Remittance Girl's Blog, page 8

Spanking and Female Ejaculation: Everything Good Is Bad Again

[image error]This week the new Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014 aimed at censoring On Demand Video in the UK were ratified. I can’t say I watch a lot of porn of any kind, and my personal opinions of the remediated acts listed in the regulations range from a shrug to a shudder. There are lots of things I’m not interested in seeing and, because I have free will, I can choose not to see them. However, I do have a conceptual problem with the regulations for a number of reasons.

They purport to be necessary to ‘save our children’ from seeing terrible things and, it is implied, becoming warped by them. (I don’t want to get into the discussion of all the awful non-sexual things they might see on the news, in the theatres, on TV) There are many, many things that children should not see, both in the media and in real life, and it is the obligation of a parent to make sure they don’t see them. State intrusion into the making of cultural product ‘for the sake of the children’ is denying the very real and important responsibility that parents should exercise themselves. Governments that do it end up creating a population that feels itself able to relieve itself of this important aspect of parenting and growth that should be a matter between parents and their children.

Although not explicitly stated, the regulations infer that there is empirical evidence that children who watch, say, a woman sitting on a man’s face, are more likely to be psychologically and socially affected by it that, for instance, seeing 10 men ejaculating on a woman. There is NO creditable research to this effect.  Now, I don’t want to suggest its time to kick the net-nanny to the curb. There is some – not a lot – of research to indicate that exposure to extreme types of violent pornography might be psychologically problematic (Flood 2003) but, frankly, the conclusion is based on a lot of assumptions and not a great deal of solid research. The irony of the discussion is that, since it would be illegal to expose under 18s to porn, it’s almost impossible to get hard data on what the effects of it are.

In the absence of any solid, scientific data, let us be responsible about what our kids our watching, yes? Seems sensible. But in order to do that, we would have to play an active role in how our children formed their thinking about sex. Since, as a society, we are so hell bent on pretending children HAVE no sexuality, thereby neatly absolving parents from their roles as good sex educators, we’re letting the government do it for us? That can’t end well – for many, many reasons.

Meanwhile, the list of prohibited acts on VOD and the rationale behind them remains stunningly puzzling. I don’t agree with the censoring of any of the acts (as long as the actors are of age, consenting and the viewers are equally of age and consenting) but some are actually laughable.

No spanking.

Although, according to Debra Lynne Herbenick PhD, of the Kinsey Instituted, it is assumed to be a very, very common form of sexual play (Washington Post). On an admittedly anecdotal basis, I don’t even KNOW anyone who has not at least tried it once. When regulations don’t reflect some semblance of agreement with what ‘normative’ people do in the bedroom, the regulators stop simply looking like over-zealous prudes; they take on something a little more sinister. Is this an attempt to socially engineer a view of sexuality formed in the image of their own fantasies?

The second newly prohibited act is the remediation of female ejaculation. It’s not totally prohibited: only if it gets on anyone else’s body.  Why, you ask? Because according to this learned group of censors, it’s watersports in disguise. They maintain that since female ejaculation may contain some urine in it, there’s no difference between a squirting scene and a golden shower.

It does tell you something about how utterly tone deaf these people are to the nuances of sexual semiotics that they equate the two. Not that I personally have a problem with either of the acts.

But let us not be disingenuous. Golden showers always carry, however subtly, the implication of degradation about them. The person being urinated on is, from a sexual power dynamic, usually the ‘bottom’ in the scene. That’s why people find them hot.

Squirting, meanwhile, is rarely semiotically degrading to the person who gets ‘squirted on’. It happens to have emerged, for better or for worse, as a symbol of extreme pleasure in an orgasming woman. If anything, there is some flavour of the helplessness in the throws of pleasure of the woman doing the squirting.

But also, what is this obsession with the urine content?

This is where it gets personal for me. Many women don’t experience female ejaculation, but I do. Not after one or two orgasms, but past the third, it is likely to happen. I honestly don’t know what’s in it. It doesn’t smell like urine, but I’m more than willing to admit there might be some in there. When I was younger, the prospect that there might be terrified me. I would forcefully stop a lover from giving me more than two orgasms for fear I would squirt. And, of course, due to the fact that one squirts during orgasms, there’s a very good chance that you will get it on your partner, and all over the bed. But it is a natural consequence of my body reaction. It is not obscene, or perverse, and it certainly WOULDN’T damage a child to see it (anymore than a glimpse at anything else they shouldn’t be watching).

It took me many years to get over the fear of it. It took me a long time to grapple and settle on the reality that sex is messy and involves a LOT of body fluids: saliva, mucus, semen, effluvia, urine, even blood sometimes, and … wait for it… shit too. I can assure you that there are microscopic fragments of feces on every cock caught on camera penetrating an anus, and the censors haven’t banned THAT, why?

But, from a purely gendered perspective – why is it socially acceptable to have video of semen all over the place, but not female ejaculation? Why is it fine to show women choking on cock, but not women sitting on a man’s face? Now the legislation doesn’t simply seem prudish, it looks downright sexist!

Look, from a erotic writing perspective, I’m thrilled they’re banning things. Banning stuff just makes it more transgressive and hotter. The writer in me says: heck, ban it all! Ban ankles. I can write a great erotic story about calves!

But the 21st century woman in me says: what planet to these idiots live on? This is not about keeping anyone safe. This is about the exercise of power for the sake of power. This is about a society that has grown so demanding that they be ‘kept safe’ from everything. A society so unwilling to take individual and personal responsibility for itself and live with the consequences of its choices that it has allowed an authoritarian monster to reemerge from the murky deep age of sexual repression.

Please be offended by this. Not because you want to view these things but because you have free will and are intelligent and can choose to watch or not watch as you wish; because you know the difference between acted-out fantasy and reality and its consequences; because letting authorities exercise this kind of power unopposed has never, in the history of mankind, ended well.

________

Flood, Michael, and Clive Hamilton. “Youth and Pornography in Australia Evidence on the Extent of Exposure and Likely Effects.” 52 (2003): n. pag. Print.

Herbenick, Debra. Interviewed for the article “Sex study: Sexual behavior, habits, and enjoyment.” Washington Post Online (2010) http://live.washingtonpost.com/sex-su...

The Perfect Monster

[image error]The flat of his furred thigh. The thin membrane between thumb and forefinger. The subcutaneous slug of vein just above a temple.  A finger crooked on the sun-warmed metal of the trigger. The latticework of history. a web that skins his back. The sun-creased corner of an eye. An expulsion of breath that hitches before its limit.

She’s made a Frankenstein out of sundry parts the men she’s known: some loved, some disdained, some feared, some expended too soon. A towering creature formed from the detritus of others. This patchwork corpse was reanimated, not with lightning, but with nouns and verbs and curdled lust.

“Play nice, now,” she says, nudging him into the forest of prose.

“Fuck you, bitch,” he replies, sitting down naked and seamed, between two paragraphs.

She backspaces and starts again.

With the tendon of a forearm. The tiny fold of skin an earlobe. The absent tail at the end of a crooked spine. The calloused wedge of a heel. The sweat-beaded crevice above a lip. A semi-tumescent uncut cock.  A two-tone voice. The concavity of a buttock past its prime. The temper of a weary taxi driver…

Erotic Agony

Why do I write texts about people in agony? Why do you read them?

I could say I don’t know why. I feel driven to do it and it feels right when I do. Lacan would surely say that it’s my symptom.

The characters in my stories suffer, but not by accident. They are not stupid, stumbling onto disaster by mistake. They seek it out. They go in search of their agonies, sometimes knowing why and sometimes knowing only that there is something unknown to be had there.

Sometimes my characters go to justice. Sometimes they go to truth. Sometimes to free themselves from the heavy burden they have become, the accretion of self they have acquired. Sometimes they go to the silence of pain, and sometimes to be enveloped in its great roar.

When I write, a void sits before me, opening up its black mouth, waiting for me to enter and to write it into the order that is a story. But I never order it completely; I leave the edges in chaos so I don’t betray the nature of the material I’ve used to build it with. This is a truth I cannot disavow. This is between me and story. You are not here yet. We have a sin to commit, I and the text. We have a master to serve. We have an agony to bring forth into the world out of a jumble of words and notions. We have a cave of pain to build.

