Best Sex Writing of the Year

by Jon Pressick

  What I never expected to learn through working in a bondage house was how to love women.

  Sage created something I had never been a part of before: a place where powerful women supported one another to get the project of making money done safely and efficiently. The Gates is a rare business in which all the workers are female and—with one or two notable exceptions—all the customers are male.

  While we were working at the Gates, we weren’t only powerful because we were the ones holding the ropes and the whips (although that literalization of dynamics certainly helps drive the point home). We were powerful because we were women who guided men into sexual discovery. Both clients and workers learned things about themselves in session, but it was the females who were the guardians of the mystique.

  Men entered, and made themselves more vulnerable to strangers than they did to anyone else in their lives. Then they left, all without knowing the first thing about how the house was run. For the most part, they were like fine diners who arrive at a

  restaurant without ever considering what goes on in the kitchen.

  Certainly, some clients thought we all just materialized, corsets cinched, as soon as they wanted us. That we were never tired, or feeling unsexy. That we never got colds.

  The truth, of course, is that someone was always rushing to lace up her boots, and someone was always complaining about her numbers, and sometimes we just sat around all afternoon, waiting for the phone to ring.

  We all had different motivations for being there, and we didn’t always all see eye to eye. But there was a reason we all worked in a house instead of going solo. When a girl went into session, she knew she wasn’t alone.

  Because whether she’d had five Steves that day or only one half-hour golden shower or whether she’d been sling height and elbow deep in a middle-aged man or been rubbed down in baby oil, whether he’d respected her dignity or she’d spent two hours batting greedy hands away, whether she felt very powerful or very small, whether she’d forgotten her troubles or been reminded of them, whether she’d been a schoolgirl or a satanic nun or a cuckolding wife, whether she’d been pretending not to watch the clock, or finding herself being strangely turned on by creepy “Uncle Mike” who talks like Jack Nicholson—she could kick off her stilettos and unzip her leather and collapse in laughter or burst into tears. She knew that these women, whether in sweats or cocktail dresses or lacy panties or nothing at all were there for her—to break the spell, to help her stain another coffee mug or champagne flute with red lip prints, to commiserate and corroborate and remind her she was real.

  What struck me most about working for Sage was how much it reminded me of my best experiences with cooperative living. The decency of the house’s rules made it possible for women to make good money working outside of established commercial systems that often oppress them or limit their options. And the careful attention to safety concerns made it possible for clients to have experiences that were dangerous in more abstract realms of the psyche.

  In my time there, I learned enormous amounts of practical kink skills like bondage tricks and the proper way to choke someone out. I also learned profound things about the human sexual imagination. The most important of these is the role that irony plays in fantasy: the dark, depraved, degrading scenes that are commissioned around the clock at the Gates are predicated on respect and clear communication. The implied meaning of a scene is most often the opposite of the literal meaning.

  At the Gates, sex is dressed up in darkness, but I have never been around so many giggles, so much emotional catharsis, so much evident healing.

  When playing at the Gates, you have five choices of environment. Across from the negotiation room is the Executive Dungeon. Here, the ceiling is painted a muted gold. The walls are made of black rubber. On one wall is a wooden Saint Andrew’s cross, and in the corner is a leather-upholstered spanking bench. In the center of the space is the house’s most impressive and unique piece of furniture. A stainless-steel bed with hooks all up and down its four posters. This room is elegant, understated despite its scandalous setting. A wooden suspension bar hangs from a rig in the ceiling. Every room, in fact, has one of these rigs, and each one can support a three-hundred-pound man.

  The boudoir is next door. Painted a lively green, it contains a matching white IKEA bed, vanity, and wardrobe. Inside the wardrobe are size-13 high-heeled shoes, enormous panties, panty hose, and costume makeup. This room is suitable for domestic scenes, cross-dressing, or sensual sessions that involve oral worship of a lady’s feet, legs, ass, or breasts (never, it must be emphasized, her vagina or anus, and it is extremely rare for a lady to kiss on the mouth). It also attracts clients who have physical limitations and need to spend most of the session sitting or lying down.

