The Juliette Society

8

I’m thinking about everything’s Anna told me about Marcus, herself, and the birds and the bees. About fuck bruises. And I want to know what it’s like to feel Jack on my body. Not just his come. His mark. I want to know if that’s what’s missing from our sex life. Rough sex.

Jack is fucking me in bed. He’s sitting on his haunches with my legs resting against his chest and my feet over his left shoulder. He’s holding my ankles and fucking me like he’s playing the cello. His cock is sawing back and forth in my pussy. His balls are slapping against my ass cheeks, and his hand is spread across my lower belly and down into my crotch, his thumb plucking at the hood and button of my clit. He’s running through all the scales, pushing my passion up by octaves and I’m singing for him.

I’m singing for him and I decide I want to hit a higher note.

I say, ‘Hit me, Jack. I want you to hit me. Hit me hard enough to make me scream.’

I say it on the spur of the moment, and because I’m feeling good and I like the idea. But it doesn’t quite work out that way.

He stops mid-thrust.

‘What?’ he says.

‘I want you to hit me, I want you to hurt me.’

He pulls out and sits at the end of the bed, just looking at me.

It’s dark and I can’t see his expression clearly, but I know it’s not good.

‘What’s the matter?’ I ask.

There’s a long silence.

‘What did you say that for,’ Jack says. ‘Why would you even ask me to do something like that to you?’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to… I thought… ’

And I give up, because I can’t really think of any good reason why. It wasn’t something I planned, it’s something I felt and acted upon. So I don’t have an easy answer for him. I don’t have any answer at all.

‘Even if I did it, I couldn’t pretend to like it,’ he says. ‘I can’t pretend I even want to do it. I just don’t. Why would I want to hurt you.’

And I can hear in his voice that he’s not just upset and puzzled, he’s angry and fuming.

He gets into bed, all the way over on the edge of his side, and wraps the covers around him.

I’m left feeling frustrated, unsatisfied and deeply confused. I feel clumsy and dumb, so dumb, to even think that Jack would be into it.

We’re lying in bed. Together, but so remote, as if there’s a wall between us.

I start to hear Jack’s breathing getting heavy, but I can’t sleep.

I go into the living room, sit on the couch with my laptop, in the dark, and find the porn website Anna works for. I’ve been thinking about it all day, ever since she told me, and I want to see for myself how those marks got on her wrists and what she does.

I’m going to hold up my hand here and admit something embarrassing. I don’t have a whole lot of experience with internet porn. Porn movies, yes. Internet porn, no – two different beasts. And, yes, I do know it’s almost as impossible to avoid, but it’s just never been my thing. Maybe Kinsey was onto something after all with his little theory about women and visual stimuli.

When I think of internet porn, I think of video games, Star Wars figures, Marvel comics and science fiction, and all the things that geeky virgin teenage boys develop obsessions with as a cover for their one overriding obsession:

Jerking off to search terms on Google Images.

I think of geeky adult men who never outgrow their obsessions, just upgrade them. From toy cars to real cars, action figures to pussy-in-a-can. From Google Images to YouPorn.

I think of all the billions of guys, in every country of the world, who are jerking off to internet porn at the same time. Or maybe not even internet porn. Maybe just Kim Kardashian’s website. Jerking off over badly retouched and barely titillating photos of the Kardashian sisters. I think of all the billions of men ejaculating gazillions of spermatozoa simultaneously over images of Kim Kardashian’s digital ass.

I think, what a waste of good sperm.

What a waste of precious energy.

If only someone invented a way of tapping that energy at source. Or found a way to turn the billions of come-stiffened Kleenex tissues discarded daily into a source of fuel. If someone discovered how to do that, most of the world’s energy problems would be solved in a snap. No more wars for oil. No more carbon footprints. No more nuclear waste.

No more wasted tax dollars needlessly spent trying to achieve cold fusion.

Just billions of hot, sweaty guys sitting in front of their computer monitors with their pants around their ankles, furiously jerking themselves off over internet porn and Kim Kardashian’s ass, day and night, night and day.

Without ever feeling guilty.

So I guess what I’m saying is this, when it comes to internet porn, I’m on the fence. Not a user myself, but I can definitely see the potential benefits for everlasting world peace.

But this porn site, Anna’s site, even with my limited experience of the genre, must be the strangest porn site I’ve ever seen. Starting with the name.

Sodom.

Or rather, SODOM, all caps. Because the last thing anyone requires from pornography is subtlety.