Once you get it, the relationship you have with it is up to you.

Remapped

[image error]

“Let me call you Daddy,” I said.

There was nothing but hiss of a bad digital connection. The screen’s cold glow cast harsh shadows across the rumpled landscape of my bedclothes. I was glad, now, that Blue* had refused to use the camera on Skype. Glad he couldn’t see me because, as the hiss stretched on, I began to cry. Out of shame, maybe. Out of fear that I’d disgusted him.

* * *

SLIP32: Don’t you ever get tired of typing?

BLUE*: Sometimes. You?

SLIP32: Wanna Skype?

BLUE*: Cam, you mean?

SLIP32: Yes.

BLUE*: I want to hear your voice. But no video.

SLIP32: All or nothing.

BLUE*: Just text then.

What if I didn’t like his voice? What if it was squeaky or nasal and a complete turn off? What if he didn’t like my voice?

All or nothing, I’d insisted, for a while. I was mindful of how annoying a voice could be. Sometimes I felt like I spent my life being passed around from one phone voice to another – the bank, the school, the mobile company. The minute there was a problem and I had to talk to someone directly, it was like a voyage into the underworld.

“You’ve reached the offices of…”

“Just hold while I redirect your call.”

“I’m afraid I don’t have access to that information, let me pass you on to our service department.”

“Would you like that in blue or green?”

“Your transaction has been denied due to insufficient funds.”

“I’m sorry, there’s an error in our records.”

“Could you spell your surname again?”

I could develop a fast hate-on for the person at the other end of the line if I didn’t like their voice.  More frightening still, I could almost fall in love with someone if they had the right voice. I had long suspected that the Apple Helpdesk hired their staff based on the sexiness of their voice. I once developed a terrible crush on a tech who had stepped me through the process of debugging a hardware problem. It had taken almost four hours. All the way through the steps, he stayed on the line with me. Finally I asked him if he was single. He said he wasn’t. A polite lie perhaps?

So, for a long time, Blue* and I stuck to text. For a while it didn’t matter. It wasn’t just his vocabulary or the fact that he didn’t indulge in passion-killing abbreviations. He was a good at it. A teller of hot stories. Enough detail in the right places. And he’d pace his responses just right, as if he could tell exactly how horny he’d made me. At first his posts where slow and long, full of lush descriptions. I’d do my best to match him. As the stories went on, we’d get more explicit, and the lines would get shorter, harsher, raunchier. As if the words themselves were pressing, pushing, demanding, stroking, penetrating. He knew. I knew he knew. He knew I knew he knew. I’d never met anyone who could textfuck the way Blue* could.

BLUE*: Tired of typing yet?

SLIP32: I am. But it’s okay.

BLUE*: Don’t you want to hear my voice?

SLIP32: Yeah, but I want to see you too. Don’t you want to see me?

BLUE*: No. Not really. I like it this way. No visuals.

SLIP32: Scared I’m going to be disappointing to look at?

BLUE*: I’m sure you’re not. But maybe I am.

SLIP32: I don’t care. Anyway, I thought men were supposed to be visual?

BLUE*: How do you know I’m a man?

SLIP32: Syntax.

BLUE*: Busted.

In the end I gave in. Mostly because the allure of a two-handed wank was tempting. I’ll admit I was scared, though. We’d been texting for more than a year. I’d grown very fond of Blue*. He wasn’t the only person I was netfucking, but he was my favourite by far. Sometimes I thought I played with other people to keep my feelings for him in perspective.

The first time I heard that creepy ring on Skype – the alert sounds like a submarine in distress – my adrenal glands went into overdrive. There he was. Blue* calling.

“Hi.”

“Hello there,” he drawled.

“You’re… You’ve got an accent!”

“Most people do.”

“Scottish? Jesus, you’re Scottish.”

“I am indeed. And you’re American.”

“Canadian.”

“My apologies.”

“Don’t. I’m not one of those Canadians.”

“Those Canadians?”

“The kind that get offended when people think they’re American.”

“Excellent. So…”

“So?” I was a little disconcerted. The transition from text to anything else was always awkward.

“Are you put off by the voice?”

I smiled. “No, not at all. You’ve got a very sexy voice.”

“So do you. What should I call you?”

“I’m not sure. What should I call you?”

“Blue.”

I laughed. I heard him breathe. “Okay, Blue. Be that way. I’m Slip.”

“Oh, you’re going numberless.”

“And you’ve dropped your asterisk.”

“True enough.”

“Hey, Blue?”

“Yes?”

“How do we start this?”

He hummed. It was a lovely, rumbling cogitation of a hum. “Close your eyes. Put your hands between your legs. I’m going to tell you a story.”

Sometimes Blue would start the story, sometimes I would. We’d always set it somewhere strange: in a deserted laboratory in Antarctica, in the bombed out ruins of Berlin, in the middle of a coup somewhere in South America, or a tea plantation in Assam. We’d always be somewhere other than where we were. Always other people. For a while, we played in the past, like we used to when we texted, but we started running out of historical events.

“New game,” he said, one day. “Are you up for it?”

“Of course.”

“Open up Google Maps,”

“Okay. Done.”

Coordinates popped up in the message pane. He took me to Japan and he went down on me right outside the Yasukuni Shrine, in the dark, with my hand clamped over my mouth so I didn’t make a noise while I came.

We worked through a list of natural disasters, great battles, and famous palaces. For a while, we did a global tour of graveyards and were ghosts, vampires, the undead, lovers in mourning. Then we downloaded usermaps and went to places where UFOs had been sighted. Sometimes I’d be the alien. Sometimes it would be him. Sometimes it would be fast and rough, sometimes it would be ridiculously romantic.

“Tonight, I want you to come to me in my sleep,” I said.

“Am I a rapacious alien, hell bent on impregnating a human?”

“Mmmm.”

“Do I bend over you while your dreaming, and rest my long, grey fingers on either side of your temples and push lewd images into your brain to make you wet?”

“You do.”

“Good.”

Blue wasn’t a prude; he had a boundless imagination and would take it almost anywhere.

“I’m a dragon,” he whispered, one night. “With a long, forked tongue. And I’m going to trail it up the smooth, pearlescent scales of your belly until your dragon cunt weeps bioluminescence. Then…”

“Then what?”

“I’m going to devour you, head first.”

“Will it hurt?”

“Maybe a little.”

“Maybe a lot!”

“Not once I’ve swallowed your brain. After that, it’s all mindless ecstasy.”

And it was.

Slowly it got more personal. I showed him on Google Earth where I almost drowned off the coast of Cancun, in Mexico, and he swam out and saved me, and then fucked me slowly on the beach in the wet sand until all the fear was gone.

We got lost. Lost somehow in the maps, and in the pictures of the streets, and the stories. I really think we did. Because after he saved me from drowning, I felt safer. I went swimming few days later, and that old, panicked feeling like I was floating into an abyss was gone. It was as if he’d wormed his way into my memory of that event and fixed it. Made it turn out right.

I didn’t tell him. I didn’t want him to think I was crazy.

He took me to the town where he’d grown up and fucked me against the brick wall of his primary school. I think, maybe, that did something for him, too, because he was quiet afterwards. We lay there, listening to each other breathe. I thought I heard him trying to hide the fact that he was crying.

“Blue?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you okay?”

“I am. Thank you, love.”

“For what?”

“Just… thank you.”

Over that year, we took each other to every place we’d been wounded, or rejected, or humiliated somehow, and wrote new memories on top of the old ones. Fucked with the timeline. Fucked with our own heads. We never talked about what we were doing; I never told him exactly what the old memory was, and he never told me. It was the sort of magic that only worked in silence. Had I told him the memory – had I put it into words – it would have given the thing too much power, been too strong, too present to change. In the quiet of knowing, not speaking, the wounds were vulnerable to the forces exerted by our pleasure. They’d re-knit in a different, softer pattern.

* * *

“Are you there?” I asked, after more than a minute of empty hiss.

“I’m still here, Slip.”

