Among the many pervy and kinky people who came into Object (the sex shop I worked at in Baltimore in the late 90's) none were so stealthily maladjusted as Tina.
Tina was a white woman in her late forties, with a messy, dark bob, dark eyes and thin lips. She looked like an academic which is exactly what she was: just a few months shy of her doctorate in psychology she happily prattled on about her burgeoning sex therapy practice and all the latest studies debunking ideas of what is normal and abnormal in the full spectrum of human sexuality.
As a customer, Tina was fun. She was bawdy and joyful, extremely complimentary to the point of flattery. She loved Object as an aesthetic and as a place where both the employees and the customers were friendly and open. She adored gay men and often declared that she wished she had been born a gay man, because, she said, then she could just be open about her sex life and instead of people being incensed they would just laugh and say "you go girl!". She made the usual outraged claim that a double standard exists in sexual expression: men are applauded for their sexual lives, but women are supposed to be innocent of their own desires. Nothing new and nothing to find fault with there. So why write about Tina? What's so special about a sex positive therapist frequenting a classy shop with folks who generally share her views? Well, Tina was an exhibitionist who was doing a bang up job of screwing up her kid.
Tina idolized Annie Sprinkle, a sex worker turned performance artist, turned angry-sex-worker-performance-artist, who specialized in water sports. Annie Sprinkle's shows are heartbreaking and revolting and if you've never seen her perform, prepare yourself to see youth and joy and romance nearly obliterated. Tina was working up an extremely kinky burlesque show around corsets, golden showers and live sex, wishing to put back some of the mystery and charm that Annie Sprinkle metaphorically clobbers to death with a rancid fish carcass. Whatever, as Dan Savage would say, lifts your luggage. But not long after Tina first discovered Object, she did something strange: she brought her twelve year old daughter, Zoe, into the store. Tina had no qualms with either exposing Zoe to the weird items and odd people found in such a place and encouraged Zoe to talk to people about their kinks and lifestyle choices. Amazingly, some obliged, but most just stared at Tina as if she were insane, which she was. Some just fled at the mere sight of the young girl. But Tina clucked her tongue at these people and hoped that Zoe would never be so ashamed.
As if this were not enough, Tina enthusiastically talked about her show and her kinks in front of Zoe. She also discussed her limp-dick ex husband, her own sexual abuse at the hands of her brothers and father, her inability to have an orgasm until she was 39, and finally she tried to give Zoe a lesson in Sex Toys 101.
Now, it is, of course, illegal for a minor, even accompanied by a guardian, to be in a sex shop, and we made that clear to Tina. When we first told her that Zoe was not allowed in the store, she was incredulous.
"But I'm with her! " Tina said.
"Doesn't matter," I said. "No one under 18 is allowed in a sex shop. You know that." As I said this, a stripper, herself barely 18 strolled in with an infant in a snuggly. Tina raised an eyebrow and I sighed.
"This is absurd! This is the kind of puritanical bullshit that a repressed society comes up with! Ridiculous to tell a human being that she is too young to know about her own body! There's nothing on display here that is unnatural or that she won't someday encounter!" I shot a glance at the wall of porn videos and my eyes rested on a video called "Anal Alice: White Trash Slut" that had a picture of a bleached blond looking pretty worn and spreading her ass cheeks in the general direction of a Natty Bo tall boy. I thought it was a pretty unlikely that Zoe would ever have a chance encounter with that, but it's true that, really, you never know.
"Tina, there's a difference. This place is for people who are already fucked in the head" Tina couldn't help smiling at this. "Zoe will go bonkers in her own good time and she won't need your help to do it."
"Jess, you're forgetting I'm a shrink," Tina said as if this would settle the issue.
"No, Tina, I am not. You people are notorious for screwing up your kids."