  Through the foyer and up the hardwood stairs is the house’s top floor. The office/schoolroom is first. In it is a wooden desk large enough for a small person to lie flat on his or her stomach, a small linen couch, and—somewhat incongruously for the setting—another leather spanking bench. Role-plays involving school or work or doctor’s offices are very common, because these are primal places for power dynamics to manifest.

  Next is the Blue Room or Worship Room, in which there is another wooden cross, a man-sized cage with a leather table for a top, and a closet converted into an iron jail cell. The midnight blue of the walls and numerous mirrors makes the place seem much more cavernous than its true dimensions.

  Lastly, the red room is draped floor to ceiling in red curtains that evoke the nightmare scenes of “Twin Peaks.” A wooden structure designed for all kinds of bondage dominates the space, though somehow there is also room for a leather futon and wooden riding horse with real equestrian saddle. There is a warmly erotic Parisian boudoir feeling to this space.

  Every room contains the following items: a spray bottle of Madacide (medical-grade disinfectant), water-based lubricant, at least ten condoms, several carabineers, some kind of bondage cuffs, several coils of cotton rope, at least one flogger, a Wartenberg wheel, a blindfold, a collar, a leash, metal nipple clamps, a collection of clothespins, tea light candles and votives, a box of matches, and an assortment of intimidating dildos.

  The other doors on the second floor lead to: a linen-supply closet filled with lube, towels, sheets, and enema bags; the bathroom, which contains a bathtub for golden and brown showers (the only room in the house with a window that isn’t frosted or boarded over); and, the upstairs apartment where Sage used to live. Trusted friends inhabit the apartment; it is the only space in the entire house that is not designated as the Gates. A stereo blasts punk music in that apartment all day to muffle the sounds of mundane life: someone in the Red Room can hear everything that goes on in that apartment, and vice versa.

  Regardless of which room you chose, what happens when you enter is between you and your mistress.

  Only once did I ever make the mistake of trying to spend the night alone at the Gates.

  I was living in San Francisco and commuting to the East Bay every weekend to work the Friday evening and Saturday morning shifts. This was right before the 2008 recession, and my business was unbelievable. I saw four to five clients a day on average. In the space of eight hours or so I easily did more sexual experimentation than most humans will do in a lifetime.

  On these shifts, I worked myself up into ecstatic states of concentration and adrenaline, and completely forgot that the rest of the world with its formalities of politeness even existed. Fueled by pure fantasy, I rarely had time to eat. About twenty minutes after closing the door on my final client of the day, I was always struck by a ravenous need for the macaroni and cheese we kept stocked in bulk next to boxes of Small, Medium, and Large latex gloves. I would shovel food into my face like a teenage athlete, and still continue to lose weight. Yeah, I was in it for the excellent money, but I had never before experienced such a concentrated dose of the human condition. For a perpetually curious person such as myself, it was a dream job.

  Usual
ly I spent the night between shifts with friends in Oakland, but this particular Friday I had a very late client and another one scheduled for first thing the following morning. I figured it would just be easier to sleep on the bed in the Executive.

  By this point, the Big House felt like my second home. Sage encouraged us to greet arriving clients the way a hostess would treat distinguished guests. When I showed up for my shift I would stash my bike in the basement and immediately tear off all my clothes—my sweatshirt, cotton leggings, sneakers, men’s boxer briefs, sports bra, band T-shirt. In fact I was quite notorious among the ladies for conducting my “behind the scenes” affairs— vacuuming, organizing the datebook, counting my money, doing paperwork—in the buff.

  The Gates gave me permission to toss out any shame or confusion I had about my body and feel like a sexy woman who had no need for social niceties like clothing. Subsequently I have rented other dungeon studios where the owners are shocked by my immodesty. More than once it has been necessary for me to sheepishly explain that dungeons and nudity have become synonymous in my mind.