“Can I call you Daddy?”

“No.”

The pop-up message informed me that he’d ended the connection. I tried to reconnect but he didn’t answer. An hour later, Blue’s account disappeared.

The Descriptive Passage

[image error]I am becoming, the woman he imagines me to be: that strange, lithe creature beneath a foreign sun, dark hair whipped by a breeze that presages an afternoon downpour. A white linen dress, crisp in the cloud-scattered light, my eyes haunted by a despicable, unwarranted hope and, on my lips, the acid drop of some impending cleverness.

I am evolving from whore to virgin, exile from the patterned world of love and disenchantment, refugee from the camps of other men’s desires, having escaped from their beds and their venereal diseases with nothing but a poignant sense of nostalgia for the smeared youth I spent there.

The woman I am in his fertile mind is beautiful, always young, always wanting at once too much and not enough, always a mystery and a cliché. He has built of me a vast, soaring cathedral of the feminine: warm and terrifying, guileless and sadistic, horrific in my innocence, an openhearted, hanging judge of men.

The more I know of him, the more I learn the minute details of who I am in the process of being. He’s making me up as he goes along, dreaming me into existence, fleshing me out, one quality at a time.

And so here, in this hospital room dimmed for sleep, where monitors murmur their electronic vigils, with the prim scent of disinfectant warring with the cloying smell of well-meant flowers, I sit beside his bed, or rest my head next to his, on the raised pillow, and whisper. This is where I’ve trapped him, in that last moment, between the taking in of the final breath and its exhalation.

“You haven’t finished me yet, and I can’t let you go until you do.”

Stone Blind

[image error]Once upon a time there was a girl whose mother had died soon after her seventh birthday. Her father, a reasonably successful merchant, was driven almost mad with grief. He commissioned a stonemason to make a magnificent, life-sized effigy of his wife, recumbent and slumbering, to cover her stone coffin. It was an almost perfect likeness. So much so that, for a few years, the merchant would visit the tomb in the church and sit for hours, reading aloud, just as he had read to his wife in bed while they were married.

“See?” he’d say to his little daughter, as he wiped the tears from his eyes, “She’s still with us. She’s only sleeping.”

As the child began, more and more, to resemble her beautiful, dead mother, it might have been expected that her father would have been gladdened by his daughter’s growing resemblance to his late wife, but that is not what happened. Instead, he looked at her with increasing disgust. He drank more and more, and when he came home, the rosy glow of drunkenness would turn to rage. He would spit at her and hit her and call her an interloper and a whore.

His rages became so common and so violent, that his neighbors in the town noticed it. And they noticed his daughter frequently came to the market with cuts on her lips, or bruises on her cheeks, or blackened eyes. And it seems that someone, at least, was brave enough to take the matter up with him, because the merchant abruptly decided his daughter should be married and, before she had any say in the matter, he’d promised her to one of the other members of his Guild.

For her part, Adela – for that was her name – had borne her father’s rages with some understanding. It could not be, she reasoned, anything but painful for her father to be reminded, day after day, of one’s lost love. But the man her father had chosen for her to marry was a revolting old lecher and, as much as she loved and pitied her father, she simply could not be obedient to his wishes. She couldn’t marry the man he’d chosen.

A week before the wedding was due to take place, one night after her father had fallen into a drunken stupor, Adela folded up her newly embroidered and gold-threaded wedding dress, crept out of the house and went to visit a witch who lived on the edge of the town.

The witch’s house, a crumbling hovel built of pilfered stones and rotting planks of wood was at the end of a damp and muddy lane. But for all its humbleness, it was a frequently visited place.  There wasn’t a woman in the town who had not, at some time, been to visit the witch – either to purchase a bottle of cough syrup for a child with the croup, a draught to ease stomach cramps, a salve to sooth swollen ankles or a potion to bring about a miscarriage. It’s not that the people in the town feared the witch but they were often in her debt – which caused them to resent her. She knew things they didn’t know and, over the years, had accumulated a store of many secrets that, if ever revealed, might have led to scandal and humiliation. In addition, the witch often charged people almost more than they could afford. People grumbled that she took advantage of them in their time of need.

Precisely for this reason, Adela carried with her the only thing she possessed that she knew was of considerable value. For what she wanted to ask of the witch, she suspected, would cost a very great deal.

By the light of a full moon, Adela picked her way down the churned up, muddy path and knocked politely at the door of the shack. At first there was no answer, so she knocked again.

“Alright, alright,” called a gravelly voice from behind the door. “An old body can’t even have a fucking wank in peace anymore.”

There was rustling and shuffling and the door finally opened.

“What the bloody hell do you want?” asked a wizened, diminutive stick insect of a woman.

“I’m sorry to bother you…” began Adela.

“No you’re not,” said the woman, and turned her back on Adela. “Come in. It’s fucking freezing out there.”

Adela hesitated at the threshold. For now, it seemed to her, she had been unforgivably foolish. The thing for which she’d come to this woman was, surely, impossible anyway, or if possible, then far more expensive than she could afford. The rumours about the witch’s avarice and temper were obviously true.

“Don’t stand there gawking, you stupid cow! Get in here and shut the door. My rheumatism’s acting up again.”

The one-roomed hovel was very dimly lit, and there was a dying fire in the rude, stone hearth. It smelled of damp oregano and unwashed body. Adela stood in the middle of the room, clutching the parcel to her newly formed breasts.

“Whatcha want?” asked the crone, settling herself into a pile of rags close to the fire.

“My name is Adela,” she said, “and I’ve come to…”

“I know what you’ve come for,” croaked the witch. She held an old bone pipe between her teeth and was lighting it with an ember from the fire. “It’s all over the town.”

“You do?” Adela was confused. Even she wasn’t exactly sure what she’d come for. She just knew it was going to be almost impossible and very costly.

“You don’t want to marry that disgusting bucket of piss your father’s betrothed you to. Can’t say I blame you, girl. I can do you some arsenic, cheap.”

“Oh!” said Adela. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“No? Jesus, woman! You really are stupid.”

Tears welled up in Adela’s eyes and she clutched her parcel tighter.

The old woman pulled on the pipe, coughed and then looked at her. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, don’t start blubbering. Come sit down by the fire and tell me what you do want.”

Despite the coarse language, Adela felt there was something tender and understanding in the witch’s voice. She moved towards the fire, and settled to her knees on a second pile of rags.

“I don’t know if you can help me, really.”

“Tell me what it is and I’ll tell you if it can be done,” the crone muttered. She leaned towards Adela and in something like an encouraging whisper said: “I helped your mother on a few occasions, you know. Dryness. Not an uncommon problem.”

Adela was confused.

The crone shrugged. “Of the skin. Go on. Tell me.”

“I don’t want to live with my father anymore. And I don’t want to marry either. I want to escape, but I don’t know how or where to go. I just don’t know what to do!”

The last words blurred into a series of hiccups and sobs.

“Well, you don’t need me for that. That’s simple. You can be a whore.”

Adela’s jaw dropped. “You horrible old woman!” she cried. “Is that your only solution?”

“It’s not such a bad life. Admittedly, some women take to it better than others.”

“Filthy! You filthy, decrepit witch! How is that any better than marrying a disgusting old man?”

It was obvious the crone didn’t like being insulted. She smiled, exposing her mostly rotten teeth. “Variety?” she said, and cackled.

“I want to be like my mother,” Adela demanded. “Beautiful and pure and perfect. Everyone loved and was kind to my mother. That’s the life I want to have!”

The witch rolled her eyes. “Oh, like your mother now?”

“Yes!”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that!” Adela shouted. “Just like her.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure!”

The witch shrugged and, with a couple of grunts, hanging onto the stone mantelpiece, pulled herself upright. “Well, that’s not going to be cheap.”

“Don’t I know it,” said Adela. “You’re just as bad as everyone says. You’re mean and miserly and nasty.”

A phlegmy cackle rumbled in the old woman’s chest. “Show me what you got, then, girl.”

Adela stood also and handed over the package. The witch took it over to an herb and pot cluttered table and undid the wrapping, revealing the beautifully worked and bejeweled wedding gown. The silken threads and tiny stones in the fabric’s design glinted in the weak light.