I thought then that we'd reached an amicable understanding, but instead, Tina dug in her heels. I don't know what battle exactly she thought she was fighting, but Tina started arriving at the store with Zoe and then making a big show of having her stand outside while she shopped and kibbitzed. Baltimore, at that time was not a safe place anywhere, at any time of day, for a 12 year old white girl to just be hanging out on a stoop, particularly one in front of a sex shop. So, of course, we let Zoe. We made her hang out with one of the employees at the cash register, which, in spite of the display of lubes, thongs for men and poppers, we thought was somewhat less bizarre to a preteen than other areas in the store. We would try to make small talk with her, but her mother would butt in and give us a rundown of Zoe's social life and when the girl looked like she would melt into tears, we all made sure to point out that her mother was crazy and to ignore her. Stupid advice, but we weren't in the business of counseling 12 year olds. Her mother was.
Eventually, my boss put his foot down. He told Tina she was a nutcase who was putting her shit on her daughter and putting his business at risk. One snowy afternoon, they started shouting at each other. Tina was banned and she stormed out hollering "I've never been treated so disrespectfully in my life!" which was so patently false I imagine she must have grimaced after saying it, but I couldn't know for sure because she was already out the door.
For what it's worth, Tina wasn't doing what she was doing to Zoe because she was sadistic or compulsive. Just the opposite. She was trying to spare her daughter the horrors of her own life. And I can't say I blamed Tina for wanting Zoe to be knowledgeable. Most kids who are sexually abused are the victims of someone they know and trust, and don't even know that what's happening is wrong- if you're a kid and a grownup tells you to do something, you do it and just assume that this is how people behave. By giving Zoe an early and semi levelheaded introduction to sex she was showing her what consenting adults do and that there are many ways to behave...as a consenting adult. The other thing that she was showing Zoe, and what might be more to the point, is that sex is meant to be pleasurable! I mean, what a rip off sex has been to so many women for so long, and particularly for Tina. After 35 years of joyless sex Tina eventually found that she could enjoy it and moreover, she enjoyed kinks! I imagine her first orgasm must have been so full of... anger! To suddenly know that it was supposed to be enjoyable must have made all the other experiences that much worse. Tina, understandably and not unlike most parents, wanted her daughter's life to be better than her own.
I write all this as if I could just look at her and have these wonderful insights, but I'm not that intuitive. My guesses come from the long conversations Tina and I had before she was banned from the store. In her early 40s she had got (sexy) Jesus and now she was a proselytizer, a missionary of anything but missionary. I'm pretty sure a lot of what she told me was part of her show, and though she invited me to see it multiple times, I had no interest in watching Tina do... anything. Ultimately, I didn't like Tina, because for all her good will and intentions, she was damaging Zoe, at least judging by the girl's pained looks and general air of silence and misery. It wasn't fair to Zoe to have a mother who was an exhibitionist. Tina was working out her childhood through her child, which is the sign of a narcissist and an unhealthy psyche. And since, at the time, I identified with Zoe way more than I identified with Tina, I hated Tina.
At one point, I briefly considered calling child services. I thought what Tina was doing might amount to emotional abuse, but then I thought of Zoe in foster care in Baltimore and decided that was far worse than whatever poor judgement Tina might have. But I relished visions of the police storming in on one of Tina's shows. I imagined a basement cabaret, a dusty red curtain fringed with gold, smokey tables obscuring furtive onlookers, Tina in the spotlight wearing one of the leather corsets she liked so much, and pissing into the mouth of a willing member of the audience when the agents burst in. They would stand there, in their cheap suits, forms and documents in hand. I imagined their surprise, their jaws dropping, and then quickly closing again.
Showing posts with label sex positive. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sex positive. Show all posts
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
The Dildo as Big as the Ritz
Please note: this is an explicit, moderately disturbing story. Please don't get mad at me if you get grossed out. Also, it' s after 3 am, and I'm pretty out of it. Forgive the typos and stiltedness..Now go ahead and read it because I know you're just dying to.
I lived in Baltimore in the late 90's.
I'll let that sink in.
Baltimore, in the late 90's was still the smack capital of the United States and the city slogan was "Baltimore, the city that reads." The pride and joy of Baltimore at that time was John Waters, Martin O'Malley, Homicide: Life on the Streets and crab cakes.
I'll let that sink in too.
