The Guide to Getting It On (8 page)

According to
The Stripper’s Guide,
a cornerstone of a stripper’s appeal is how each stripper needs to adopt her own unique look. It does a woman no good to try looking like someone else. It’s all about attitude and having your own style rather than sporting the perfect body. Forget buying expensive products, going on strange diets, and spending hours at the gym.

The Stripper’s Guide
offers a number of tips based on general body types a woman might have. For instance, when it comes to trimming your pubic hair, women with a voluptuous or well-endowed body might try a landing strip. The vertical line balances the curves and draws the eyes downward. A woman with an I-shaped body might go for a more natural-looking pubic bush, which helps make her hips look more round and curvy. On the other hand, just having pubic hair might look too retro. (Maybe pubic hair will be in style again someday!)

Playing Strip Poker

A time-honored and frequently fun way of getting naked together or in groups is by playing strip poker. While you don’t need a book to tell you how to play strip poker,
The Stripper’s Guide
offers hilarious advice for a woman who unexpectedly finds herself in a game of strip poker but hasn’t trimmed her pubic hair in a month and is wearing a granny bra. The authors suggest that she head for the bathroom for her three minutes of ABT “allowable bathroom time.” She should stuff the granny bra into her purse or into a drawer (better to be totally topless than shirtless with an ugly bra). Then she should run her fingers under cold water and tweak her nipples with them. If the cards aren’t running her way and she loses her pants, she should make a show of taking them off, but sit with her legs crossed.

Technology Gives Nakedness a New Dimension

Twenty years ago, when the first edition of this book was being written, this chapter stopped right here. That’s because there was no such a thing as sexting or websites featuring naked women who would become the new face of sexwork. (There weren’t even phones with cameras or computers with built-in cams. That kind of technology wasn’t even on the radar back then.)

Now, an entire book this size could be written on sexting and webcam communities alone. The expansion of nakedness beyond what was once the almost exclusive domain of strip clubs and Peeping Toms has been nothing short of phenomenal.

Rather than attempting to provide a grand overview of this technology-aided transition into how we now view nakedness, we’ll focus instead on the first and most famous camgirl, Jenni Ringley, whose willingness to broadcast every single aspect of her private life on the new invention of the webcam was unprecedented in the history of nakedness or technology.

Cam Girls — Nakedness Briefly Makes Online History Through Lifecasting

Until the invention of the webcam in the late 1990s, if you wanted to see a stripper strip, you had to leave your home and the stripper had to leave her home. Both of you would intersect in a club that featured strippers. But then came JenniCam, featuring the World Wide Web’s first cam girl.

JenniCam was broadcast live from 19-year-old Jennifer’s Ringley’s dorm room in Dickinson College in 1996. This was when the best connectivity the web had to offer was dialup. For the first year or two, JenniCam would only refresh once every three to five minutes.

Unlike today’s webcams, which stream in real time and are more of an x-rated peep show, the webcams would broadcast live 24/7. Early cam girls like Jennifer were referred to as “lifecasters.” The early webcams were the forerunners of reality TV shows like
Big Brother,
and with good reason.

The webcam was on in Jenni’s dorm room 24/7. Much of the time, viewers would see nothing but an empty room. Other times, they would see Jenni eating or reading. Sometimes they would see her naked or her having sex with her boyfriend, or masturbating when she was alone, or performing a striptease. Jennicam viewership skyrocketed when her webcam started showing her having sex with her boyfriend.

It wouldn’t be long before 100 million weekly visitors would see Jenni doing the same things they would see you doing if there were a webcam in your bedroom or living room 24/7. The difference, of course, is that few people would ever allow that kind of closeup lens into their private lives.

Certainly there were far more graphic pornographic images available on the Internet for which viewers wouldn’t have to wait patiently in front of their computer screens like peeping Toms. But that was also the magic of the early cam shows. Viewers could be the ultimate voyeurs.

A key part of the early cam girl experience was the girl’s blog or website where she would keep her diary or post her daily journal, answer viewer questions, and provide an archive of images. The early camgirl blogs were the forerunners of Facebook pages. Only a handful of cam girls would ever experience this level of celebrity and early social networking fame.

JenniCam was live for seven years. It was the perfect intersection of new technology, exhibitionism, and voyeurism.

The early cam girls don’t exist anymore online. They’ve been replaced by thousands of women who have joined cam sites that cater to customers who want to see women masturbate and act out special fantasies. The women set up cams in their own homes where they perform several hours a day. These are the new sex workers born of the Internet. They are the strippers of the electronic age.

Sexting

Modern technology has thrown nakedness another twist in the form of sexting, where a person takes pictures of their naked body (or parts of it) with their phone and sends them to someone else. So the camera phone has taken what would have formerly been a slice of the pornographic pie and personalized it.

It is doubtful that the women who snap upskirt photos of their naked crotches or breasts are consciously aware of this amazing intersection between their private lives and the world of online porn they have grown up watching. On the other hand, it’s painfully obvious that the men who sext photos of their erect penises are not only aware of it, but are reveling in it. It’s as if they honestly believe that women will be unable to resist them once they receive photos of their penises on their phones. And in that sense, the men who do this fancy themselves as the new male strippers.