“Nice. Very nice.”

“Can you do it?”

“‘Course I can do it,” the witch snapped. “Take off your clothes.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Off! Everything!”

“But…”

“I’m not a fucking magician, you know. I can do what you want, but not with you all covered up that way. Flesh. I need flesh to work with!”

Reluctantly, Adela took off her cloak, and her shoes, and then unlaced her tunic, shrugged it off and stepped out of it. She shivered in the damp chill of the hovel. Even in her white cambric undersmock and her woolen hose.

“All of it. Come on, I ain’t got all night!”

“But I’m cold.”

“Runs in the family,” the witch muttered. Looking sternly at Adela, she said, “Believe me, little girl, this is the last time in your life you’ll ever feel the cold.”

Off came the hose and, a little shyly, Adela undid the ties on her smock and pulled it over her head. She stood, teeth chattering in the dark, dank hovel. The witch shuffled around her, viewing her from every angle and began to chant in a low, broken voice, in a language Adela had never heard. Reaching a large, fat pouch, high on the wall, the witch took it down, worked it open, reached inside and pulled out a fistful of white powder. Without any warning, she threw the handful at Adela. Then another, and another, and another.

It stung her eyes, and went up her nose. The bitter dust covered her lips, and felt like sand between her teeth. She coughed as it made its way into her lungs. But the witch kept chanting, louder now, while she showered Adela with clouds and clouds of the fine white dust.

Panic siezed her, but even as it did, a strange numbness also took its hold. She tried to speak, but her lips wouldn’t budge. She tried to bring her hands up to her face, to shield it from the snowy storm, but her arms wouldn’t budge. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, couldn’t yell, couldn’t escape, and then, quite abruptly, the world went dark.

* * *

“There we go. It’s done.”

At first, Adela only hear the voice at a distance.

“Not bad, if I do say so myself. Quite a likeness. Quite a likeness!”

It as the witch. The milk-white haze that had enveloped Adela cleared, and she could see the witch, brushing the chalky powder off her own clothes and out of her grey, scraggly hair.

“It is?” asked Adela.

“I have to say, you’re the spitting image.”

Adela tried to look down at herself. At first, she wasn’t sure she could move at all. Just the effort of lowering her chin felt odd, but when she did, she could see that the witch had turned her milky white.

“What have you done?” cried Adela. “I’m a statue!”

“Well, not exactly. But bloody close.”

“I can’t… Oh, God… I can’t move.”

“Yes you can. You just move… different. Takes a little practice. That’s all.”

And indeed the witch was right. Moving didn’t feel normal. She couldn’t feel her muscles. She didn’t notice her limbs move, but something like a puppet, she was first in one position and then another. As if time froze in slices and held her trapped there until, having willed herself to be in another position, she’d moved there without moving.

“I can’t speak. Can you hear me?”

“Well, I can’t hear you exactly but I know what you’re sayin’. I got the gift for that, you know.”

“So, I’m mute, and crippled!”

“Right then, that’s you sorted,” said the witch, yawning and shooing her towards the door of the hovel. “Bugger off now. I’m tired.”

Even as she made her way back down the muddy path, she could hear the old witch laughing.

“And don’t bother coming back,” called the crone. “What’s done is done for good.”

So strange and new was her body, that it wasn’t until Adela had reached the centre of the old town that she noticed two things. Dawn was coming, and she was absolutely naked. She was terrified. Where could she go? What could she do? For what seemed like a long time, she stood paralyzed in the square, wanting to weep and being, somehow, unable to even do that. The first shafts of autumn light shot over the tiled roofs of the houses.

The church. That’s where she’d go. And in that strange, halting, stuttered motion, she made her way to the church. When she reached the porch, the door was already open. She could see, through the gloom, that the old priest was inside, lighting the candles in the large, iron candelabras. He was talking to himself, maybe praying. She couldn’t go in there.

The churchyard was old. There were many graves so worn that the writing on them could not be discerned. An enormous yew tree, almost strangled in ivy stood to one side of the church, and that is where Adela took sanctuary. Among the crosses and stone angels, she lay down in a tangle of ivy. The leaves tickled at her skin, and its creeping branches bit into the notches of her spine.

Why didn’t she feel cold? What had she done? And what, Adela wondered, was to become of her? She pulled the dew-drenched tendrils of ivy over her, not for warmth, but for comfort, and wept, and slept.

* * *

It was full dark when Adela awoke. The moon was high in the slate sky and the stars were out. All around her frost rimed and glittered on the leaves and stone. Once again, Adela was taken aback at the way her new body moved. She went from horizontal in the ivy to upright, and standing by the church doors in the blink of an eye. And odder still, she could not feel herself blink at all.

The church was dark and empty now. It smelled of moss and bitter incense. She made her way to her mother’s tomb, tucked along the side, surrounded by a latticework of iron, with the other prosperous tombs.

There she lay: her beautiful mother, not naked like Adela, but milky white like her. Hard like her. Dead like her. Not sleeping. No. Gone from the world. Again Adela wept, although she knew she shed no tears. There was no comfort for her here. How could she have ever wished for this?

Before, when she had been a girl of flesh and blood, she had a home. Not a happy one, but a home nonetheless. And she had had a future. Not a happy one either, but something known. Something she could understand. But where did she belong now?

As Adela moved around the old church, she realized there were many things like her. St. Sebastian with his staff in one hand and the Christ child on his shoulder, readying himself to take a step. The Virgin with her dry, hollow eyes and her flowing veil frozen in a breeze that had died long ago. Little imps and deformed creatures perched on the tops of the columns. And up at the altar, Christ, stopped in his middle agonies, drooping off the cross. There was no one here like her. No one real. Where could she go?

A memory came to Adela. A warm summer’s day, long ago when she was a child. A feast day, she thought, when the whole town had been alive with garlands and music, and people milling in the square. She remembered that her father and mother had taken her up to the enormous manor house just a mile or so beyond the town. There were games, and dancing. Music and people in funny clothes, and meat grilling on open fires. There, just beside the huge stone house, was a garden they’d walked through. It had high, clipped hedges, and spiny red roses. There were benches and a fountain and row upon row of white, stone statues. Just like her.

Her father had never taken her there again. Perhaps the Manor Lord never invited the townspeople back, or perhaps, once her mother died, her father had not wanted to revisit the place. But that night, moving in her strange, flitting way, Adela took the east road out of the town and headed for the garden full of statues.

She passed two drunken cooper’s boys on the street leading out of the town, but it was as if she wasn’t there at all. How could they not see her, she wondered, gleaming white in the moonlight? Then, a little further on, a cart came by and, had she been like she was before, she would have asked for a ride, but she didn’t feel tired or cold. Besides, both the horses and the driver overtook her, without even slowing down, as if she weren’t there at all.

The road to the manor curved around a copse of trees, but when the huge house came into view, it was just as Adela remembered it. She could see a dim light glowing through one of the tall, arched and curtained windows on the ground floor. There were sheep, bleating in a field to her left.

Yes. There was the garden, with its high hedges. The roses were gone, and one of the benches had cracked and collapsed into the weeds. But there, in the garden were the statues. Beautiful girls, posed and naked, one with an urn in her arm, another caught in the moment of a turn, a third’s eyes were downcast, as if she had noticed the slow tickle of the little snail making its moist way up her leg. There were boys, too. Some bashful, some brazen. A pair of lads, bare as the day they were born, clasped in each other’s arms, engaged in a wrestling match that would last forever. The fountain was dry. In its centre, stone fish stood cleverly and forever on their fins in a fishy dance around a frightening giant with a big beard, and a pitchfork and a curled and scaled tail.

Adela flitted amongst the statues, learning each of them by heart. Noting each position of their limbs and each expression on their faces. This, she decided, was where she belonged.

She struck a pose, one leg straight, and the other bent, and demurely set ahead of the other. Tucking one arm behind her back, she raised the other into the air as if she were just about to catch a leaf wafted by on the wind. She froze, and slept again.

