Best Sex Writing 2010 Page 9

  After several meetings, I began to understand the concept that all forms of sex were an exchange of power, whether it was conscious or unconscious. My focus had been exclusively on the exchange of pleasure in sex. I had never considered sex in terms of power. A basic principle of S/M is that all sexual activities between one or more adults must be consensual, which required a verbal negotiation followed by an agreement between the players. In my youth, when I had sex with a man, I automatically assumed he was in control. All my years of romantic sex when we tried to read each other’s minds was nonconsensual sex with me as a bottom. By the time I was forty and into sport fucking, I learned to take control as a form of self-protection, but none of this was ever discussed or agreed upon. When I had sex with a woman, I relied on visual cues. As a teacher, I simply asked her questions.

  The idea that sex was an exchange of power presented a new understanding of my role as a workshop leader. I’d often kidded around in the groups about being a “top sergeant,” but I never thought of myself as a dominant. Instead, I was guiding the group through pleasure rituals. Once I stepped back and looked at the power dynamics, I was blown away with a new image of my work. Every month I got a dozen women I’d never met to agree to spend two afternoons with me in the nude, share details of their sex lives and show me and each other their pussies. On the second day, we’d masturbate in a circle, have orgasms with electric machines and end with group massage. Since I got paid, that made me one of the biggest professional Doms in town.

  Until I joined my S/M support group, I had been unable to see this power dynamic. No wonder society condemned this sexual subculture. Society allowed us to avoid looking at how unaware we are of our sexual power and therefore we continued to abuse it. This ignorance sustained the illusion that men and women were created equal. Yet everywhere I looked, I witnessed inequality. A corporate executive climbed into a limousine next to a trash can where a bag lady rummaged for food. A belief in equal opportunity and that government is “by and for the people” was the same as believing in the myth of romantic love with its false promise of living happily ever after. As I looked at sex from this new perspective, it felt like I was waking from a deep sleep.

  Gradually, I began to understand the immense variety of activities these women enjoyed: bondage, spanking, verbal humiliation, butch/femme roles, cross-dressing, fetishes, recreational sex, piercing, tattoos, and public sex performances. Everyone assumed a role that represented her position of power as a dominant or submissive without any judgments that one was better than the other. Women who played both roles were “switchables.” Except for tattoos, bondage and spanking, I’d done most of these activities. I told the group that bondage scenes had been part of my sexual fantasies for years, but I’d never actually experienced them. They said new members didn’t have to be experienced players. The purpose of the group was to explore all the possibilities of fantasy role-playing with other like-minded women.

  One night Doris, one of the founding mothers of the group, gave me some porn she’d written about consensual humiliation. Although I enjoyed reading it, I couldn’t imagine how humiliation could ever turn me on. She suggested I think about something I’d done in sex that I didn’t want to do, something that embarrassed me as well as excited me, something that made me feel as though I were out of control, dirty, or extremely guilty. Scanning memories, I couldn’t get any recall on sexual humiliation. After all, I’d just spent the last fifteen years proving to myself, and anyone else who would listen, that sex was good clean fun.

  As I continued to think about what Doris had said, a peculiar uncomfortable feeling crept over me. Had becoming a feminist sex teacher taken the spice out of my sex life? Had I lifted sex out of the gutter and elevated it to transcendental heights of cosmic bliss? Had I lost touch with basic aspects of my own human nature? Maybe in the efforts to redeem masturbation, I’d brainwashed myself with spiritual hearts and flowers, and in the process, I’d forgotten my humble beginnings when sex was definitely dirty and hot.

  My erotic pendulum had swung over into the white light and stayed there. During the midseventies when I was dedicating my orgasms to the goddess of sexual love and abundance with meditative sex rituals, I’d forgotten about my dark side, a subterranean place where my mind sniffed out dirty little perversions. My masturbation fantasies had bondage scenes where I was helpless and fucked by wild dogs or Boy Scout troops. Now that I was no longer smoking marijuana and communing with spirit guides, a little “smut” might do me some good. So I continued to ask: “What was the most humiliating, sexy thing I’ve ever done?”

