the Condom Aisle

Most of you are probably too young to know this, but there was a time when, if you wanted to buy condoms, you had to go to the pharmacy counter and ask for them. A stern man or woman wearing the white, side-buttoned jacket of pharmaceutical authority would assess whether you were in fact worthy to have them, and then slide a very unimpressive box of them across the counter at you. The ordeal was so painful that many people ended up having to marry and raise unwanted children. But there was a positive side to it: you were never forced to stand in front of five shelves of multi-coloured boxes, muttering, “Oh my god. What the fuck?”

Condoms have their own, vast semiotic landscape. They come ribbed and nubbed, coloured and flavoured, ultra safe and uber thin, with spermicide and without. Christ, you can even get ‘natural’ ones, made out of some part of a lamb’s body, just in case you like a little animal sacrifice with your sex.

Allow me to take you through the minefield of choice available to you.

If you buy ridged, ringed, nubbed or in any way textured condoms… exactly who is that for? And what does it say to your lover? Those little raised bits are so small, I can hardly feel them with the tip of my tongue – my vagina sure won’t notice the difference.  So… is the sub-text here that his dick lacks the requisite features you find satisfying. Not veiny enough for you? ‘Hello dear, I’ve bought some ribbed condoms because your cockhead lacks flair/flare’. This is not a good start to the sexual conversation.

Then there are the coloured ones. They have green ones, and I guess that could be good if you wanted to fantasize about comic book characters, but being of a more pragmatic bent, the idea of a green cock just makes me think that ring has been on too tight for far too long and they’re probably going to have to amputate. The yellow ones immediately bring hepatic dysfunction to mind. I’m at a loss as to what to say about the blue ones other than I hope you have another one to slip over his balls, because no one is getting laid tonight. Neither tissue hypoxia or hypothermic genitalia do it for me. The red just make me think of distorted clown noses. They’re scary enough when they’re round and on someone’s face. Who wants them between someone’s legs? And black… I’m not sure quite what to say about black. Once they’re on, they never actually look black in the strictly goth sense, they go a sort of inky grey, which reminds me of fucking zombies. If I ride it too hard, will it fall off?

Flavoured condoms have always puzzled me. It screams ‘Your cock tastes so bad, I’d rather ingest artificial grape flavour.” Not exactly the right tone to set with someone you hope will give you orgasms. But more to the point – yes, I know this isn’t SAFE SAFE SEX – I’ve never given someone a sheathed blowjob. I just don’t see the point, or smell it, or suck it. Besides, they never have any flavours I’m interested in.

I think if you’re going to go for the ‘ultra safe’ variety of condoms, you might just save your money and buy a pair of rubber washing up gloves. It’s cheaper and they’re re-usable. Once you slip that monster on him, penetrative sex is going to seem like a nostalgic memory; it’s going to be as much fun as… well… doing the dishes. The super-thin ones are yet another semiotic dilemma. Yes, it says: ‘I’m hoping you’ll feel something’ but it also, more subtly says: ‘I fear you might have been masturbating with sandpaper and have suffered from deadened nerve endings’ or, more self-effacingly, ‘I’m a little like the Eurotunnel. Hope this works for you.’

The name of the brands themselves are something of a problem. Durex has the stink of the medical about it, but the ‘dure’ root also says: you’d better stay hard and last for hours. Trojans always scare me for a number of reasons. I can’t get past the ‘Trojan Horse’ implications. I don’t want someone hung like a horse, and I’m not crazy about sneaky and unpleasant surprises either. Lifestyle makes me think of creepy marketing strategies and fills me with post-modern dread. Bravo seems like you’ve congratulated someone before they’ve even started. In Asia, the dominant brand is OK, which has the opposite effect. Was it only just OK for you?

Okamoto – honestly, what does that mean? The name reminds me of idiot foreigners who sport t-shirts with Kanji characters they don’t understand until some polite Japanese person informs them they’ve been walking around all day with “I Only Fuck Sheep” on their chests.

Finally, there’s a matter of the number of condoms in the box. I pondered this for a long time. Does a pack of 12 look too desperate? Greedy? Does it carry the expectation of gross over-achievement? On the other hand, the pack of five seems a little patronizing, as if you have reason to lower your expectations.

Yes, I know we’re all supposed to think choice is wonderful and celebrate it, but I do yearn for the days when some authoritarian asshole glared at me in disapproval and slid a nondescript box across a counter. I’d willingly endure the humiliation to avoid the angst.

Right about now, you might have come to the conclusion that I over-think things. I do. Which explains why I don’t get laid very often.

*Next week: Why are so many lube bottles shaped like massive dildos?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Guilty

Drag yourself

between my legs

in a state of moral undress.

With the queasiness

of reprehensible behaviour

clawing up the rungs of your spine

and the effervescence

of broken rules

fizzing in your blood.

I’m not interested

in snow white seed.