* * *

Time passed in the strangest way. It was the sound of footsteps on stones that brought Adela to alertness. Not that she had been unaware of the world around her before, but it had receded, through the starry night, into a muffled jumble of owl hoots and scurrying claws, and layers of darkness as clouds crossed the face of the moon on its way behind the hedges.

An old man pushed a barrow over the frozen ground. He was bent, and almost bald and wrapped up against the cold in a ragged woolen cloak. He picked up some of the few fallen branches, gave the broken bench a grumpy kick, and pushed his wheelbarrow on. He didn’t even give Adela or any other of the statues a second glance.

A little later in the morning, a tight, giggling knot of girls came past. All huddled together, with their plain shawls pulled tight around their shoulders. They were talking and laughing. Servants, thought Adela. None of them noticed her either.

A bank of grey clouds boiled across the sky in the early afternoon, and the wind picked up, whipping dead leaves around her bare feet, twirling and dancing them between the statues, fluttering into rustling clumps at the bottom of the empty fountain. A crow landed on the top of the bearded man’s head. It sat there and cried out its displeasure at the wind.

A man, young and richly dressed in a fine burgundy cloak trimmed with rabbit strolled into the garden. He wore no hood or cap, and his straw-coloured hair danced around his head in the breeze. At first, he didn’t look at the statues, either. He was talking to himself and looking up at the sky. But then he sat on the unbroken stone bench and looked straight at Adela.

He saw her, she was sure of it. Not only could he see her, but she could feel his gaze as it roamed over her body in a way that would have made Adela blush if she’d been flesh. She could feel his eyes moving from her hip to her breast, up her arm, then down again. Over her face, along her neck, and around the curve of her shoulder.

She wanted, more than anything, to move, to cover herself. And yet she knew that if she did, he would know her secret. Perhaps he realized she didn’t belong there. Would he say something to someone? Would they make her leave? She should hide. Now. Now before it was too late. Before someone made her go.

Just when Adela thought she could bare his eyes no longer, he muttered something to himself, reached inside his cloak and pulled out a small book.  It was covered in calfskin, the same colour as his cloak. There were fine scrolls picked out in gold. He opened it, turning its thin, delicate pages, until he settled on one, and began to read.

Come live with me and be my Love,

And we will all the pleasures prove,

That hills and valleys, dales and field,

Or woods or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks

And see the shepherds feed their flocks,

By shallow rivers, to whose falls

Melodious birds sing madrigals.

His voice enthralled her. He stood and began to pace as he read, through the open spaces between the statues.

And I will make thee beds of roses

And a thousand fragrant posies,

A cap of flowers, and a kirtle

Embroider’d all with leaves of myrtle.

A gown made of the finest wool,

Which from our pretty lambs we pull,

Fair linèd slippers for the cold,

With buckles of the purest gold.

Knowing his back was to her, for she could hear his voice dying as he moved away, she turned to watch him walk and read.  Every so often, he’d stop beside a statue, raise a hand, and touch it. A shoulder, a breast, a hip, a buttock. Once he leaned close to a marble head and whispered the line into its ear.

Now she could make her escape, before he reached the end of the row and turned around. Adela spotted an area beyond the fountain, where a holly bush broke the line of the hedge. With a crackling of branches she could only pray he didn’t hear, she pressed her white form deep into the tree’s thick, green embrace.

She listened to the cadence of his voice, but could no longer hear the words. As he turned and strolled back towards the unbroken bench, he took the same liberties with each of the statues in that row. A caress here, an little pat there.  He stopped in front of the beautiful girl with the urn and trailed a forefinger over her enigmatic smile.

“Hello, my lovely,” he said, loud enough for Adela to hear. “Did you miss me?” Then he paused, waited, as if he was sure the statue would answer him. In truth, Adela thought the lady with the urn might indeed answer him, or move to swat his hand away from where it had settled on her bottom. But of course, the statue did not speak. Did not move.

“No, you have plenty of finer friends to amuse you. Don’t you?” he said, and moved on.

When he reached the spot where Adela had been standing, he stopped and looked puzzled. He glanced around, as if searching for her. Then closed his book, tucked it back beneath his cloak, and turned a full circle, as if he’d lost his way in his wandering.

“John?” called a woman’s voice from somewhere behind the hedge, closer to the walls of the house. “John?”

“Here, Mother! I’m in the garden.”

A proud, mature woman in a black gown and cape, wearing a fur-lined hood stopped at the entrance, in the gap between the hedges. “There you are! Silly boy. It’s too cold to be strolling. Especially here, in this Godless, sinful bower.”

The woman cast her eyes over the statues with distaste. “Your father was such an odd man. I do hope he’s in heaven. But only the Good Lord knows for certain.”

“They’re just statues, Mother. I’ve read that there are thousands of them in Rome.”

“Rome. Ha!” his mother huffed. “Come along. Your uncle’s arrived, full of boasts and ready to eat our larders empty. Let’s not keep him waiting.”

The young man joined his mother at the garden’s entrance, took her arm in a gentle way, and they were gone.

* * *

The following morning at, from what Adela could tell, exactly the same time, John came to the garden again. He sat in the same bench and let his eyes roam over the statues, but today Adela had been careful and positioned herself towards the back of the garden. She reasoned that if she did not place herself somewhere too obvious, he would never be able to tell her apart from the other statues.

Like the previous morning, he took out his book and read aloud while pacing through the frozen effigies. A line of poetry made him laugh aloud, and slapped one of the wrestlers on the back as if he were a childhood friend.

As he made his way up the row, he had a word to say for almost all of them and, when he reached Adela, he smiled.

“Ah, there you are. What beauty. How is it that I never saw you until yesterday? How could I have been so blind as to overlook your lovely form? I wonder where my father found you? Venice perhaps? That’s where all the most wanton wenches come from.”

Without hesitation or even a blush, he reached up and covered her left breast with the palm of his hand, gave it a mock squeeze, and moved on down the row.

* * *

When the rains came, he did not come to the garden. When the snow covered the statues, he did not read, but walked past the hedged garden to take his exercise elsewhere.

But each morning without fail, Adela took her place amongst the statues, just in case he should come. Worried now that, if he noted her absence, something dreadful would happen. On the mornings he did come to visit, sometimes he’d notice her and speak to her or touch her, and sometimes he’d pass her by.

She found, on the mornings he would speak tenderly to one of the other statues, it annoyed her. She’d grown to like his attentions, to anticipate them. even. When he showed some special affection to another, Adela was overcome with jealousy.

Early in the spring, he was absent from the garden for two whole weeks. Adela took her place each morning, but John did not visit. When he finally did return, he stopped at the girl with the urn and repeated the words she’d first heard him address to her.

“Hello, my lovely. Did you miss me?”

“She didn’t,” Adela wanted to shout. “But I did! I’m the only one who did.”

The next day John returned and, feeling desperate and yearning for his affection, Adela moved her position and posed just before the stone bench he always took as his seat at the beginning of his visit.

At first he looked confounded, then a smile spread across his lips. “Tricky old rogue,” he muttered. He laughed, as aiming it towards the heavens and shouted. “You can’t fool me, Fenton. I know you’re moving them about!”

“I beg your pardon, sir?” answered the old gardener, turning the corner of the hedge with a shovel in his hand.

“You’re a sly old bastard.”

“If you say so, sir.”

“Be off with you. Leave me to my madness.”

“Right you are, sir,” mumbled the old man, confused, and shuffled away.

John stepped right up to Adela and cocked his head, his lips right next to her ear. “I bet you’re his favourite. Aren’t you? Lusty old beggar, he is. Spawned more than a dozen brats,” he whispered. “I’ll wager he’d make a dozen more with you, if he could.”

Adela fumed. First her father had tried to marry her off to a degenerate, poxy merchant and now this man was trying to marry her off to his is decrepit, half-witted gardener.

“Not that I blame him, you understand.” John slid his hand down the smooth nakedness of her back and over the high, plump globes of her arse. “Does he touch you when no one’s looking? Like I do?”

It took all the strength she had not to move. Not to turn into his touch. Not change the position of her head to face him.

“Ah, well.” He sighed, patted her rump and moved down the row.