Sodom. And not Gomorrah. Not because it’s too subtle, but probably because it’s too hard to spell and sounds like an STD. Because pornography and STDs, well, let’s just say they’re never going to be the best of friends.

So, SODOM. An acronym of sorts. For the words splashed across the home page, also in caps.

SODALITY OF DOMINANTS.

Whatever that means.

I’m looking at this website and I can’t make head or tail of it. This isn’t pornography as I know it or understand it. For a start, there’s no sex on display. None at all. At least, none that I can see. Just a gallery and a search engine.

I don’t know what to search for and afraid of what I might find if I do. I scan through the gallery instead. An endless scrolling collection of girls, in portraits that look like yearbook photos, all exceptionally pretty, almost every one college-age. I scan through the gallery looking for Anna, half-expecting to recognize someone else I know too.

I wonder how many girls there are like Anna who pay their way through college like this, in porn. If I’m the only college-age female who doesn’t. I wonder why pretty girls, whose looks give them such a natural advantage in life, choose to turn what they have to their disadvantage.

I think of Séverine. Who had everything, wanted for nothing, and how that wasn’t enough. Séverine, who, more than anything, wanted to be nothing.

I think of Anna. And then I see her.

I click on her picture. It brings up another gallery. All of Anna’s scenes, each one illustrated by a thumbnail. I scroll through them. There’s a lot, too many to count. And the thumbnails, they look like minutely detailed tableaus of medieval torture from an illuminated manuscript.

The movie clips don’t have titles. Anna doesn’t have a name, not even a porn name. She’s been reduced to a number – a generic ten digit number. It feels like I’m flicking through a Sears catalog of sexual aberration and torture or that I’ve clicked open a window into Pandora’s Box. I wish I’d never seen it because now I can never un-see it.

Where should I start?

How about the drilldo? Seems as good a place as any. The first clip I click on features Anna, a toilet and a drilldo. If you don’t know what a drilldo is, I’ll tell you.

It’s exactly what it sounds like. A drill with a dildo where the tip should be.

The next question is, how does it work?

And the answer to that is, do you really have to ask?

Ever had to drill holes in the wall to put up a set of shelves?

Then you already you know that once it gets going, an electric drill will slice through plaster like butter. And it will keep going until it hits that outer wall of concrete and stone. Then it starts to shake the shit out of you. You set it to ‘hammer’, hoping to chisel away a little further and, when it hits stone again, your drill has a kick like a .45.

Now, imagine putting that inside you.

I’ll stop there for a second to let that sink in.

An ordinary household electric drill, put to uses its manufacturer never intended, never even considered as part of its recommended usage. A power tool turned into a sex toy.

Not just any sex toy.

The .45 Magnum of sex toys.

Call me naive but I had no idea such a thing existed. I had no idea vibrator technology had advanced to the degree that the battery-powered rabbit was now as outmoded as the Sony Walkman. That vibrator technology had evolved into the realms of body horror, dragging female sexuality kicking and screaming along with it.

Two thousand years of culture and seven ages of man, all leading up to the moment when some genius came up with the idea of combining a dildo and a power drill. As if that’s exactly what the world was waiting for, a sex toy that can punish the insides of a woman to orgasm at twenty-four hundred revolutions per minute.

Not just any sex toy.

The Maserati of sex toys.

Built for women, but designed – and could only have been designed – by man. As if women haven’t already been punished and tortured enough by the designs of man. Someone had to invent the drilldo. Now imagine watching this thing punish the insides of your new best friend.

I’m looking at Anna tied to a toilet, on a concrete plinth in the middle of a large, dark, dank, dirty, creepy warehouse. There’s no set-up for the clip, no explanation, no plot, no dialogue. Other than Anna you never see a single other person. No shadows lurking in the background. No voices off-camera. It’s as if she has been abducted, locked up and left there. And maybe that’s the point. Anna told me that the site had a specific audience and now I understand why she said it. The movies are edited so that you can see only what whoever made them wants you to see.

When Anna told me what she did, when I saw the welts and bruises on her wrists, it unnerved me. But my first instinct when confronted with this is to laugh. It looks so silly. But also strangely beautiful.

Anna’s soft, pale, ruddied flesh is set against the hard white enamel of the toilet. She’s slouching against the toilet, head and shoulders against the cistern, lower back resting against the seat, her legs extended vertically, in a v-shape, held by ropes tied around her ankles, like the strings that hold up a marionette, so her pussy and ass are on show. Ropes above and below her breasts reach behind and around her, anchoring her to the bowl like a hat strapped to a lady race-goer at the Kentucky Derby.

