America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction - Hardcover
Welcome to the America we don’t usually talk about, a place where that nice couple down the street could be saddling up for “pony play,” making and selling their own porn DVDs, or hosting other couples for a little flogging. As award-winning journalist Brian Alexander uncovers, fringe experimentation has gone suburban. Soccer moms, your accountant, even your own parents could be turning kinky.
Stunned by the uninhibited questions from ordinary people on his msnbc.com column, “Sexploration” (“My wife and I have heard that a lot of couples in their thirties are playing strip poker . . . as well as skinny-dipping with other couples/friends. Any idea if this is a fashionable trend or has it been going on for some time and we never knew it?” or “I am interested in bondage and hear that there are secret bondage clubs someplace. Can you help me find them?”), Brian Alexander was driven to understand Americans’ desire to get down and dirty—especially in an era where conservative family values dominate.
To find out what people are really doing—and why a country that suffered a national freak- out over Janet Jackson’s breast was enthusiastically getting in touch with its inner perv—Alexander set out on a sexual safari in modern America. Whether mixing it up at a convention of fetishists, struggling into his own pair of PVC pants for a wild night at a sex club, being tutored on dildos by a nineteen-year-old supervisor while working in an adult store, or learning the surprising ways of Biblical sex from an evangelical preacher, Alexander uses humor and insight to reveal a sexual world that is quickly redefining the phrase “polite society.”
Gonzo journalism at its funniest and kinkiest, America Unzipped is a fascinating cultural study and an eye-popping peek into the lives of people you’d least expect to find tied up and wearing latex.
One Dozen Things to Avoid When Exploring American Sex
1. Asking an enthusiastic devotee to explain cock-and-ball torture while standing within arm’s length.
2. Assuming an evangelical Christian will not be familiar with the term “69.”
3. Incredibly tight PVC pants.
4. Trying to become the first male sex toy home party salesman in Missouri.
5. Standing too close to bondage models without wearing overalls and safety goggles.
6. Insisting that Dan Quayle would never invest in porn.
7. Displaying a look of surprise when a grandmother discusses the risk of removing a dildo from a microwave oven.
8. Admitting your sex vocabulary is smaller than an eighth grader’s.
9. Explaining the difference between “cream pie” and “gonzo” to a suburban mom shopping for her son’s birthday sex DVDs.
10. Trying to interview a naked submissive locked on a cage.
11. Expecting answers about sex from a six-foot-tall pink rabbit.
12. Thinking that porn kings could not possibly have Ivy League degrees and run charitable foundations.
Stunned by the uninhibited questions from ordinary people on his msnbc.com column, “Sexploration” (“My wife and I have heard that a lot of couples in their thirties are playing strip poker . . . as well as skinny-dipping with other couples/friends. Any idea if this is a fashionable trend or has it been going on for some time and we never knew it?” or “I am interested in bondage and hear that there are secret bondage clubs someplace. Can you help me find them?”), Brian Alexander was driven to understand Americans’ desire to get down and dirty—especially in an era where conservative family values dominate.
To find out what people are really doing—and why a country that suffered a national freak- out over Janet Jackson’s breast was enthusiastically getting in touch with its inner perv—Alexander set out on a sexual safari in modern America. Whether mixing it up at a convention of fetishists, struggling into his own pair of PVC pants for a wild night at a sex club, being tutored on dildos by a nineteen-year-old supervisor while working in an adult store, or learning the surprising ways of Biblical sex from an evangelical preacher, Alexander uses humor and insight to reveal a sexual world that is quickly redefining the phrase “polite society.”
Gonzo journalism at its funniest and kinkiest, America Unzipped is a fascinating cultural study and an eye-popping peek into the lives of people you’d least expect to find tied up and wearing latex.