His habitual progression was slower today, as if his belief that Fenton was moving the statues around prompted him to take more notice of them. He stopped at the girl with the urn and read her a few lines of bawdy verse and then spoke to her in a voice so low that Adela couldn’t hear.

She burned with jealousy and anger. Didn’t he notice she was different? How could he treat her just like all the others? Why did he not see that she was real and all the others just lifeless statues?

* * *

That night, as spring rains fell and the thunder rolled through the heavens. As the frogs sang in the filling fountain and the warm wind whipped and whistled through the hedges, Adela’s anger grew.

She could not bear for him to show affection to the others. She wanted him to herself. She cursed the day she’d gone to see the witch. Cursed the witch for the cruel gift she’d bestowed on her. As the lightning lit the heavens and the garden, Adela moved from pose to pose, from place to place, in frantic slices of illumination.

A flash glazed the wrestlers’ rain slicked muscles, the tips of Neptune’s trident, the plump knee of a bashful nymph, the graceful shoulder of the urn girl. Damn you, Adela thought. You he loves. You he remembers. Just because of your urn. He doesn’t see you, you stupid fool. He only sees the urn.

In a moment of rage, she moved into the space where the urn girl stood upon her pedestal, feeling the wet stone grate against her own. She did it again, and again and the statue began to rock. Lightning scraped the garden with light and Adela,  watched the delicate stone form pitch sideways, catching another on the hip with her head, which broke away with a soft crunch and rolled across the grass to settle under the lip of the fountain’s basin.

* * *

“The wind must’ve pushed it over, Master John,” said Fenton, the following morning as John followed the old man through the storm-strewn garden. He stooped and picked up the marble head. “Sad, though. Your father liked this one very much. It was the first one he brought back.”

John nodded, and surveyed the rows of statuary. “Yes, it’s a pity. Can’t she be fixed?”

“Well, if it were just the head, I reckon we could probably find a stonemason ’round these parts to put it back on, but,” the old man said, stepping through the high grass over to where the broken body lay, “but one arm’s broke clean away and there’s a big chunk come off the leg, also.”

“Alright, Fenton. Well, see what can be done, won’t you?”

“Indeed I will, sir.”

“And, if she can’t be fixed…” John stood for a moment and closed his eyes. “Give her a decent burial, won’t you?”

“Burial? I’m not sure that’s proper Christian.”

“No? Maybe not. Well… just …. I don’t want to find bits of her filling gaps in one of the stone outhouse walls. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

That day, John didn’t read aloud in the garden, nor did he stroll down the rows, speaking to the statues. It shamed Adela. Not that she felt bad for having broken the girl with the urn, but because it had caused John pain to see her broken.

* * *

But he came back. All through the summer, John spent his mornings in the garden. Sometimes he’d read aloud and sometimes he’d stroll in silence. Once Adela listened to him sing a song, in French, she thought, as he walked the rows and caressed the stones. It was sad. That’s all she knew. So sad.

When he came to her, he smiled. With a single finger, he stroked the flat plane of her brow. “Like it? It’s a song about a broken hearted courtier who lost his lover to a richer man.”

The melody had so moved Adela, she was weeping tearlessly. Not for the words, because she didn’t understand them, but because the sound of a heart breaking was there in the sad sweetness of his voice. And before she even knew what she had done, she’d moved.

John pulled his hand away, as if something had bitten it. “Good Lord!”

He shook his head, leaned closer to Adela’s face and peered at it with a combination of curiosity and fear. “No,” he muttered quietly to himself, withdrawing. “That’s what I get for drinking soured sack.”

“No more bad wine! Not good for the wits.” He moved on down the row.

* * *

The first time Adela had moved in his presence, it had frightened her. Not just the slip of her composure, but the awful consequences she imagined it could have wrought. But then she realized that it was also the only way she could show John that she wasn’t like the other statues in the garden.

So the next time he stopped to caress her, she moved again. He had spoken some line of verse, so close that she could feel his breath on the surface of her cheek. He settled an affectionate hand upon her belly and, instead of playing the part of the frozen woman, she’d simply shifted her weight from one hip to another.

Again, he’d pulled his hand away in horror. In fact, he’d stepped back so abruptly that he’d tumbled onto the grass. From that position, he glared up at her whiteness and, after pushing what Adela suspected were some darker thoughts from his mind, laughed aloud.  “Oh, cunning Venus!” he said, squinting in the bright sunlight. “Thou hast unmanned me with thy charms!”

To Adela’s growing frustration, no matter how she moved in his presence, or even under his hand, John would simply shake his head, and brush it off as some flaw in his own balance or perception.

She moved places, moved her limbs into new positions, turned her head, raised her foot. It made no difference. He quipped that he might be suffering from fever, impending madness, or that he’d read too much love poetry for his own good. One morning, he pressed his lips to her cheek, even after she’d changed the cant of her head, and told her it was time he found himself a wife.

Gradually, Adela came to understand that there was no way she would ever be able to persuade him of who or what she was, because he was not inclined to know. There were nights when, Adela, the only living statue in John’s garden, considered leaving it, so terrible was the grief of knowing he would never see her for the living thing she was.  But each morning, he’d return, reading his poetry in his sweet, low voice, and offering her the fleeting touch of his warm desire.

If she could not make him see her for what she really was, then at least she had the comfort of knowing he saw her at all.

The Mortal Coil

[image error]The toy was pink. Sticky pink in that way only a boiled sweet mistakenly left in the sun on the dashboard of your car can be. Hard, molded, Chinese factory pink. The cockhead-shaped tip was only translucent, but beneath it, the plastic was transparent; the metal capsule of the motor and the brutalist ball-bearings showed through as if to counteract the coyness of the pink. There to remind her that, as pink as this thing was, it had a job to do and was capable of doing it. Nestled against the shaft like a parasite was the clit stimulator. A fat, pink cockroach with bunny ears, slightly splayed, designed to nestle on either side of the mad node of nerves while the toy was inside her. Sandra brought it up to her face, smeared the smooth, seamless plastic over her lips. Inhaled the acrid ghost of hot, taffy-soft, extruded petrochemical. The nostalgic scent of almost instant orgasm.

There must be, Sandra thought, a perfect woman, who lies on a gynecological examination couch, legs spread and braced in stirrups, in a design lab somewhere. White-coated and disinterested technicians measure the distance between her clitoris and her vaginal passage, and construct the toy according to her perfect golden-meaned cunt. Once they make their prototype, which is probably not pink, they call her back in. Once again she drapes her perfect body on the table, raises and rests her legs on stirrups, padded for her comfort, and they try the toy out on her. Or, perhaps, in order to more closely approximate use case, they ask her to use the toy, to test the design.

Sandra wonders whether they dim the lights and withdraw to a polite distance before the woman uses the toy. She wonders whether the woman is completely naked, or just pulls her underwear off and bunches her skirt around her waist. The latter, she figures. After all, this isn’t romance. This is technology. This is science. What if the prototype-testing woman doesn’t get off on the toy, but orgasms because of the sterility of the environment she’s masturbating in? Wouldn’t that make the whole process invalid? Or do they interview prospective testers to screen for that kind of perversion?

No, she thinks, it’s probably not like that at all. There are probably five Eastern European women, none of whom are undressed or beautiful, and they are paid to try out the prototypes on grungy, second-hand waiting room furniture in a second floor office with marked up drywall, with a laminate coffee table and a vase full of dusty, artificial chrysanthemums. If three of them reach orgasm before the battery runs out, that’s chalked up as a design success and the toy goes into mass production in Zhejiang Province.

Little do the designers know that the three women who come are getting off on watching and hearing each other plunge ugly, unwieldy prototypes into their variously shaped vaginas. The other two have done this longer. They know they’ll get paid whether they orgasm or not, so they don’t put much effort into it.

The thought is both depressing and vaguely arousing. Sandra puts the new pink toy back into its exuberantly designed box and places it in the closet along with the other countless sex toys she keeps there.

