America Unzipped (34 page)

What if taboo—sin—did not exist? In the absence of sin, in a world devoid of condemnation, what fuel could Pamela use for heat? I have often joked with friends that I owe the Catholic Church a great debt for making sex dirty and therefore much more fun. I'm not sure how I could function, sexually speaking, if I didn't think I was committing a sin, somehow.

Art from the
Decameron
to
The Blue Angel
has celebrated the concept of sin as excitement. Condemnation may be the biggest favor any religious or political moralist could do for sex, especially now that sex is available anywhere and therefore no longer controllable.

But what happens when we kill sin and make sex akin to buying new snow tires? I ask Allena, who has made acceptance of sexual exploration a major part of her life's work.

“You need the religious right to condemn you, don't you?”

“Oh, yeah,” she says. It was no accident that the sex-positive center was founded in 1999 and has grown since. “Both sides need each other. We give them people to be afraid of.” This is why, she suggests, the two seemingly mutually exclusive strains of American life are happening at the same time. The more condemnation there is, in an age of unprecedented sexual availability, the more people will be seduced by the thrill of disobeying. The more deviancy the sexual moralists find, the more ammo they have to justify their argument that the nation is facing a values meltdown.

If perversion became bourgeois, what fun would the Wet Spot be? In fact, I don't think it is an accident that most of the Wet Spot members I have met so far are over thirty, many middle aged. The kids don't need a center to give them permission. They just do it on their own.

 

A
llena drives a beat-up Suzuki stuffed with knickknacks. A small note on the dash says “Allena is well loved.” As far as I can tell she is. A black leather rose surrounded by barbed wire is tucked up against the windshield, a memento from a BDSM conference.

First we stop at the Crypt, a place mainly for gay men, where I decide that I am not a leather kilt sort of guy, and that no matter how deeply discounted they may be, I am not going to wear a pair of black leather boy hot pants. Allena becomes more amused with every one of my vetoes. Next we drive back downtown to an adult store, but the clothes are for women and though a young man with multiple facial piercing tries to convince me I might look good in a body stocking, I veto that, too.

As she drives, Allena talks more about this idea of mainstreaming perversion, an oxymoron, but neither of us can think of another phrase. Now that she's thinking about it, she recalls a time when she was giving a fisting seminar, lessons on the sexual joy to be experienced by women who learn how to have a lover insert their entire fist into the vagina. The seminar was being given in a hotel.

“And there was a wedding rehearsal there and some of the bridesmaids peeked into the room and asked what we were doing. When I told them, they were all, ‘Ewww!' but then I told them how much fun it could be and before you know it, they were lying down on the table, these cute little chicks with their dresses up over their heads, getting fisted. People just aren't afraid to try things anymore.”

Finally, Allena drives us toward the city's Capital Hill neighborhood. We stop into Babeland, founded by one of Joani Blank's two interns, and see their selection of vibrators, including a new computerized thing a woman can program with preset routines. It seems like a long time ago that I worked at Fascinations and visited the women in Missouri. Then we drive a few more blocks and park across the street from a store called Metro, a goth palace.

A very pretty, tall, young woman with short black hair and glasses is sitting behind the counter reading a book when we walk in. Her name is Keda. She is wearing a camisole and black pants and a stainless-steel collar with a padlock in front. I also notice lines of deep diagonal scars on her chest, forearms, and wrists.

We're there a few minutes when Allena pulls a pair of black shiny pants off a rack.

“Oh, these would be perfect! You'll look hot!”

They are extraordinarily narrow pants.

“Let's get you a shirt, too” she says as if there is no question about the pants. A few minutes later she has selected the T-shirt with the skull.

In the mirror of the dressing room I look all the world like a shiny, older Joey Ramone.

I walk up to the counter and hand the clothes to Keda. She is twenty-one years old, she says. “Were you a cutter?” I ask, referring to her scars.

“I was an angsty teenager,” she replies. She was in and out of treatment for her habit of cutting herself and it worked, intermittently. She finally stopped altogether. “I am not allowed to cut myself anymore,” she says, fingering her padlock. “Now I have somebody else do it.”

Allena hands Keda a business card. “Call me,” she says.

When we step outside, Allena explains that “many people in our community stop cutting once they get involved.” I hadn't thought of the Wet Spot members as a community, but I suppose they are like any other ad hoc community in which people find a form of family and shelter. They have turned the sexual realm into a real-world place.

Allena runs into a young woman on our way back to the car, a woman I am going to call Sunshine. Sunshine has shaved half her head, though at first you can't tell because she has long hair that flows over her skull as if Sunshine hasn't really decided if she wants half her head shaved or not. Sunshine is a Wet Spot member, one of the youngest I have seen so far, and a friend of Allena's, though their relationship is really more like older sister to younger sister. Sunshine is a little wild, Allena explains. Sometimes Allena has to rein her in and provide some guidance.