In the midst of all that high brow culture, I worked in a sex shop called Object. I can say, with as little irony as the city's slogan, that Object was a truly classy sex shop. You think Babeland is nice? It's okay, but it's about as sexy as a small town library compared to Object. Object was barroque in it's sexiness. The spiked paddles and flavored lubes were ensconced in 19th century glass- fronted, dark wood cases. There was an original Tiffany stained glass skylight in the middle of the ceiling of the anteroom and a huge crystal chandelier in the back room. The curtain to the dressing room was heavy red velvet, and of the six people who worked there, not one of us had a coke habit. The owners were two very cute, very young gay men, who we called the Boys, and their tiny chihuahua, named Igor, slept in a very large, gilded bird cage.
Most of the customers at Object were strippers, pleasant gay men, and goth kids trying to get a handle on the whole S&M aspect of gothiness before they were even able to find a partner with whom to use the rhinestone encrusted nipple clamps. There were also a number of very wealthy, married men, corporate executive types who were closet cases who narcissistically believed they were totally alone in the world as closeted, kinky, corporate executives. They often came after hours for private spanking sessions with one or both of the Boys and they all shared a weird passion for lederhosen. You would be amazed what a common fetish lederhosen are for corporate executives. Don't ever let anyone tell you those men are not Nazis at heart: there is just something about the Teutonic youth culture that those guys just find.... hot.
But among these mostly milquetoast clients, there were a few real perverts. Some were not at all what you would expect from a perv. For example, more than a few were women, and of those a handful were lesbians, which if you had asked me then, I would have thought was physically impossible. But I'll talk about them another time. This week's perv is a giant man-child named Gregory.
Gregory's face was so smooth I think he might have waxed it. He had straight, thick, blonde hair, cut in a sort of prep school boy's style. He wore steel rimmed glasses and a large guage silver earring in his left ear. His lips were red as cherries and wet. He had a fine nose, ruddy cheeks, and squinty eyes. He might have been something approaching good looking except that Gregory was about 6'7" and big and blowsy as a Golden Girl caftan, shoulder pads and all. He couldn't have weighed less than 300 pounds and he just emitted an air of creepy. And sweat. I'm not sure if being a perv causes people to sweat a lot or if people who sweat a lot happen to be pervy. It's a correlation worth looking into.
He spoke with that wierd accent that people in movies from the 40's speak with and he liked to think of himself as a connossieur. I don't know of what, but if he spoke, at some point he would say, more or less apropos of nothing, "I like to think of myself as a connossieur." His speech was abrupt and non-sequitous. It was clear that he was having lengthy conversations in his head and we were just granted useful snippets here and there. His fat lips were constantly smiling and grimacing and he was often closing his eyes and either supressing some emotion about the people around him, or smelling something.
My co-worker, Johnathan - a tall drink of Shirley Temple- and I would suppress squeals and jab each other with our elbows whenever we saw Gregory's bulk floating towards us. Gregory preferred to be waited on by males, even girly males like Johnathan, but he was more likely to buy something quickly and leave if I helped him, and since his presence in the store made other customers uncomfortable, we tried to get him out of there as fast as we could. Gregory never did anything outwardly crazy and he had lovely manners. He was not a bad guy, at least not in a way that we or the customers could directly observe. And frankly, the only really weird thing he did to employees was make passes at the good looking gay men who worked there, which would be perfectly understandable (if not welcome) except that Gregory was not gay. If you'd looked at him, you'd think he was, with his pastel polo shirts and cable knit sweaters tied, just so, at his shoulders. He was so preppy and he had that guaged earring, he just had to be gay, right? Nope. Gregory didn't crave another human, male or female. What Gregory was into was toys. Very, very large toys. He had "outgrown" almost every toy by almost every novelty company in existence by the time I met him. There was just one company that could still help him and it catered to leather daddies and made terrifyingly giant dildos. Over the year or so that I worked at that store, we special ordered every giant dildo this company produced until finally, to our shock and awe, there were no more dildos to order. The fellow who informed the Boys of this did so in a tone of voice that had a hint of chastisement to it. If a man who peddles ball gags and castration kits as sex toys for a living is chastising you for asking for something too big, you have left the world of kinks and fetishes and entered the world of perversions.