One Dozen Things to Avoid When Exploring American Sex
1. Asking an enthusiastic devotee to explain cock-and-ball torture while standing within arm’s length.
2. Assuming an evangelical Christian will not be familiar with the term “69.”
3. Incredibly tight PVC pants.
4. Trying to become the first male sex toy home party salesman in Missouri.
5. Standing too close to bondage models without wearing overalls and safety goggles.
6. Insisting that Dan Quayle would never invest in porn.
7. Displaying a look of surprise when a grandmother discusses the risk of removing a dildo from a microwave oven.
8. Admitting your sex vocabulary is smaller than an eighth grader’s.
9. Explaining the difference between “cream pie” and “gonzo” to a suburban mom shopping for her son’s birthday sex DVDs.
10. Trying to interview a naked submissive locked on a cage.
11. Expecting answers about sex from a six-foot-tall pink rabbit.
12. Thinking that porn kings could not possibly have Ivy League degrees and run charitable foundations.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
BRIAN ALEXANDER is an award-winning contributing editor at Glamour magazine and writes the “Sexploration” column for msnbc.com. His six-part online series, “America Unzipped,” received more than one million viewers per month. He lives in San Diego, California.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
CHAPTER 1
The Sex Mogul of Hillsborough, North Carolina
I Explore Phil Harvey's Empire
Pleasure is so difficult to come by in this culture. I say fight for your right to enjoy your porn, your sexual fantasies, your masturbation and your orgasms.
-Betty Dodson, 2003
He may just have been trying to shock me, but out of the blue, over breakfast, he asked what I thought about threesomes," Kathy Brummitt told me of a conversation she had with her fifteen-year-old son. Kathy is a forty-something brunette from central North Carolina with a short, sensible haircut, a little extra middle-aged weight, and a soft lilt to her voice. She resembles my Catholic-high-school Latin teacher, the one I used to torment by choosing to read aloud Roman narratives about bathhouse prostitutes and by displaying Roman good-luck drawings of erections.
So normally it would have been easy for me to picture Kathy dropping a spoon into her heart-healthy Cheerios, grabbing her minivan keys, and dragging her son to school to demand the principal explain just what kind of education the kid was receiving. But I was having a tough time imagining Kathy's kitchen, because just as she launched into the details of how she handled this ticklish mothering challenge, I became preoccupied with a pretty brunette sitting naked and open-legged in a love swing.
A scrawny middle-aged guy with thinning black hair had his hands on the two straps attaching the swing to the ceiling of a dreamlike darkened room. He was naked, too, and gently pushing the swing back and forth about six inches at a time as he watched his erection slide in and out of the brunette. She, meanwhile, was wearing a big, satisfied smile. Though the scene on the video monitor just over Kathy's shoulder was running without sound, it had the effect of turning Kathy's voice into so much white noise. I thought I heard her say, "So I asked him why he wanted to know," but I couldn't be sure because-really-I was very impressed by the precision measurements that must have been involved in setting up the swing.
Think about it: What are the chances you could hang a swing from your ceiling while factoring in the critical height differential between a hard and a flaccid penis, the weight of the person in the swing, and a dozen other variables, without making multiple trips to Home Depot? How were those calculations made? Did they consult a carpenter? Was a laser device involved?
Meanwhile, Kathy was chattering away like a concerned PTA mom, seemingly oblivious to the video sex going on right behind her. "And it turned out that a friend of his wanted to have a threesome with my son's girlfriend and his girlfriend . . ."
I tried paying attention to Kathy, but now I couldn't help counting all the reasons why, and I mean never in a hundred million years, I could never have broached this subject with my mother.
"He really said this to you?" I asked, interrupting the story. "I mean, you two actually discussed threesomes?"
The guy on the video screen started moving the swing a little faster, bending his knees as if bearing down on a difficult task.
"Yes, of course," she said.
Then he arched his neck and stood up straight as if struck by lightning. His butt cheeks clenched. Apparently the love swing worked.
"And so then I asked him, 'Well, what do you think of threesomes?' I didn't want to appear shocked at all because I think he was testing me, though I do appreciate that he felt free to approach me with such a question, and he said, 'It might be okay.'"
Most mothers would have become hysterical at this point in the conversation, but not Kathy Brummitt. Thinking about threesomes is part of her job. I didn't realize it at first, but Kathy was manning a convention exhibit booth for an outfit called the Sinclair Intimacy Institute, and as I soon learned, she was the director of production on the love swing video, and others, too, for Sinclair, based in the unlikely location of Hillsborough, North Carolina. In other words, it's her job to hire people to have sex, hire other people to film those people having sex, and make sure the whole production looks classy.
"So you make porn."