Her friend Marissa calls it her ‘cupboard of love’. It’s a testament to something, for sure. Sandra’s not sure to what anymore. When her collection first began to grow and she had fitted the space with clever organizer structures to accommodate the toys, it made her feel brazen and proud. When her female friends came to visit, she’d pull the doors wide open, and say, ‘behold!’ They were impressed. They were jealous. For a while, it felt like a statement of feminist rebellion and sexual independence. That was back when the toys still possessed the capacity to bring her any pleasure.

Now the cupboard seemed larger, like a stern, cream-coloured, semi-gloss maternal admonition. Opening it made her feel worse. The slick boxes were so countable. Now each one was an enumeration of her failure to achieve what the devices had been designed to offer her.

Sandra could clearly remember her first experience with a vibrator. The toy, carefully preserved in the box it had come in, sat in a place of pride in the top left pigeonhole in the cupboard. Long dead, its battery no longer capable of holding a charge, it was a small, tastefully designed oblong covered in white and purple soft-touch silicone.

The first time she’d used it, she had treated it like a lover. After bringing it home from the shop in a discreet carrier bag, on a bright Saturday morning, she’d removed all her clothes, pulled the curtains of her bedroom closed, and slipped into bed with it.

For all its built-in innocuousness, it had intimidated her when she pressed the button and turned it on. Sandra had expected it would probably require charging, but the manufacturer had been thoughtful and pre-charged it before packaging. The vibrations, even on the lowest setting, seemed disturbingly strong, so that it was with some trepidation, lying on her back, entirely naked, with her legs bent and parted, she directed the buzzing little object to the cleft of her labia and pressed it there.

The sensation had made her entire body jerk. She fumbled with the smooth, unlabelled controls, trying to dial down the strength of the vibrations, only to discover it was already on the lowest setting.

After a lifetime of using nothing but her fingers to masturbate, the device seemed sinister. It sat in the palm of her hand, purring with a monstrous efficiency. It took her ten minutes to persuade herself that there was nothing to be frightened of, and less than twenty seconds to come.

Although she knew she’d had an orgasm, it was unlike anything she’d had before. Sandra had always been fairly orgasmic, but getting herself off with her fingers took a little time and a mind full of fantasy scenarios. Sequences of lovingly nourished and embellished images, sensations, scents and sounds partially constructed of real sexual experience and things she’d seen or on the Internet. Sometimes she’d just turn a perfectly good movie dirty, inserting unwritten, unfilmed scenes where the actors finally fulfilled the erotic promises they had made in the commercial release. Sometimes it was just one tiny lived moment, replayed over and over again until her fingers found the charm of orientation and rhythm and persuaded her body to pleasure.

Always there was a slow, concerted labour of mind and body that had to be done to achieve orgasm. Always there were early minutes of mental unreadiness, where she coaxed herself to relax and then feel. Her cunt moistened and she’d reach a place where the sensations were pleasant and almost aimless in which something akin to comfort wandered through her core and traipsed over her skin. Depending on how much time she had apportioned to the task, she might stay in that zone for as little as a few minutes or as long as an hour. Like a shower, taken in haste or enjoyed in slow luxury. At some point, though, she’d remind herself of the goal to be achieved. She’d concentrate on the fantasies, create them, slide into them, drink them back into herself recursively, converting the images into a language her body could consume, converting the idea into motion and sensation with the dexterity of her fingers, pushing each primed package down her spinal column and into her pelvis. There was always a moment when suddenly she knew that her orgasm was inevitable. Like the grooved lines on a ziplock bag, there was a silent snapping into place of rightness, a smooth, linear passage towards completion. All the fantasies fragmented into nonsense, melted into moment, and her fingers would work, undirected but for muscle-memory, toward the nameless, formless abyss.

That first little toy had made all of that unnecessary. The first orgasm it afforded had felt like a curious, electrified theft of her body’s responses. It took her a while to get over the shock. Sandra lay there trembling, panting, and feeling the dying spasms of a hijacked climax, holding the little oblong machine, still buzzing away in her humid, trembling hand.

But it wasn’t long before she was curious as to whether the little device could do the trick twice. And a third time. And a fourth. Each time it took a little longer, but not much. That fateful Saturday, she’d spent the entire afternoon in bed with her new, amazing friend. The masturbatory marathon had only ended when, to her disappointment, the complimentary bonus charge had run out.

Reluctantly, she’d showered, dressed and read the manual. After setting up the induction charger, she’d perched the vibe in the correct position and slept while it charged. Sunday, she hadn’t bothered to get out of bed, but reached for the toy, switched it on, and spent the day producing more orgasms than she could have possibly counted.

How was it, she had wondered, that she’d ever lived without this? This tiny little thing, costing less than $50, was the answer to all her erotic prayers. Who needed a lover if you had this? What was the point in all the social stress, all the angst, all the tamping down of raging insecurities that congress with another human being involved? There was all that dreaded crap, and then there was her little toy. Her life had been changed forever.

It hadn’t been long before Sandra became curious as to what other sex toys in other shapes and sizes and with other functions could do for her. That was the birth of her collection. Each one had promised something a little different. Some did what they said on the package, and others fell short of their marketing hype. She could not remember when she had decided to dedicate the cupboard in her hallway to them, but the collection grew. Some items enjoyed a long sojourn on her bedside table before being exiled to the cupboard. Others ended up there almost immediately. These days, Sandra rarely bothered to liberate them from their increasingly alluring packaging. She bought them, mostly over the Internet, disposed of the wrapping they’d been shipped in, and placed them in the cupboard.

She’d opened the box on the pink rabbit vibrator just to look at the strange, outlandish design. It was not rechargeable and, although it had shipped with two complimentary double A batteries, she didn’t bother loading them into the device. Sandra had long since learned that it was unwise to store sex toys with the batteries in them. Inevitably they’d burst and leak and cause all sorts of mischief.

Hours of pleasure, it said on the box. Lie of lies. It wasn’t that the toys no longer brought her to orgasm – they still made her come, although it took significantly longer and the lowest setting no longer registered.

Sandra had discovered something most of the world, if one were to believe all the advertising, the romance novels and the porn on offer, seemed completely unaware of: pleasure and an orgasm were, in fact, not precisely the same thing.

She’d reluctantly resigned herself to masturbating only with her fingers. It hadn’t been easy to resist the addictive lure of the instant, and she’d disappointed herself by relapsing a few times. Harder still had been learning how to generate fantasies again. It was, apparently, a muscle that required exercise. These days her orgasms were infrequent, and hard-won.

Perhaps it was time to bite the dreaded bullet, and consider dating.

Podcasted: Eversharp

You can also access my podcasts at my iTunes page: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/remittance-girl/id347803780?mt=2

The Desire Artist

You know what it’s like. You’re only reading this because you think that maybe you’re different from everyone else. Maybe you aren’t seeing things, feeling things right, but you are.

But I’m going to write this anyway. Just so you know. So you can think: well, at least there’s someone else out there who thinks about sex all the time but is simultaneously scared to death of it. Not the sex. Not the mechanics. If all we ever had to experience were the mechanics, we’d all be fine. It’s all the shit that goes along with it. And it only gets worse.

When you’re young and your hormones are screaming in your veins like four-year olds having a tantrum at the supermarket, you’ll drag your genitals through a garden full of broken glass just to have someone slide their fingers into your pussy. When you get older, and the cacophony of urge grows quiet, every goddamned surface becomes reflective, and you’re the idiot in one of those awful hospital gowns with their ass peeking out. And it’s not as great an ass as it used to be, either.

I know there are people for whom sex isn’t enormous. They do it like they eat breakfast. They do it when they’re hungry and need it. They consume pleasure and sometimes they’ve happened upon a fairly good restaurant but sometimes it’s just McDonald’s.  Memorable or forgettable, they walk away sated, intact and occasionally a little queasy. But that passes

I never wanted sex to be that way. When got it that way, I decided to give it up for a while, hoping to reclaim something momentous in the act, perhaps at a later date. Perhaps with someone who wanted it to be momentous too.

The saddest thing about giving up sex is how easy it is. To this day it still stuns me how the dry years slid so easily over each other, like pages in a book. The ache I thought would surely drive me crazy became an easily ignored tenderness at the back of my mouth. It came, it went, I prodded it with my tongue from time to time, but it didn’t require fixing.