The Boys informed Gregory that we couldn't help him, he would just have to make do with the dildo collection he already had. Johnathan and I were relieved. As the year had progressed, we had both become extremely uncomfortable around Gregory. It wasn't anything he did, he hadn't changed his manners or habits or anything. I think we were just becoming aware that we were dealing not with a slightly weird, sex positive man, comfortable with his predilections, but with a man who was broken. There was a good natured raunchiness, a frank humor that floated around the store and made the weirdness of Baltimore and the depressing lives of many of our customers bearable, but Gregory's case was not funny anymore. And for my part, I had come to this job as a bit of an outsider. I was not into the world of sex the way my coworkers were. I came from a more academic approach: my father taught human sexuality and so I was privy to such racy information as textbooks provide; like the fact that many men experience "nocturnal emissions". I was sex positive, in theory but in practice, I didn't see what all the hubub was about. (And in case you were wondering, why, then, did I get a job in a sex shop? I was one of those goth kids who regretted that corsets had gone out of style, and this store, with it's genteel setting and terrific assortment of hand sewn corsets had seemed totally innocuous at the time.) Gregory was so out of my frame of reference that even the idle chit chat that accompanies any retail exchange - even that kind- was impossible. When you cannot discuss the weather with a customer it becomes difficult to not confront them as a real human being.
Alas... Gregory was not to be thwarted. He was smarter than us all. Where we had seen a wall, he saw a window. Where we had said "We're sorry, but the world simply does not make what you are looking for" Gregory said, "I have a vision." He then offered the Boys an absurd amount of money to create his perfect dildo. I believe I gasped. One of the Boys, I'll call him Brains, said "Honey, don't think I don't want to take your money, because I do, but do you really want to be known as the guy who sat on a dildo and died?" Gregory laughed. "I'm not kidding," said Brains. "There's a reason they don't make them bigger and it's because no one was meant to fit a baby into their asshole." This was a very long way from diagrams of fallopean tubes.
Gregory turned red then, which is funny because a guy like this, one would think, would be pretty much done with shame. I mean, he never tried to hide what he wanted, he never whispered or shrank from his requests. He would just walk in and say "this is what I want, here is my money. Thank you very much." But after this statement, Gregory and the Boys talked in private for a long time about size, waivers, materials, notaries, diapers, lawyers and money. In the end, Johnathan and I, as artists, were given the task of making a dildo roughly the size of my thigh, . A "head" was requested but we flat out refused to do it. We made it out of wood, chicken wire, plaster and many, many coats of wax. This seemed like a bad idea to me, since it had no give, but that was what Gregory had requested: rigid. When we were done, it was shaped like a bullet and dark brown. It was 12" around and 18" long. We put the giant dildo on display for a while as another Baltimore oddity, like the ratty, fur-covered triangle that was the sign for a dyke bar in Hampden called the Pelt Room, or the shrine to the dog-faced girl that someone in North Baltimore had built into the side of their house and was regularly visited by people leaving votives and flowers. We savored the similarities to Pompeiian art and A Clockwork Orange. People looked at it, and though it was displayed with other dildos, pointed and said "what is that?"
"That," I said, "Is an enormous fucking dildo."
A week or so after it was completed, Gregory came for his giant dingus. His eyes registered delight, but he didn't stop and wonder. He didn't look at the monstrous, somewhat lumpy phallus and exclaim "what was I thinking?! I can't possibly use that! It's huge!" He said "It looks great. Thanks guys," and plunked down the balance. He asked us to wrap it up for him and we found a large box in the back to pack it in. He made idle chit chat with the Boys and then smiled and waved and wished us a nice day. He never came back.
I didn't like to think about Gregory, about why he wanted to do this to himself or how he had come to be on this particular path. I didn't think about his outwardly respectable appearance and the diapers he wore under his Brooks Brothers shorts, about where his money came from, about whether or not he really did want to die this way as Brains had said. I was young and crazy when I worked at Object. I was learning that people do all kinds of things to themselves and to others for the sake of pleasure and love and I now I guess it was a delusion to think that Gregory's fetish was just another facet on that rock.
I lived in Baltimore in the late 90's.
I'll let that sink in.
Baltimore, in the late 90's was still the smack capital of the United States and the city slogan was "Baltimore, the city that reads." The pride and joy of Baltimore at that time was John Waters, Martin O'Malley, Homicide: Life on the Streets and crab cakes.