  It was in this relaxed and naked state that I locked the door behind the last ladies working late on the Friday night shift, and settled into the Executive bed. I am quite proud of my ability to make a home anywhere I lay my head, and I never considered that the Big House would be any different.

  That night I discovered that the wrought-iron bed in the Executive Room was not made for sleeping.

  Maybe stagehands have similar experiences if they get caught working late at the theater and must spend the night in a prop bed on a stage. In my dreams, every scene that had ever taken place in that room seemed to be happening at once. All night I tossed and turned as if I were trying to sleep in the middle of a kinky symphonic light show. Surreal moments of nipples extending and whips raising welts flashed through my mind. All sort of obscenities were barked over each other, as if every booth at a porn shop were turned up at once.

  These ghosts of the Gates were not nightmarish per se. They were just dreams that were meant for waking life, not for quotidian human functions like resting. The house Sage built had spawned a million spontaneous stories, and those stories, once given a life of their own, had entered my psychically vulnerable subconscious. They were more powerful than either the men or women who’d first conjured them during working hours; now, without the other women to protect me, I was defenseless against them.

  I never slept there again, and I recommended that other girls refrain from doing so as well. But I had a new reverence for the power of the place.

  Sage does not take sessions anymore. In fact, she stopped around the time I started. I was fortunate enough to see her in action once or twice when someone wanted a walk-on and no other lady was around. On one such occasion, I clomped out of the session bathroom to find Sage drinking an afternoon beer in her office.

  “I need someone for a golden shower walk-on!”

  Sage looked at the books and shrugged. “Well, I guess it’s gonna have to be me.”

  “Is that okay?”

  “Sure thing, Mistress. I’ll see you up there,” she said, and tipped the rest of the beer down her throat.

  In five minutes, just as I was finishing pissing, there was a knock on the door. My client—lying in the bathtub as all toilettraining submissives did—spluttered, “Come in! ”

  Sage entered the tiny bathroom. She was wearing a transparent blue teddy and no makeup, her blonde-red hair and sun-tanned skin radiating beauty.

  “Well, look at this boy,” she cooed. “It looks like he hasn’t quite been doused enough.”

  Moving gracefully, like a barefoot ballerina, she mounted the lip of the tub and released a steady stream of hot piss all over the client, who may not have even realized how lucky he was.

  The Choice of Motherhood and Insidious Drugstore Signage

  Stoya

  I had the privilege of growing up with a second wave feminist/ reformed hippy mother. Before I sprouted my first pubic hair she handed me a mirror and a flashlight and told me to get to know my vagina. I was raised to believe that my body was mine to share with whoever I chose, whether that was one man, a couple of women, or a whole bunch of people over the course of my life. My mom homeschooled me for most of my childhood, and the parts of history that most excited her were the struggles for social change. When I was in fourth grade we drove down to Atlanta and took a tour of an old plantation. Afterwards we stood on the giant lawn and my mother’s bright green eyes turned an unsettling shade of yellow from emotional overstimulation as she educated me about the history of -isms in America and how important freedom and tolerance are.

  A year or so later we found this book, The Movers and Shakers, in a used bookstore outside of Charlotte. It was about activists in the sixties. The black cover with orange and yellow writing made the contents seem urgent but the dust and used-book smell made it seem old and historical, like something important had happened in the distant past. This book prompted my mother to share her own experiences of being a young adult in the early seventies. She’d fought for civil rights, she’d celebrated when Roe v. Wade was decided in favor of reproductive rights, and she’d been the only woman working in the engineering department at a nuclear plant when she got pregnant with me. I was ten or eleven when I first heard these stories. I thought my mom was positively ancient and I had little contact with other kids or the outside world. I believed she’d helped make the world a better place a very long time ago and thought that everyone was accepting of everyone else now. I thought that all the battles for human rights had been won already and I imagined prejudice as a relic of the past; if it still existed it must have been decaying next to a gramophone or icebox in a junkyard somewhere. I saw the effects of the sexual revolution and the right to abortion as gifts that my mother’s generation had given mine.