That scared me. It reminded me of that story, A Hunger Artist, by Kafka, about the guy who starves himself for a living and people come to see him get thinner and thinner, they’re amazed at his discipline, his ability to deny himself. That’s why they came to look. But all the time he felt guilty for cheating them; he knew he was a fraud because not eating was the easiest thing in the world; he just couldn’t find anything he actually wanted to eat.

That’s what it was like for me. The hardest thing in the world was finding anyone I wanted to fuck. Not because my world was full of unattractive people, but because none of them were attractive enough to compete the blissful lethargy of going without. I felt, somehow, like that was a sin – the not wanting.

So I made up for it. Instead of forcing myself out of that lethargy and visiting the gym of the flesh, I fell in love with a man who would not have me.

As procrastinations went, it was – if I may say so myself – pretty damn baroque. I’m not sure when I started to want him, but in retrospect I think it was conveniently after I knew he didn’t want me.

To his credit, it wasn’t an outright rejection. There were just so many elaborate reasons why it wouldn’t work out, why he couldn’t face the idea of becoming that close, why it would just signal the beginning of the end of something beautiful. Stop rolling your eyes. Those kind of excuses serve a purpose, you know.

Like any good piece of fiction, they allow you to suspend your disbelief, maintain a modicum of self-respect and invite you to indulge in years of what-if daydreams. As a writer, I had to admire it’s potential as an engine of creative sublimation.

Unrequited sexual desire can eat up your life, your attention like nothing else. You get to feel all the thrill and angst and urge of a new relationship without ever having to get undressed or consider contraception. You can spend years hatching amazing narratives that jump back and forth in time: if I’d only met him sooner, or, once we’re old we can meet and laugh at how badly it would have all turned out, and everything in between. But never once do you have to really consider the reality of changing your life or the dreary prospect of inevitable boredom. You can live in a comfortable state of perpetual, poignant, delusional hope.

Then one day, something monumental happened. Something, awful but revealing. It blew through all the baroque excuses like a hurricane through cheap curtains. All the spindly glass columns that supported that suspension of disbelief shattered. I really did attempt to take up the thread of my fabricated, hopeless romance, but I surveyed the wreckage and realized it was beyond repair. All the love in the world couldn’t blind me to how badly I’d built that fiction of perhaps.

I was left thinking… fuck, I’m going to die without getting laid, again. I was back to being haunted by how acutely unnatural my life had become. How selfish, how miserly with my time and my affections I’d grown. How cleverly I’d kept potential lovers at a distance.

And still there was something holding me back. That dismal, romantic yearning for sex to be important, something worth the effort of all the space I’d have to give up to get it. Something more than the consumption of the adequate.

No, I told myself. You’re just making up reasons not to get laid. Just go do it.

So I did. Because I’m not Kafta, and this isn’t a story.

Ask Better Questions

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from Amazon.co.uk
from Amazon.com

Kristina Lloyd, whose novel Undone has just been published (and is phenomenally well-written – buy it), has been doing the blog tour thing. Today, Anna Sky hosted an interesting post by Kristina: “Do Women Prefer Erotica?” Whether you’re a reader or a writer of erotica, it’s worth your while to read it.

At the end, she makes the point that our society is consistently asking the wrong question. Let me quote:

Perhaps it’s time we started asking different questions: not ‘why do women prefer erotica’ but why are women less likely than men to incorporate adult content in their lives? Why is female desire not fully acknowledged by our culture? Why can’t we have the same sexual freedoms enjoyed by men? And why, oh why, aren’t our desires more widely catered for?

I think these are powerful questions worth unpacking, examining, and attempting to answer.

Why are women less likely than men to incorporate adult content in their lives?

I’m going to debate this first one, or rather, I’m going to specify that I think women do incorporate adult content into their lives just as much as men do, but not commercial content, and often the content is self-generated.

Women don’t consume anywhere near as much commercially available adult content – that’s a fact. But I think Kristina addresses this well in the post: so little of what is available is targeted at women. Yes, there is a little, but quite often it is  re-purposed gay porn (and I can tell when it is; it makes me feel like I’m using a hand-me-down dildo. The gay gaze and the female gaze are NOT the same.) Much of the stuff produced by women for women has undercurrents of political correctness or activism about it that, frankly, just spoil the ‘dirty’ for me.

There is not a lot out there for women, porn-wise, because it isn’t a lucrative market. Many women won’t pay for porn. So there’s little commercial impetus to produce it for them. Why is that?

I think it comes back to another question Kristina asked: “Why is female desire not fully acknowledged by our culture?” My hypothesis is that most women won’t purchase porn for themselves because they are products of their culture and that culture has very ambivalent feelings about female desire. The lie that ‘women aren’t visual’ (beautifully dismissed by Kristina in her post) translates in our society to ‘women shouldn’t be visual'; ergo women who are visual are abnormal.

The one place where, I think, the marketplace has proven the lies of how women want romance, how they’re less visual, how they have lower libidos than men, how it all needs to be personal and caring and shit is in the sales of sex toys.

It’s hard to get solid numbers on this, but according to a survey by Adam & Eve, almost half of all women in the US own a sex toy. And those are the ones who will admit to owning one. Excuse me if I feel that there might be a little under-reporting going on. Also, is anyone counting conveniently shaped shampoo bottles, deoderants, etc.?

Women DO spend money on getting off. They spend about $15 Billion a year on it. We get off wild and we get off hard and love has nothing to do with it.

But the other aspect of the first question is about content. Here I’m going to venture into speculative territory. I wonder if, because a lot of adult content is not made for women and so the sexually arousing fantasies are not as easily found externally, maybe women manufacture more of their own? I’m not saying some men don’t have marvelous interior fantasy machines, but I’ve noticed that once you can find your fantasy represented externally, you’re not as hard-pressed to generate your own. (I began writing erotic fiction because I couldn’t find much out there (porn, erotica, whatever) that addressed my particular perversions. Had I found a lot of stuff that hit the spot, I might not have bothered trying to write it.)

What I’m trying to say, poorly perhaps, is that imagination is a muscle. You don’t use it unless you have to. And a LOT of women have to because their erotic fantasies may not be represented in porn or represented in the right way.

Kristina’s second and third questions: Why is female desire not fully acknowledged by our culture? and Why can’t we have the same sexual freedoms enjoyed by men? are really inextricably bound together.

I think the spectre of female sexual desire unmoderated and made safe by an accompanying cuddly love-bunny thing is a frightening thing in our culture. Certainly there are porn memes about insatiable women, but they aren’t really about insatiable women. They are about the benefits a man might reap from a sexually insatiable women, who is really not quite insatiable, and finds satiation with YOU (the male consuming the meme).

But, let me flip this around. There is a small community of men who fetishize the humiliation of not being potent enough, large enough or well-equipped enough to satisfy a woman with a rampant sexual appetite. That fetish, I think, reveals the true horror of an insatiable woman. She doesn’t care one wit for you or your feelings. If you can’t get her off fast enough, often enough, hard enough, she’ll walk over your exhausted, drained and prostrate body to get to the next candidate, muttering ‘pussy’ as she goes.

My guess is that for most men, a woman who knows exactly what she wants sexually, is demanding of it, and intolerant of a man who falls short is a terrifying prospect. Yet if we were to look at most male-centered porn, that is the message reflected back to us all the time. Men are so horny, they just can’t get enough. No one woman can satisfy them – they need five. As women, we live with the constant spectre of not being hot enough, tight enough, wild enough, wet enough, multi-orgasmic enough all the time.

My guess is that if we ever made porn that DID reflect women’s sexual desire, unmitigated by shame or the limiting narrative of affection, there would be more massively insecure men in the world than there are already.

Ironically, what I think men ought to be scared of is the ubiquity of the stereotypical uber-rich, permanently erect, led-by-his-penis alpha male in most contemporary romances. Believe me, the vast majority of you can’t live up to that at all. But your doomed-to-fail attempts keep the free-market system ticking over.

We’d all be a lot healthier if this were really about sex.

 

 

 

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