Sexting has had so much media play and will continue to do so that it’s hard to even know where to begin discussing it. Perhaps for the next edition of
The Guide
it will have its own chapter. For now, the best advice for people who are of a legal age and want to sext is to make an attempt to find creative and seductive ways of sexting rather than simply being porn-actor wannabes. There are now books and articles on how to sext creatively and how to show less flesh and more allure when you sext. Why not research the subject and try to use the amazing capacity of your smartphone to create your own unique sexting style?

In time, sexting won’t be in the chapter on getting naked, but instead will be in the romance and talking-to-your-partner-about-sex chapters. But for now, it remains stripping adjacent.

Dear Paul,

I get seriously turned on when my girlfriend is wearing pantyhose. There’s something about the feel of them on her legs that makes Mr. Winky pop straight in the air. Any advice about this? —Seamless in Seattle

Dear Seamless,

Given how most of our mothers wore nylons or pantyhose, and considering how often our toddler selves stood next to them with arms wrapped around their legs, it’s a wonder more guys aren’t stirred into action by the feel of a woman in pantyhose.

Assuming your girlfriend is understanding and willing, ask her to cut out the cotton crotch on a pair of pantyhose. Thanks to the new ventilation system, you’ll be able to go down on her as well as have intercourse while she is wearing her customized pantyhose. Make sure she cuts out the crotch on the inside of the seam so they don’t unravel. Also, consider helping her to arrive orally before slipping your penis in, because it isn’t likely that you will be lasting for long if nylons are your thing. If she isn’t handy with scissors, she can purchase crotchless pantyhose in some stores, but probably not at places like WalMart.

For those of you who are wondering about the difference between a guy with a healthy appreciation of girls in pantyhose versus one with a fetish or paraphilia, see Chapter 47:
Kinky Corner
.

Thanks
to the writings of Barbara Keesling, Linda Levine, Lonnie Barbach, Cynthia Heimel, and Jay Wiseman for naked inspiration. Ditto to the folks at Los Angeles’ Trashy Lingerie, and to Katherine Liepe-Levinson, author of Strip Show. Thanks also to Leslie Davisson who was involved in the original launch of
The Guide
.

CHAPTER

5

On the Penis

T
his chapter was written for women readers, although the men who have seen it claim to be amused. The topic is boys and their toys. Hopefully the following pages provide some insight into the love, and sometimes hate, relationship between a man and his weenie.

Toys, Pain & Pleasure

As a woman, the first thing you will find out about penises and testicles is that most guys take them way too seriously. There are reasons for this:

• The penis is the only childhood toy that a guy gets to keep and play with throughout his entire life. It is the only toy he will ever own that feels good when he tugs on it, that constantly changes size and shape, and is activated by the realm of the senses. Try to find that at Toys‘R’Us.
  
• One of the first things a man does when he wakes up in the morning and the last thing he does at night is to touch his penis and testicles. It’s a male ritual of self-affirmation that has little to do with sexual stimulation. A daytime extension of this is known as pocket pool.
  
• The average male pees between five and seven times a day. Each time he pees he has a specific ritual, from the way he pulls his penis out to how he wags it when he’s done. When he is peeing alone a guy will often invent imaginary targets in the toilet to gun for. An especially fine time is had when a cigarette butt has been left behind. Floating cigarette butts are the male urinary equivalent of the clay pigeon. While this may be a difficult concept for a woman to fully grasp, it does make for a certain amount of familiarity, friendship, and even self-bonding between a man and his penis.
  
• Another bathroom-related matter has to do with visual reinforcement. How many women look down when they are peeing to see what’s coming out of their bodies? Guys look down often. As a result, we males get visual reinforcement for the feelings we have in our genitals when we pee. While women experience a hand-eye-genital experience when they use tampons, it’s usually not all that visual, and it doesn’t start until after puberty. Between erections, corrections, pocket pool and peeing, guys have far more sensory experience with the penis than most women have with their vaginas. This must be why women sometimes call us “Dicks!”
  
• You wouldn’t believe how often the human male experiences a jolt of pain in his testicles. It is a discomfort that gives a guy the kind of extra-personal relationship with his reproductive equipment that menstruating women have with theirs. The source of agony can be anything from an elbow during a game of basketball to simply bending over and having your pants crimp the very life force out of you. One of the great culprits in male testicular angst is the horizontal bar on the bicycle frame. Why is it that girls’ bicycle frames are V-shaped when it is guys who need the V? Not only did this confusion among bicycle makers result in our younger selves not getting to look up girls’ dresses when they were mounting their bikes, but many of us still have the word Schwinn engraved on the underside of our testicles from each time a foot slipped off the pedal.
  
• This may be difficult to fully appreciate, but there is the matter of the unwanted hard-on. The unwanted hard-on usually strikes with predictable ferociousness first thing in the morning. Not only does it interfere with the ability to relieve a full bladder, but it provides logistical problems for a guy who has to traverse shared hallways to get to the bathroom. The unwanted hard-on can be excruciating and even painful for its most frequent victim, the adolescent male. The unwanted hard-on is much less of a problem after a man turns thirty, and by the time he’s forty it is an event accompanied by a sigh of relief and a moment of thanks.
  
• Our society teaches us that sexual pleasure between a man and a woman depends on the man’s ability to get hard and stay hard. What a demented view of sex. This puts a lot of pressure on guys to be consummate cocksmen. It makes us more dick-centered than necessary, at the expense of everyone.
  
• When life is full of despair, the one thing that a guy can usually count on for a good feeling is his penis, unless matters are totally out of hand, in which case he needs to consider something stronger like tequila or prayer.