  Finally, my mind darted back to the beginning of my love affair with Grant. Seven years of sexual starvation during marriage had me as horny as a nanny goat, and I’d fallen into romantic love again. Ignoring his moodiness, heavy depressions, and bursts of volatile anger, I was utterly dependent upon him for my best orgasms, which kept me coming back in spite of his bad temper.

  One Saturday night, Grant wanted to cancel our date, saying he wasn’t fit for company and preferred to be alone. Pushing my agenda, I said I’d come over and cheer him up. He declined and I insisted, confident that my sexual allure would banish his black mood. A big part of my arousal was anticipating sex while I got dressed. After I put in my diaphragm and showered, I slipped into a black knit dress that clung to every inch of my firm body. Carefully, I applied mascara, eyeliner, and lipstick. The weather was still warm, so I put on high-heeled sandals without hose. “Sexy!” I thought, as I looked in the mirror.

  When I arrived at Grant’s apartment around four in the afternoon, he was still in his pajamas nursing a depression. He let me in, and then went back into the bedroom and flopped down on his bed lethargically. Even though I could see he was miserable, I slipped off my panties with seduction in mind. Standing next to his bed, I began undulating my hips inches from his face while I slowly raised my skirt. He watched without showing any signs of interest. Heat from embarrassment flushed my cheeks, yet I moved closer and began massaging my clit, trying to arouse my disinterested lover.

  At the time, the idea that he was my master and I was his sexual slave was not in my conscious mind. I simply wanted to have sex. But in recalling that moment, I could see how my feelings of humiliation coupled with sexual arousal had produced an emotional state, a kind of desperation, and I couldn’t stop. That’s when I spotted an empty coke bottle on his end table and grabbed it. As I thrust my hips forward, I slowly pushed the bottle inside my vagina. No decent woman would have done what I was doing. I definitely felt “dirty,” but fucking myself finally got his attention. He stood up, pulled me to the floor and pushed me over the edge of his low bed. Still in his pajamas, he knelt behind me, opened the fly and shoved his hard cock into my wet cunt. Exactly what I wanted! While fucking me, he hurled his sadistic lightning bolt. “The next time you want to look sexy, I suggest you wear hose to hide the dirt on the soles of your feet.”

  It was a moment of utter humiliation that totally shattered my feminine desirability—I was dirty, unattractive. Lust was now combined with degradation, and those two conflicting emotions made my orgasm so intense that I cried and trembled all over like an autumn leaf. After getting what I wanted, the lingering feeling of shame was so confusing that I simply buried the memory and the scene was forgotten. We’d been faithful to the traditional sex roles of dominant sadistic male and submissive masochistic female with not one ounce of awareness. I was simply “in love.”

  I thought about the first summer with Tommy in my early twenties when we had a vicious argument and I’d questioned his manhood. He’d gotten so angry that he slapped me across the face. Afterward I cried while he kissed away my tears, telling me how sorry he was and how much he loved me. All of this drama was foreplay for the hot sex that followed. Very interesting! And what about the time when Dr. Juan pierced my ears, which hurt like hell, just so I wouldn’t lose the gold hoops he’d brought me from Madrid? So I wasn’t such an S/M novice after all.

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nbsp; Interesting how as romantic lovers we never thought we were playing a role. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that our society was doing around-the-clock S/M without any awareness. Lovers possessed one another, husbands dominated wives, some wives dominated husbands, mothers punished their children, the kids teased the dog, and the dog got to bite the postman. Everyone had someone to “love.”

  After several more meetings, I realized some women in the group felt that being in a role full-time bordered on an obsession. Others who were doing master and slave full-time felt the most passionate sex would always be based upon owning another person. Their style of S/M was the ultimate metaphor for romantic love. If both lovers consciously agreed, being consumed by an erotic obsession was viewed as a sexual preference.