Kathy smiled. No, she said, she doesn't consider this porn. She knows porn, and porn doesn't look or sound like this. This is education, erotic how-to, an exploration of fantasies and techniques that can forge a deeper bond between loving couples. The way she said all this made the love-swing video sound almost medicinal.
Besides, she argued, the movies she helps create are produced by Sinclair for its Better Sex series, those DVDs and tapes advertised in sports sections of newspapers all over the country, in women's magazines, even in highbrow publications like the New York Times Book Review and the Atlantic. The ads feature attractive people in each other's arms apparently in the beginnings of foreplay. They are who we would like to be, or at least who we wish our lovers would be. This kind of product, Kathy told me, is far removed from the pizza-delivery-boy-meets-horny-housewife world of porn.
The Atlantic!
To me, Kathy was one of the more interesting people at the sexology convention, which, as far as I was concerned, was mostly a bust. I had gone because I had my questions and thought perhaps I could get most of them answered in two or three days of PowerPoint presentations. There were seminars and symposia and lectures from Women Going Topless on the Red Mile During the Stanley Cup Playoffs, Calgary, May-June, 2004, to Sex with Animals on the Caribbean Coast of Columbia (76 percent of adolescent boys do it, apparently, usually with a "she-ass"). But an awful lot of the dialogue was opinionated and political and not really about why so many of my readers wanted to know if it would be a good idea to have sex in a car for the entertainment of passing truckers.
One researcher's poster did address a question somebody had once asked me. My reader wanted to know about bukkake. I had never heard of bukkake, so I looked it up, promptly dismissed it as urban legend, and never answered. But as the poster explained, bukkake "is a Japanese term that refers to showering a receiver, male or female, with semen from one, several, or many men." I had seen porn and so I had seen the facial "cum shot," but according to the poster, bukkake was neither urban legend nor a pornography trope. It had "spread across the globe and . . . has gone from cult-like status to an accepted sexual practice." There were now organized bukkake groups that "have generated several popular schools and techniques" of bukkake practice and that have brought bukkake into the sexual "mainstream."
Though I was grateful for such bits of information, I preferred talking with Kathy because she was not a sexologist or a sexuality theorist. She was giving people what she said they wanted-more information on how to expand their sex lives in any number of ways, with any number of accessories. Still, I half expected her to be apologetic. Kathy just didn't fit the part of somebody who works in the sex industry. But she is proud, she said. Kathy believes that helping people find more and better sex is a noble purpose. She is a middle-class mom whose concern for others is expressed by making sex videos.
The DVDs seemed popular among the sex therapists, psychologists, and sociologists. Several stopped by as Kathy and I talked. They like the idea of visual aids, they said, because there is now so much curiosity out in the big world away from sexology conferences. People are asking questions they never asked before. Hearing answers from a therapist in an office about how to slide a butt plug into your ass or how to use your tongue on a woman's clitoris is a far less amusing experience than watching a well-made video with folks who look like more attractive versions of your neighbors.
"We're very successful," Kathy said. "We sell to people all over the country. Big cities, small towns, Midwest, South, West, everywhere."
When I asked her if it isn't difficult to find couples to perform for her, especially considering that the videos didn't seem to hire pros with porn-star names like Allysin Chaynes, she said no.
"It's not really hard at all." Some are indeed porn-industry wannabes, "but most are just couples who like having sex in front of cameras." Kathy had a way of making this sound like taking the dog for a walk. "And thank God for them. They help us promote better sexual health, better relationships."
Kathy made her work seem practically altruistic, but she is not exactly employed by a sexier version of the Maryknoll Sisters. Sinclair is a division of PHE, Phil Harvey Enterprises, of Hillsborough, a porn and sex toy empire founded by, naturally, Phil Harvey.
Despite her insistence that she was exactly what I had thought her to be-a mom, a businesswoman, a churchgoer-despite the way she regarded her work as being as American as the Wal-Mart greeter, I had to ask how others living in the geographical heart of the nation's evangelical revival react to her job. Do they stop her in the produce aisle at Food Lion to inquire how the dildo scene worked out that day? Or do they hug their child close and dash over to canned soups?
"We've all had the 'What do I tell my mother?' moment," she replied, referring to how she and her coworkers explain their careers to friends and family in North Carolina. "But everyone accepts that this is a job I love and that we do a lot of good for people."