I'll let that sink in too.
In the midst of all that high brow culture, I worked in a sex shop called Object. I can say, with as little irony as the city's slogan, that Object was a truly classy sex shop. You think Babeland is nice? It's okay, but it's about as sexy as a small town library compared to Object. Object was barroque in it's sexiness. The spiked paddles and flavored lubes were ensconced in 19th century glass- fronted, dark wood cases. There was an original Tiffany stained glass skylight in the middle of the ceiling of the anteroom and a huge crystal chandelier in the back room. The curtain to the dressing room was heavy red velvet, and of the six people who worked there, not one of us had a coke habit. The owners were two very cute, very young gay men, who we called the Boys, and their tiny chihuahua, named Igor, slept in a very large, gilded bird cage.
Most of the customers at Object were strippers, pleasant gay men, and goth kids trying to get a handle on the whole S&M aspect of gothiness before they were even able to find a partner with whom to use the rhinestone encrusted nipple clamps. There were also a number of very wealthy, married men, corporate executive types who were closet cases who narcissistically believed they were totally alone in the world as closeted, kinky, corporate executives. They often came after hours for private spanking sessions with one or both of the Boys and they all shared a weird passion for lederhosen. You would be amazed what a common fetish lederhosen are for corporate executives. Don't ever let anyone tell you those men are not Nazis at heart: there is just something about the Teutonic youth culture that those guys just find.... hot.
But among these mostly milquetoast clients, there were a few real perverts. Some were not at all what you would expect from a perv. For example, more than a few were women, and of those a handful were lesbians, which if you had asked me then, I would have thought was physically impossible. But I'll talk about them another time. This week's perv is a giant man-child named Gregory.
Gregory's face was so smooth I think he might have waxed it. He had straight, thick, blonde hair, cut in a sort of prep school boy's style. He wore steel rimmed glasses and a large guage silver earring in his left ear. His lips were red as cherries and wet. He had a fine nose, ruddy cheeks, and squinty eyes. He might have been something approaching good looking except that Gregory was about 6'7" and big and blowsy as a Golden Girl caftan, shoulder pads and all. He couldn't have weighed less than 300 pounds and he just emitted an air of creepy. And sweat. I'm not sure if being a perv causes people to sweat a lot or if people who sweat a lot happen to be pervy. It's a correlation worth looking into.
He spoke with that wierd accent that people in movies from the 40's speak with and he liked to think of himself as a connossieur. I don't know of what, but if he spoke, at some point he would say, more or less apropos of nothing, "I like to think of myself as a connossieur." His speech was abrupt and non-sequitous. It was clear that he was having lengthy conversations in his head and we were just granted useful snippets here and there. His fat lips were constantly smiling and grimacing and he was often closing his eyes and either supressing some emotion about the people around him, or smelling something.
My co-worker, Johnathan - a tall drink of Shirley Temple- and I would suppress squeals and jab each other with our elbows whenever we saw Gregory's bulk floating towards us. Gregory preferred to be waited on by males, even girly males like Johnathan, but he was more likely to buy something quickly and leave if I helped him, and since his presence in the store made other customers uncomfortable, we tried to get him out of there as fast as we could. Gregory never did anything outwardly crazy and he had lovely manners. He was not a bad guy, at least not in a way that we or the customers could directly observe. And frankly, the only really weird thing he did to employees was make passes at the good looking gay men who worked there, which would be perfectly understandable (if not welcome) except that Gregory was not gay. If you'd looked at him, you'd think he was, with his pastel polo shirts and cable knit sweaters tied, just so, at his shoulders. He was so preppy and he had that guaged earring, he just had to be gay, right? Nope. Gregory didn't crave another human, male or female. What Gregory was into was toys. Very, very large toys. He had "outgrown" almost every toy by almost every novelty company in existence by the time I met him. There was just one company that could still help him and it catered to leather daddies and made terrifyingly giant dildos. Over the year or so that I worked at that store, we special ordered every giant dildo this company produced until finally, to our shock and awe, there were no more dildos to order. The fellow who informed the Boys of this did so in a tone of voice that had a hint of chastisement to it. If a man who peddles ball gags and castration kits as sex toys for a living is chastising you for asking for something too big, you have left the world of kinks and fetishes and entered the world of perversions.