  Although I’d burned out on romantic obsessions, I’d be the first to admit they had produced some of the hottest sex I’d ever known. Like it or not, my postmenopausal sex life had become warm and friendly, maybe even downright wholesome. The only obsessive passion in my life was the current creative project I had embraced: writing a sexual memoir. Little did I know then that the cruelest mistress of all had me totally enslaved! I feverishly wrote night after night for five years, devoted to telling my sexual story that would be rejected by every publisher who read it. There were so many rejections I lost count. I was told if I turned it into a novel, they could sell a million copies. How’s that for utter humiliation?

  My manuscript went back into the closet until I shopped it in 2005. Once again, my sex life was rejected. This time I realized that the publishing industry doesn’t deserve me. I’m back to the one place that has never censored me—the Internet.

  Go Thin or Bust: How Berkeley’s Mayer Laboratories Won the Battle of the Thin Condoms

  Rachel Swan

  A 2005 commercial for Kimono condoms speaks volumes about the company’s self-image. In the ad, a woman sits at a poker table with four men. The setup is swank: chandelier light reflects from the walls, glass tumblers litter the table, smooth jazz plays in the background. When the woman runs out of dough, she wagers a single Kimono condom, and another player sees her bet with all his remaining chips. It’s a fitting analogy for a company that presents itself both as an underdog, and a producer of high-end condoms. Consider the tagline: “Kimono. When the Stakes Are High.”

  In a market dominated by Trojan and Durex, where images of male virility are the norm, Berkeley-based Kimono has created a brand identity that’s an anathema to the competition. Launched twenty-one years ago by Mayer Laboratories, a company founded by longtime birth-control advocate David Mayer, Kimono is the condom industry’s answer to couture. It’s a sleek, elegant Japanese import with a pretty patina—packages are designed with cranes, koi and other Japanese imagery—and a price about 15 to 20 percent higher than most other brands.

  “Kimono as a name is a Japanese silk robe,” said Mayer at his office in downtown Berkeley. “But that was all part of our marketing when we started…to try to communicate more that condoms can be silky and thin and sheer and elegant—and something that women might approach as a kimono versus as a Trojan.”

  Mayer lowered his voice disparagingly on the word “Trojan,” the U.S. industry’s dominant brand, which he considers to be the Exxon-Mobil of condoms. He’s repelled by the military imagery bound up in the Trojan name and the phallic metaphors in its advertising language. (After all, Trojan’s perennially popular Trojan Magnum XL just happens to share its name with the handgun used in Dirty Harry.) “I just think they’re marketed more toward men,” Mayer said of Trojan and other industry big boys like Durex and LifeStyles. “You know, race cars, high-performance sex. Women aren’t interested in that, but it tends to hit a different demo.”

  Indeed, the American condom industry is anything but demure. In fact, it’s often quite cutthroat. Companies routinely appropriate one another’s terminology and brand identities. They send litigious letters to one another and race to beat one another to the trademark office.

  Mayer and Kimono have gone against the grain in marketing their products, basing their brand identity on the apparently radical notion that there are other ways to market condoms besides affirming the penis size of the buyer. Instead, Kimono markets its condoms as being so thin and silky that they’re practically not there. In short, the company appeals not only to women, but also to a different side of male vanity—the squeamish impulses that make many guys resistant to using a condom in the first place.

  Kimono may look like a sensitive girly-mon in the condom world, but it’s allowed Mayer to grow his business by cultivating a market that all the big boys now seem interested in infiltrating. Ironically, Mayer did this by claiming to sell the country’s thinnest condoms—a concept that seems to be at cross purposes with the very function of condoms, which is to provide reliable protection from pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases without breaking.

  Now, it seems like the whole condom industry is fighting over who makes the least-condom-like condom.

  Mayer Laboratories is located in a pristine downtown Berkeley office complex, home to insurance salesmen, lawyers and a popular local artist who illustrates New Yorker covers. The place is bright and well-ventilated, and a pebble garden in the foyer could have been transplanted from any high-end department store in Union Square. The lab looks like any other office space. There aren’t any Willy Wonka-type condom machines spitting colored disks of latex onto a conveyor belt; nor are there any seedy adult ads on the walls. Rather, it’s antiseptic, with cubicles and a large conference room in the back where, on a recent Tuesday afternoon, Mayer laid out his whole arsenal of products.

