America Unzipped

by Brian Alexander

  Peter worries about this. He has studied Marcus Aurelius, the Roman stoic who believed “that which is good must be something useful, and the perfect good man should look after it. But no such man would ever repent of having refused any sensual pleasure. Pleasure then is neither good nor useful.” Abandoning moderation in all things, pleasure seeking, leads to weakness not just of the person, but of the state.

  Still, Peter says, “One could make the argument that happier people are more productive people, especially in an information economy. When people plowed fields, if they didn’t plow, you got no food, right?” But most of us don’t plow anymore. We don’t work in big scrap-metal yards or glass factories or appliance plants. We don’t know the customer who comes into the small department store in the small town because she shops in the mall. We sit in front of computers. “It might be that we are having such a great time, it encourages more creativity and so more value-added services.”

  Now, there is an interesting economic theory. Raising the gross national product through sex.

  “Isn’t it possible, though, that we’re just bored?” I ask.

  Peter does not disagree.

  Janice picks me up at my hotel. We’re going to stop at a little Italian place she knows in her neighborhood for a light dinner and then I am going to change into my new pants and my shirt for a night at the Wet Spot.

  The Italian place defines the term hole-in-the-wall. I’d like to tell you its name, because I loved it, but I can’t. You’ll see why in a moment. Janice and I walk in and the owner greets her warmly. She eats here a few times a week, and there is nothing quite so welcoming as the proprietor of a restaurant or bar where they know you well. Janice looks forward to the welcome and the sense of belonging.

  Janice possesses a certain melancholy I can’t identify, but as we talk she tells me about being an unmarried young woman and giving up a baby for adoption knowing that she could never do that child justice the way a loving adoptive family could. Janice’s mother has never forgiven her that. Her father wasn’t much help. He never particularly cared for Janice, though Janice doesn’t know why.

  She was married once. She still owns half the house where she and her ex-husband lived. Janice has a tattoo on her shoulder, one that is always hidden by her professional work clothes, of a rising Phoenix being reborn from the flames, a pictorial description of the reinvention Debra felt after her divorce and the self-creation Janice has embarked upon since hers. Her life, Janice says, is what she has made it. These words, said with smiles and gentleness, float on an underlying fierceness.

  Currently, Janice lives with a man, a lawyer she loves, but she has also had a secondary sex partner in what she describes as a polyamorous relationship. Sometimes she and her primary partner “play” with others together. Janice likes the BDSM and “poly” life because she gets to be the bottom, mostly. Being the bottom means somebody is paying attention to you. Somebody cares. Every stroke with the lash, or every slap or shock or new bondage position, means somebody has taken the time to think just about you.

  “I gotta tell you, Janice,” I say. “These things sound like a helluva lot of work.”

  She laughs. They are work, she says. A pain in the ass sometimes. But they develop trust. “And trust is huge with me. I have trouble trusting.” Trust is a word I have heard from many people. Is that what we are seeking, trust? Whom do you trust? Whom can you trust? In relationships like Janice’s everything is elaborately negotiated. That is the advantage of BDSM or polyamory, you have to talk the way most couples never do. You have to lay it all out, strip off the desires you sometimes hide even from yourself.

  Breaking the terms of the agreement is a capital offense. In a high-stakes relationship in which you might suspend somebody from your ceiling in a rope or use electrical devices or light them on fire, for crying out loud, not to mention risk a sexual disease by some unauthorized diddling with another person, how, why, would you ever trust somebody who broke the contract?

  Janice won’t. Yesterday, she broke it off with her secondary partner. He wasn’t where he said he was going to be, and where he was was with a woman Janice knew nothing about. She cut him loose.

  The owner comes over to see how our cocktails are tasting and Janice whispers into his ear.

  “Sure,” he says.