"So how did you solve the threesome dilemma?" I asked. Her face lit up with the triumph of mothers everywhere who respond with, "If Jimmy jumped off the bridge, would you do it, too?"
"I just asked him, 'Well, how would you feel if your girlfriend wanted to be with you and another boy?'
"He sai...
The Sex Mogul of Hillsborough, North Carolina
I Explore Phil Harvey's Empire
Pleasure is so difficult to come by in this culture. I say fight for your right to enjoy your porn, your sexual fantasies, your masturbation and your orgasms.
-Betty Dodson, 2003
He may just have been trying to shock me, but out of the blue, over breakfast, he asked what I thought about threesomes," Kathy Brummitt told me of a conversation she had with her fifteen-year-old son. Kathy is a forty-something brunette from central North Carolina with a short, sensible haircut, a little extra middle-aged weight, and a soft lilt to her voice. She resembles my Catholic-high-school Latin teacher, the one I used to torment by choosing to read aloud Roman narratives about bathhouse prostitutes and by displaying Roman good-luck drawings of erections.
So normally it would have been easy for me to picture Kathy dropping a spoon into her heart-healthy Cheerios, grabbing her minivan keys, and dragging her son to school to demand the principal explain just what kind of education the kid was receiving. But I was having a tough time imagining Kathy's kitchen, because just as she launched into the details of how she handled this ticklish mothering challenge, I became preoccupied with a pretty brunette sitting naked and open-legged in a love swing.
A scrawny middle-aged guy with thinning black hair had his hands on the two straps attaching the swing to the ceiling of a dreamlike darkened room. He was naked, too, and gently pushing the swing back and forth about six inches at a time as he watched his erection slide in and out of the brunette. She, meanwhile, was wearing a big, satisfied smile. Though the scene on the video monitor just over Kathy's shoulder was running without sound, it had the effect of turning Kathy's voice into so much white noise. I thought I heard her say, "So I asked him why he wanted to know," but I couldn't be sure because-really-I was very impressed by the precision measurements that must have been involved in setting up the swing.
Think about it: What are the chances you could hang a swing from your ceiling while factoring in the critical height differential between a hard and a flaccid penis, the weight of the person in the swing, and a dozen other variables, without making multiple trips to Home Depot? How were those calculations made? Did they consult a carpenter? Was a laser device involved?
Meanwhile, Kathy was chattering away like a concerned PTA mom, seemingly oblivious to the video sex going on right behind her. "And it turned out that a friend of his wanted to have a threesome with my son's girlfriend and his girlfriend . . ."
I tried paying attention to Kathy, but now I couldn't help counting all the reasons why, and I mean never in a hundred million years, I could never have broached this subject with my mother.
"He really said this to you?" I asked, interrupting the story. "I mean, you two actually discussed threesomes?"
The guy on the video screen started moving the swing a little faster, bending his knees as if bearing down on a difficult task.
"Yes, of course," she said.
Then he arched his neck and stood up straight as if struck by lightning. His butt cheeks clenched. Apparently the love swing worked.
"And so then I asked him, 'Well, what do you think of threesomes?' I didn't want to appear shocked at all because I think he was testing me, though I do appreciate that he felt free to approach me with such a question, and he said, 'It might be okay.'"
Most mothers would have become hysterical at this point in the conversation, but not Kathy Brummitt. Thinking about threesomes is part of her job. I didn't realize it at first, but Kathy was manning a convention exhibit booth for an outfit called the Sinclair Intimacy Institute, and as I soon learned, she was the director of production on the love swing video, and others, too, for Sinclair, based in the unlikely location of Hillsborough, North Carolina. In other words, it's her job to hire people to have sex, hire other people to film those people having sex, and make sure the whole production looks classy.
"So you make porn."
Kathy smiled. No, she said, she doesn't consider this porn. She knows porn, and porn doesn't look or sound like this. This is education, erotic how-to, an exploration of fantasies and techniques that can forge a deeper bond between loving couples. The way she said all this made the love-swing video sound almost medicinal.