  Arrayed on the long table were six packages of condoms from Mayer’s line Kimono, along with packages of other Mayer products such as Aqua Lube, Digitex gloves, and the fc female condom. In the condom world, these are all considered to be high-end designer products: more elegant, more expensive, and more feminine than the average Trojan or Durex contraceptive. For Mayer, they hold sentimental value, symbolizing his effort to carve out a distinctive brand identity that could sustain a small Berkeley condom-maker. They also illustrate Mayer’s seemingly counterintuitive quest to popularize the world’s thinnest condom.

  Few people in the world can boast a condom history as long as that of David Mayer. In 1978, he launched National Condom Week as a freshman at UC Berkeley, spent several years working in teen programs in the Contra Costa County Health Department, and traveled to Haiti in 1984 to promote public health and family planning. Mayer describes himself as having a history of “male involvement in family planning,” and says that even if he had never spawned his own condom line, his impact would still be felt in the contraceptive world. The American Social Health Association still plans National Condom Week events every year (although after thirty years, Mayer said it has kind of gone the way of Valentine’s Day).

  When Mayer launched Kimono in 1987, the AIDS epidemic had generated a surge in consumer demand, and companies just needed to fill the pipeline. By then, most condom companies had product lines with contoured tips, ribs, studs, and splashy colors. But Mayer thought he knew another type of aesthetic that could get people to buy more condoms.

  From his company’s inception, Mayer sought out Japanese manufacturers. His reasoning was that Japan had higher quality standards and looser restrictions on condom thickness. Because Japan didn’t legalize oral contraceptives until 1999, its market for other forms of birth control was quite advanced. Mayer said Kimono’s reliance on more-advanced Japanese condom-making technology helped his company push up against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s .03 millimeter (or 30 micron) minimum-thickness limit. Mayer conceptualized his brand accordingly.

  Even before Kimono began cultivating the super-thin market, competitors paid close attention to its products. In 1988 Mayer Laboratories introduced the Kimono Maxx, a special plus-sized condom with extra head room (2.34 inches in diameter) and an additional .2 inches of length. Roughly seven months lat
er, Trojan unleashed the Magnum XL, an 8.5-inch “King of the Big Boys” that has become the gold standard for large-sized condoms (given that it’s name-checked in rap songs and worthy of its own Wikipedia definition).

  Not to be outdone, Kimono shifted its focus to thinness and delicacy. In 1992 it came out with the Kimono MicroThin, which the company claims is 20 percent thinner than the original Kimono. For sixteen years, Kimono has claimed that MicroThin is the thinnest condom sold in the United States. According to Mayer, regular Kimonos—at 55 microns of thickness—were already 20 percent thinner than most other brands. The new MicroThins measured 49 microns, Mayer said, “So now we are really ahead of our competition offering that really thin, sheer experience for users.”

  The product was groundbreaking, according to one local retailer. “I do believe they were the first people to bring in ultrathin condoms that were strong and comfortable, but offered the maximum sensation that allowed people to feel like they weren’t wearing anything at all,” said Coyote Days, senior buyer at the adult store Good Vibrations, which has carried Kimono for well over ten years. “They’re a premium line; they have different contours and different sizes. A piece of their own marketing was that they were Japanese-made, and that stood for a high quality.”

  Before Kimono hit the market, Days said, there wasn’t much incentive for big companies like Trojan (now eighty-eight years old) or Durex (now ninety-three years old) to enlarge their brands or expand their customer base. But slowly that’s changing. “It’s ‘the way we’ve always done it’ versus ‘the way we’re gonna do it now,’” Days said. “Someone comes in with a new idea, a strong brand, and something you don’t have, you’re gonna feel a little threatened and you’re gonna step up to the challenge.”

  And step up they did. Although Mayer says it took his competitors several years to acquire the ability to produce super-thin condoms (which they too accomplished by sourcing from Japan), they began appropriating his company’s language right away—even for condoms whose thinness he claims is questionable.