I meet Sunshine again, later that evening, at a business-networking happy hour in a downtown bar. Allena, a whirlwind, organizes this monthly get-together for business owners and employees. Some are Wet Spot members, but others aren't. Sunshine is there because she runs her own massage service. When she sees me, she wants to ask if I'd like to interview her. Maybe we could go someplace? I want to stay and meet some other people, so I explain it's not possible. Will I be going to this weekend's party at the Wet Spot? she asks.

I spend most of my time talking to Janice and Peter. Janice, a legal secretary, is dressed in a knee-length skirt and long-sleeved blouse; she's just come from work. Her jewelry is tasteful, her brown hair cut short. She's pretty. She speaks in clipped, precise language, using an elevated vocabulary and a hint of hauteur.

Being in his rookie season as a sexual explorer, Peter is nervous about talking to me at all. He is a forty-two-year-old business consultant with an Ivy League MBA and some work for a renowned think tank in his background. He was divorced a few years ago and has a son, too, and you never know what an ex-wife might do in a court of law if she knew you were fucking several different women at a time and trying out your newfound interest in S&M on yourself.

Peter is an intense man. He was raised in a conservative fashion with a conservative ethnic background. If you were to see him in an airport, maybe Hong Kong or Shanghai or Bangkok, all places he flies to often, you would assume he is one of those youngish titans of business we are supposed to admire, the sort of guy we like because they break rules and make a lot of money doing it. Peter knows how to do all that—he's an expert, in fact—but he is just “dipping his toes” in the waters of sexual taboo.

“I have always been curious but fairly inhibited and never felt comfortable, really, at expressing to myself, and certainly not to other people, what I was interested in. I thought it was shameful.” Like so many others, the digital world opened his eyes. “I did lots of online porn and knew what was out there.” He found Internet bondage porn both “empowering and titillating.” “But I never really had a chance to [experience it]. In Philly once, I came across a BDSM group and went to one of their meetings and stayed for a half hour and left. I was too overwhelmed with it.”

It wasn't until he began dating a woman who happened to be a member of the Wet Spot that he truly began to explore in real life. “I have been going on and off for a couple of years now. I am comfortable there. I feel safe there.”

Peter gives his newfound sexual life a great deal of thought. Even speaking to me, he says, is a deliberate act. “It is not something I am comfortable with, but it is a way for me to develop courage and to confront things I am afraid of and master them.”

One of the things he always wanted to try, he says, is “ass play.” Just the very idea of it made him feel wicked and shameful. He began to think about it in a conscious way, mentally rehearsing scenarios. Once, while standing in his apartment's kitchen, “I thought, ‘Oh my God, now that I have opened this up, something really bad is going to happen.' I imagined all the knives and forks flying around attacking me for having these thoughts. I felt real shame and dread. ‘How can you think of something like that?' But when I shared that with others, they said, ‘Oh yeah, if you wanna try it, I would be willing,' and nothing bad happened.”

Since then he has done everything from anal massage to being penetrated by strap-ons. If something occurs to him, he tries to find a way to make it happen and then decides if he likes it or not. Often he moves on, working his way down a cafeteria line of sexual dishes.

These days Peter has four sexual partners, all women. The variety, he has concluded, is natural. “There is this whole Judeo-Christian-rooted idea that you have a perfect other, but that is really unrealistic. Not to objectify women, but it's like eating Mexican food every day. It gets old.”

Acting as the sub in some of his relationships, Peter tells me, is “a manifestation of integrity.” “This is who I really am. I can be this passive, submissive person and told what to do and that's fine. There are no repercussions.” Business, on the other hand, rewards aggression and decisiveness. “In my public persona, in the corporate world, to be successful, the company comes first. You put aside personal feelings, values. It is bottom-line driven, shareholder-value driven. That is very unnatural.”

But Peter is not euphoric about what he also sees as the surge in American sexual exploration. Perhaps there is a backlash against this corporate philosophy and toward a more balanced work–life division that is driving the search for sexual sensation, but on the other hand, he argues, American culture glorifies sex. “So we are conditioned to overvalue sex.”

Could be, he thinks, that we are seeking community and trying to find it through sexual gratification, the intimacies Debra says she feels even if fleetingly in swinger clubs, or the ad hoc family Allena has created at the Wet Spot, or the shared codes of the fetish world.

I think of a conversation I had months ago with Joe Beam. Isn't it possible, Joe, I asked him, that faced with our culture, people are looking for some sort of refuge or a new reality in sexual expression they are not finding in other areas of their lives? That you and other fundamentalist Christians, who find refuge in religion, have more in common with rubberists or swingers or shibari masters than might be comfortable to admit? That you are looking for the same thing?

“I think you are right,” he answered. “We marry people we feel our parents will accept, or our social group accepts, and somebody who rates closely to you on the attractiveness scale. So while we think we are picking our own, we really aren't. And in the church it is even worse. ‘We are going to control you.' That is our culture. Sex can be the one true place to be absolutely creative and totally expressive, totally uninhibited and be you. But in my opinion, from what I find in our seminars, most Americas don't have sex like that because we are hung up on our beliefs, or we aren't close to our partners…I think you are right, but I'm not sure if we know what that answer is. Some connection with other human beings. Otherwise we would all just masturbate. It's more efficient.”

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.

 

J
anice 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.