Besides, she argued, the movies she helps create are produced by Sinclair for its Better Sex series, those DVDs and tapes advertised in sports sections of newspapers all over the country, in women's magazines, even in highbrow publications like the New York Times Book Review and the Atlantic. The ads feature attractive people in each other's arms apparently in the beginnings of foreplay. They are who we would like to be, or at least who we wish our lovers would be. This kind of product, Kathy told me, is far removed from the pizza-delivery-boy-meets-horny-housewife world of porn.
The Atlantic!
To me, Kathy was one of the more interesting people at the sexology convention, which, as far as I was concerned, was mostly a bust. I had gone because I had my questions and thought perhaps I could get most of them answered in two or three days of PowerPoint presentations. There were seminars and symposia and lectures from Women Going Topless on the Red Mile During the Stanley Cup Playoffs, Calgary, May-June, 2004, to Sex with Animals on the Caribbean Coast of Columbia (76 percent of adolescent boys do it, apparently, usually with a "she-ass"). But an awful lot of the dialogue was opinionated and political and not really about why so many of my readers wanted to know if it would be a good idea to have sex in a car for the entertainment of passing truckers.
One researcher's poster did address a question somebody had once asked me. My reader wanted to know about bukkake. I had never heard of bukkake, so I looked it up, promptly dismissed it as urban legend, and never answered. But as the poster explained, bukkake "is a Japanese term that refers to showering a receiver, male or female, with semen from one, several, or many men." I had seen porn and so I had seen the facial "cum shot," but according to the poster, bukkake was neither urban legend nor a pornography trope. It had "spread across the globe and . . . has gone from cult-like status to an accepted sexual practice." There were now organized bukkake groups that "have generated several popular schools and techniques" of bukkake practice and that have brought bukkake into the sexual "mainstream."
Though I was grateful for such bits of information, I preferred talking with Kathy because she was not a sexologist or a sexuality theorist. She was giving people what she said they wanted-more information on how to expand their sex lives in any number of ways, with any number of accessories. Still, I half expected her to be apologetic. Kathy just didn't fit the part of somebody who works in the sex industry. But she is proud, she said. Kathy believes that helping people find more and better sex is a noble purpose. She is a middle-class mom whose concern for others is expressed by making sex videos.
The DVDs seemed popular among the sex therapists, psychologists, and sociologists. Several stopped by as Kathy and I talked. They like the idea of visual aids, they said, because there is now so much curiosity out in the big world away from sexology conferences. People are asking questions they never asked before. Hearing answers from a therapist in an office about how to slide a butt plug into your ass or how to use your tongue on a woman's clitoris is a far less amusing experience than watching a well-made video with folks who look like more attractive versions of your neighbors.
"We're very successful," Kathy said. "We sell to people all over the country. Big cities, small towns, Midwest, South, West, everywhere."
When I asked her if it isn't difficult to find couples to perform for her, especially considering that the videos didn't seem to hire pros with porn-star names like Allysin Chaynes, she said no.
"It's not really hard at all." Some are indeed porn-industry wannabes, "but most are just couples who like having sex in front of cameras." Kathy had a way of making this sound like taking the dog for a walk. "And thank God for them. They help us promote better sexual health, better relationships."
Kathy made her work seem practically altruistic, but she is not exactly employed by a sexier version of the Maryknoll Sisters. Sinclair is a division of PHE, Phil Harvey Enterprises, of Hillsborough, a porn and sex toy empire founded by, naturally, Phil Harvey.
Despite her insistence that she was exactly what I had thought her to be-a mom, a businesswoman, a churchgoer-despite the way she regarded her work as being as American as the Wal-Mart greeter, I had to ask how others living in the geographical heart of the nation's evangelical revival react to her job. Do they stop her in the produce aisle at Food Lion to inquire how the dildo scene worked out that day? Or do they hug their child close and dash over to canned soups?
"We've all had the 'What do I tell my mother?' moment," she replied, referring to how she and her coworkers explain their careers to friends and family in North Carolina. "But everyone accepts that this is a job I love and that we do a lot of good for people."
"So how did you solve the threesome dilemma?" I asked. Her face lit up with the triumph of mothers everywhere who respond with, "If Jimmy jumped off the bridge, would you do it, too?"
"I just asked him, 'Well, how would you feel if your girlfriend wanted to be with you and another boy?'
"He sai...
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherCrown
- Publication date2008
- ISBN 10 0307351327
- ISBN 13 9780307351326
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages320
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