  The first time someone tried to shame me for sexual activities, I thought they were the cultural equivalent of the missing link. It took me years to really understand that there are at least as many anti-equality, anti-sex work, anti-homosexual, and anti-all sorts of other things people in the world as there are people who think like me. Sometimes I still forget. For instance, when I said in my first article for Vice that “I’ve been pretty successful at avoiding pregnancy,” I was surprised when people assumed that meant I’d never had an abortion. What I should have said was that given the amount of sex I’ve had (and without doing the actual math) three abortions seems statistically low. In the same way I feel entitled to have the kind of sex I want to have, purchase condoms, leave the kitchen, wear shoes, and put my body through attempts to find a hormonal birth control method that works for me, I feel entitled to have an abortion when necessary. They’re a last resort and I do try to avoid them, but an abortion is still a better option in my opinion than an unwanted child. All three of my abortions were medication induced. Taking RU-486 to end a pregnancy is more painful than my worst period but less painful than a burst ovarian cyst.

  Just like I prefer to avoid getting pregnant at all, I’d prefer to always catch unwanted pregnancies as early as possible and avoid the more invasive aspiration or dilation and evacuation procedures. I will take a pregnancy test if I don’t see my period for twenty-nine days or if it’s suspiciously light. I’ve been on Loestrin 24Fe (a kind of hormonal birth control) since January 7th. I take my pill every single day between 7:00 and 9:00 a.m. I missed one of the placebo/iron supplement pills about a month ago and took a double dose the next day. I’ve heard that this pill occasionally causes women to stop menstruating entirely, but I haven’t seen anything resembling full-on menstruation for a suspiciously long time and I have actually taken pregnancy tests when I haven’t even touched a penis for months just to see the little minus sign or the “not pregnant” and be happy that there’s at least one thing that isn’t currently a problem if I’m having a bad week. So I went to the drugstore a couple of days ago and got a pregnancy test from the family planning aisle.

  Th
e phrase family planning hanging on a sign above the pregnancy tests and condoms irritates me because it implies that everyone plans to have a family at some point. As the cashier was ringing me up another woman behind the counter asked me how my day was going. I told her that I was on birth control, pointed out that I was purchasing a pregnancy test and a bottle of Aleve, and said she probably didn’t want to hear the actual answer. She chuckled awkwardly and wandered off. I usually go for EPT or Clearblue, but this time I went with First Response. When I pulled out the test and instructions, a cardboard gizmo fell out. First Response has taken the presumption that everyone wants to have a baby one step further by including a congratulatory contraption that tracks one’s due date and has a helpful form on the back for “Moments & Milestones” including possible baby names, birth time, and weight. I’d hoped that the asterisk next to “A general guide for your enjoyment” would lead to a footnote saying “You know, if you’re interested in having a baby.” But it was a disclaimer stating that only a physician can determine due dates. I grumbled while I waited three minutes for the results and seethed when both tests came up with error messages.

  Inferior products aside, the thing that makes me angry is the insidious suggestion that all women want children and the subtle shaming of people who exercise their reproductive rights. This is part of the reason women feel the need to say things like “I only had one abortion” or “a baby at that point would have ruined my college prospects.” I resent the way this sneaky societal pressure has wormed itself into my brain enough that I feel the need to explain my mild latex allergies and issues with hormonal birth control or follow the number of pregnancies I’ve terminated with a reminder of how many sexual acts I’ve engaged in when talking about my own abortions. I’m uncomfortable about the way that I’ve allowed these messages to undermine my belief in my rights enough to feel defensive about exercising them. Every time that a woman like Molly Crabapple or Chelsea G. Summers vocally stands behind their decision to abort, it’s a drop in the bucket that maintains balance against people like Todd Akin and Jack Dalrymple. It reminds me that the freedoms we do have are precarious and that a sizable chunk of America sees women, homosexuals, and anyone who is different than they are as lesser beings. And it makes me that much more appreciative of those who do support freedom of choice.