  So Janice tells me the story of how, when a girlfriend was about to be married, a lot of her pals threw a bachelorette party by kidnapping her, forcing a hood over her head, tying her up, and bringing her here. When they all stumbled in, giggling and laughing, and sat down at the bar, Janice thought she detected a look from the owner toward the kidnapped bride-to-be. Something about the knots and the skillful way they were tied. And the hood. Janice and the owner exchanged some knowing glances before telling each other about their mutual membership at the Wet Spot.

  “That happens all the time,” she tells me. “I’m always running into people I recognize from the Spot. Sometimes I think half the city goes there.”

  Because I am dreading putting on those pants, I have tried to keep the conversation flowing. But we’ve eaten some ravioli and had a drink. It’s time. Janice excuses herself and goes to the restroom to change out of her conservative clothes and into her Wet Spot clothes. When she returns, she is wearing a long black gown with diagonal see-through strips through which it is virtually impossible to see. It’s pretty, hardly the exotic costume I was anticipating.

  Ravioli was not the best dinner to have before putting on absurdly tight PVC pants. You may also be interested to know, in case you find yourself choosing between PVC and a nice gabardine, that PVC pants conduct cold. I hadn’t thought about this until I sat on Janice’s car seats.

  Being a weekend night, there’s a good crowd at the Spot when Janice and I arrive. Allena, in the same long, woolen cape as the day we went shopping, greets us warmly and introduces me to a few regulars. Some people are dancing with all their clothes on, some are in their underwear, some women are topless, and a few people in the play space are naked. The back room is filled with subs and doms using the equipment. One woman rolls a huge trunk out of the room filled with all of her personal BDSM gear.

  Though I don’t notice at first, as I am standing by the play space observing somebody being flogged, I see a naked woman in a tiny cage at my feet. She is looking up at me like a puppy in the pound. After everything I have seen, every conversation I have had all over the country with all kinds of people, this is the first time I feel disturbed. If only she would smile. But she is not smiling. She is looking sad and reacts to my stare like a beaten dog reacts to an abusive owner. She squeezes herself to the back of the cage, curls into a ball with her hands to her face. She may be in her “sub space” and I don’t doubt she is there willingly, but still, I’m bugged. I am tempted to crack open the cage and let her out.

  Allena would say this is my own rescue fantasy. Am I like Dave Gibson? Think hard enough about sexuality, talk to enough people, and you start imagining there is a little bit of all of them in you.

  Ten minutes later, a man opens the cage. “Are you going to be good?” he asks the woman. She nods. “Okay.” She stands up, crookedly at first, and they walk off together.

  When I turn to watch them I notice that directly behind me, a foot away, a man and a woman have been screwing on a couch. She has slipped her panties off from under a short pleated skirt and opened his fly, and now she is bouncing up and down on his lap.

  Meanwhile, the head of the woman who is being fisted and punched in the thighs bangs into the man’s knee every time the other woman’s fist shoves into her vagina.

  “Hi!” Sunshine says out of nowhere, distracting me from the action on the couch and oblivious to it herself. Sunshine has dressed cyber-style with huge colored dreadlocks and a short skirt, black lipstick, and enormous black boots with thick soles like some exoplanetary trooper. “Let’s talk!”

  “It’s a little loud,” I shout over the metal.

  “Come on!”

/>   She leads me to the after-care room and we sit down on the futon. “You look great!” she exclaims. “Nice pants.”

  I want Sunshine’s story like I want everybody’s story, and she obliges with a tale about growing up in Alaska and how her mom set her up with a guy in his thirties, some car enthusiast, when Sunshine was sixteen. Maybe she did that to get her away from Sunshine’s dad, who used to dance “inappropriately” with her and “had anger issues.” But as she speaks, I sense Sunshine has more on her mind than her story. She keeps looking at my wedding ring. There is a sign outside the entry forbidding sex in the after-care room and I am thankful for it. Sunshine is an attractive girl, but even if I were single, I wouldn’t. She seems vulnerable and I have a code.