The Boys informed Gregory that we couldn't help him, he would just have to make do with the dildo collection he already had. Johnathan and I were relieved. As the year had progressed, we had both become extremely uncomfortable around Gregory. It wasn't anything he did, he hadn't changed his manners or habits or anything. I think we were just becoming aware that we were dealing not with a slightly weird, sex positive man, comfortable with his predilections, but with a man who was broken. There was a good natured raunchiness, a frank humor that floated around the store and made the weirdness of Baltimore and the depressing lives of many of our customers bearable, but Gregory's case was not funny anymore. And for my part, I had come to this job as a bit of an outsider. I was not into the world of sex the way my coworkers were. I came from a more academic approach: my father taught human sexuality and so I was privy to such racy information as textbooks provide; like the fact that many men experience "nocturnal emissions". I was sex positive, in theory but in practice, I didn't see what all the hubub was about. (And in case you were wondering, why, then, did I get a job in a sex shop? I was one of those goth kids who regretted that corsets had gone out of style, and this store, with it's genteel setting and terrific assortment of hand sewn corsets had seemed totally innocuous at the time.) Gregory was so out of my frame of reference that even the idle chit chat that accompanies any retail exchange - even that kind- was impossible. When you cannot discuss the weather with a customer it becomes difficult to not confront them as a real human being.
Alas... Gregory was not to be thwarted. He was smarter than us all. Where we had seen a wall, he saw a window. Where we had said "We're sorry, but the world simply does not make what you are looking for" Gregory said, "I have a vision." He then offered the Boys an absurd amount of money to create his perfect dildo. I believe I gasped. One of the Boys, I'll call him Brains, said "Honey, don't think I don't want to take your money, because I do, but do you really want to be known as the guy who sat on a dildo and died?" Gregory laughed. "I'm not kidding," said Brains. "There's a reason they don't make them bigger and it's because no one was meant to fit a baby into their asshole." This was a very long way from diagrams of fallopean tubes.
Gregory turned red then, which is funny because a guy like this, one would think, would be pretty much done with shame. I mean, he never tried to hide what he wanted, he never whispered or shrank from his requests. He would just walk in and say "this is what I want, here is my money. Thank you very much." But after this statement, Gregory and the Boys talked in private for a long time about size, waivers, materials, notaries, diapers, lawyers and money. In the end, Johnathan and I, as artists, were given the task of making a dildo roughly the size of my thigh, . A "head" was requested but we flat out refused to do it. We made it out of wood, chicken wire, plaster and many, many coats of wax. This seemed like a bad idea to me, since it had no give, but that was what Gregory had requested: rigid. When we were done, it was shaped like a bullet and dark brown. It was 12" around and 18" long. We put the giant dildo on display for a while as another Baltimore oddity, like the ratty, fur-covered triangle that was the sign for a dyke bar in Hampden called the Pelt Room, or the shrine to the dog-faced girl that someone in North Baltimore had built into the side of their house and was regularly visited by people leaving votives and flowers. We savored the similarities to Pompeiian art and A Clockwork Orange. People looked at it, and though it was displayed with other dildos, pointed and said "what is that?"
"That," I said, "Is an enormous fucking dildo."
A week or so after it was completed, Gregory came for his giant dingus. His eyes registered delight, but he didn't stop and wonder. He didn't look at the monstrous, somewhat lumpy phallus and exclaim "what was I thinking?! I can't possibly use that! It's huge!" He said "It looks great. Thanks guys," and plunked down the balance. He asked us to wrap it up for him and we found a large box in the back to pack it in. He made idle chit chat with the Boys and then smiled and waved and wished us a nice day. He never came back.
I didn't like to think about Gregory, about why he wanted to do this to himself or how he had come to be on this particular path. I didn't think about his outwardly respectable appearance and the diapers he wore under his Brooks Brothers shorts, about where his money came from, about whether or not he really did want to die this way as Brains had said. I was young and crazy when I worked at Object. I was learning that people do all kinds of things to themselves and to others for the sake of pleasure and love and I now I guess it was a delusion to think that Gregory's fetish was just another facet on that rock.
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