  Sunshine sometimes dates women, but mainly she’d really like to find a man. The problem, though, is that she just “can’t take a vanilla boy.” Anastasia Pierce, the BDSM model I met at Fetish Con, told me that once you go fetish you can never go back, and I guess that’s true for Sunshine.

  In the absence of a good relationship, she is focused on her massage business. She wants to grow it, turn it into something serious and pure, but she keeps giving happy endings to a few male customers when they ask really nicely. She can’t help herself. But this defeats the spirituality of massage, damages its integrity, you know?

  She puts her hand on my chest. “I really want to hug you right now, but I don’t know what you and your wife have negotiated.” I can’t help it. I laugh, hard. It just bursts out because I am imagining how supremely abbreviated any such negotiation would be.

  “Let’s just say that’s not part of our deal.”

  Sunshine’s story goes pretty quickly after that and we leave the after-care room. Five minutes later, I see Sunshine trussed up in a shibari suspension, her large breasts hanging down from an opening in the ropes. A man on his knees is sucking them.

  I meet up with Janice again. She has found a friend, a young woman in a short, tight PVC dress, who spends her days working for another set of lawyers. Neither of them knew the other was a member. “See what I mean?” Janice says.

  The thin, frail-looking man with the white hair and beard is naked, strapped onto the big wooden X-shaped structure in the middle of the play space. A man and woman have stripped down to their underwear. She is topless. He’s a portly fellow in a pair of brown briefs and black socks and glasses.

  The man and the woman work over the sub for half an hour. They slap him, whip him, stroke him, whisper to him. When it is all over, Mr. Portly wraps him up in a blanket, picks him up into his arms like a child, and carries him across the threshold of the play space to the couch where the woman is seated and waiting. The sub puts his hand to his face as if about to suck his thumb. Mr. Portly lays him down into the woman’s lap and she strokes him and he coos and goes fetal, and I am disgusted.

  I am going to have to spend some time thinking about why this particular sight, of these other sights, has affected me this way.

  Janice is ready to leave. I’m not sorry. If you aren’t going to get wet, there’s not much point in hanging around the pool. I find Allena, who is now strolling through the Wet Spot with just her wool cape draped over her bare torso, and I smile and give her a hug. She says what a lot of people on this quest have said, “Hope we didn’t shock you.”

  “No, you didn’t shock me,” I reply, for I am not shocked. I say good-bye to a few other Wet Spot members who have taken time to talk, and then Janice and I walk outside and I feel the cold air on the PVC.

  On the way back to my hotel, Janice says “Okay, what do you really think?”

  “I think we live in a very sick culture.”

  “Yes, we do,” she says.

  “But it’s not sick because people are having sex. I don’t care how people have sex. I think—” But then I stop, because I also have a code about talking out of my ass without having a couple of drinks first.

  “It is sick,” she says again. “People are looking for love, but who can you trust? My mother said she’d love me forever, too.”

  CHAPTER 9

  America, Unzipped

  Life as she saw it was quite simple. You wanted a good time; “they,” meaning the party, wanted to stop you from having it; you broke the rules as best you could.

  —George Orwell, 1984, 1948

  What I find so fascinating is that there is this huge sex industry, billions of dollars, and what it all comes down to is you. It comes down to one person: you. Everybody has their own story.

  —Kim Airs, 2007

  The plane takes off heading over Puget Sound and I am thinking I wouldn’t mind having a conversation that does not include the words dildo, fisting, squirting, orgasm, vibrator, latex, fucking, shibari, or three-way.

  At least I now know that the readers of my column are not an extraordinary group of especially perverted people. Their questions are American questions, their curiosity part of the country’s conversation. In fact, I’ve spent so much time on the road talking sex that if I didn’t know better, I’d swear June Cleaver was wearing crotchless panties under those dresses, and Ward had a Prince Albert hiding behind his flannel trousers, and instead of playing bridge with the Rutherfords, they were playing same-room swing. Immersion has a way of altering your outlook.

  It can also skew your outlook, of course, and I have to remind myself that many people in the United States do not use sex toys. Most do not enter into polyamorous relationships, have probably never heard of shibari, and might think bukkake is a beer from Japan. Surveys tend to show that most of us get married, try to stay married, that half of us divorce anyway, that we think monogamy is still the ideal. Nevertheless sexual experimentation, sometimes radical experimentation, has become a mainstream pursuit.

  I did not start out completely naive. I knew things had changed in the country; that’s why I set out months ago armed with facts and statistics. I wanted to put some faces and words to what few numbers and facts existed. But I have been surprised at how profound the change is in the way many people live their sex lives.

  This was not supposed to be the case. A generation ago, Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority and took credit for changing the sexual climate in the country. “More than 100,000 pastors, priests and rabbis and nearly seven million families joined hands and hearts to reclaim America for God,” Falwell wrote shortly before he died in 2007. “Many historians believe the result was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the genesis of what the media calls the ‘religious right.’”

  The object of the Moral Majority, which was reborn in 2004 as the Moral Majority Coalition, was to agitate for a nation based on the idea found in verse fourteen, chapter seven, of the second book of Chronicles: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

  While we elected Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush (at least once), we have clearly not turned from our wicked ways as defined by the likes of Falwell. We have ballooned the porn industry into a multibillion-dollar enterprise, flooded into adult stores and retail websites to buy sex toys, helped Phil Harvey give away more condoms than ever. More of us have started having anal sex, oral sex is now considered foreplay by kids like Trista Windels, the number of sex clubs is expanding and so is the number of fetishists.

  In the sex election, Americans have voted. In 2006, by the estimate of AVN Media Network, we spent $2 billion at exotic dance clubs. We spent $1.7 billion for cable TV porn, $2.8 billion on Internet porn, and another $1.7 billion on sex toys.

  Falwell was forced to admit defeat in 2006, writing, “It is obvious that we are losing the cultural battle in many ways, especially with our young people.”

  If cultural battle means “sex,” and it often does, Falwell was correct, except that from what I have seen I would replace losing with lost.

  It’s over. It’s been over for a long time, but
so much attention has been paid to the loudest voices condemning sexual exploration that we haven’t listened to those who have pursued it. While there is obviously a vocal gay rights movement, there isn’t much of a porn rights movement, or swinger rights movement, or sex toy buyers’ movement, or fetish liberation movement. There is an organization called the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, founded in 1997, that is focused mainly on keeping S&M enthusiasts out of jail and conventions from being shut down by local authorities, but I don’t think there will soon be marches featuring vibrator-wielding women in Montgomery, Alabama.

  This is not because they are ashamed. I have yet to meet a single person—with the possible exception of Don, who is clearly troubled about meeting strangers for sex in hotel rooms—who expresses any shame at all. Rather, they think that what they do sexually really isn’t anybody’s business and that they shouldn’t have to reveal the details of their sex lives to the world in order to pursue them.

  But this reticence gives the mistaken impression that Americans are not as interested in sexual variation as we are. Thirty years ago, pollsters asked people in Lexington, Kentucky, about pornography and a majority said they thought erotica ought to be available for adults. These people also assumed they were in the minority. The minority who felt there should be strict control of porn were sure they were the majority. We are more sexually laissez-faire than we think.

  Over the past months I have met many people who are married, monogamous, and churchgoing and enjoy sex toys and porn. I have met psychologists who swing, nurses who show off online and act out bisexual fantasies, sub and dom businesspeople, Republican bondage fetishists, soldiers who play superhero (and not the kind you see at a kid’s birthday party either). None of these people were scary. They are you and me and our neighbors.

  Falwell has been proven wrong, Dobson proven wrong, the entire anti-sexual-freedom harangue proven wrong, and from what I can see the country is no worse off because a middle-aged housewife in Tempe buys a Pyrex dildo or because Peter experiments with “ass play.” What does matter, and what I think we ought to worry about, is why there is so much sexual experimentation now and if anybody is finding any happiness doing it.