She looks like the kind of thing Marcel Duchamp might have come up with if he’d only ventured into porn.

A woman tied to a toilet.

Every plumber’s fantasy.

The drilldo.

Joe the electrician’s favorite tool.

Put them together and what have you got?

The ultimate in handyman porn.

And this drilldo, it’s pounding away at Anna’s pussy like a jackhammer and her eyes have rolled into the back of her head. Her body is trembling the way your hand trembles when you’re holding an electric drill. Her whole body. Like she’s strapped to a chair in a wind tunnel.

And she’s screaming. The way you scream when the car of the roller coaster tips over that first big curve and all you can see is that long drop racing towards you. A scream of pure pleasure and sheer inexhaustible terror. But her scream doesn’t stop, it just merges into the remorseless electric roar of the drilldo.

I have the volume turned all the way down, but somehow it still doesn’t seem low enough. Because a scream sounds piercing at any volume. I’m scared to turn off the sound because I’m certain that, without it, everything will just look ten times worse.

I glance at the bedroom door.

I really hope Jack’s asleep.

I’m trying to imagine why any woman would want to submit to that. I ask myself why Anna would want to submit to that. And the answer is right there in front of me.

Her eyes have glazed over. There’s a strange kind of ecstasy written on her face. A look that says, ‘gimme more’ and ‘no more’. Both. At the same time. A look beyond the limits of endurance. A look I’ll never forget. I can’t stop looking. I’m afraid to look away. I don’t know whether I want to fuck Anna or save her.

I don’t hear the bedroom door until it’s open.

Until it’s too late and Jack’s standing there, naked and rubbing sleep out of his eyes.

I stab at the keyboard, frantically.

Turn off the volume.

‘What time is it?’ Jack says, sleepy-voiced. He’s woozy, but still a little sour.

‘You frightened me,’ I say.

Did he hear?

Hide the browser.

I’m flushed with the fear of being discovered. Paranoid it shows on my face.

Pull up the word processor.

‘What are you doing?’ he says.

He heard. He knows. He suspects.

‘Essay,’ I say, and sigh, just a little too dramatically.

No more questions. Please, no more questions. I’m not good at this. The guilt thing.

He goes to get himself a glass of water in the kitchen, and walks back through the living room.

‘Don’t stay up too long,’ he says, standing above me, looking down.

‘Soon,’ I say.

He doesn’t know, he didn’t hear. I can hear it in his voice now. I feel stupid.

The guilt of doing wrong replaced by the guilt of being dumb.

And then I’m distracted by his cock. Right at eye level. Early morning cock, fat and fleshy. His balls hanging full and low. Sometimes I think I could tell the time of day by the shape and size of his cock at any given moment, like the shadows on a sundial that lengthen and recede. I know if I could put Jack’s cock in my mouth now, I could suck all the disappointment out of him and make him forget anything happened between us at all.

He goes back to the bedroom and closes the door behind him. I wait to make sure he’s not going to come out again. I wait as long as I can. I wait thirty wasted seconds staring at the blank page of an essay I have no intention of writing. Then I pull up the SODOM website and start again.

I’m looking at Anna in an iron cage that’s been cast in shape of a dog, standing on all fours. It fits the curves of her body so snugly it seems like it was custom-made. Only her rear-end and her head are not encased by metal.

From what I can tell, the whole cage is electrified because there are cables connected to it that trail off, out of shot, and every time Anna knocks against the bars, even slightly, she howls in pain. Just like a dog is supposed to.

The clip is shot so it never cuts, just tracks around and around and around Anna, ever so slowly, just so you can soak in all the details.

It tracks past Anna’s rear-end and I can’t help but notice her labia squeezed plump between her thighs, entirely and expertly shaved, with not a razor bump or burn in sight, but coated with thin beads of sweat. She’s completely smooth and hairless, except for a neatly trimmed bush, dirty-blonde and downy, in the shape of a rabbit’s foot.

Sticking out her ass is a large, shiny aluminum butt-plug that looks like an H-bomb. And sticking out of that are several black cables that are clamped to the bars of the cage.

The lips of Anna’s pussy are held apart by metal clips. They look like bulldog clips, but they have screws in the top with copper wire around them, which hangs slack, all the way down to the terminals of a car battery placed nearby on the floor. It is jury-rigged with dials so that the juice can be turned up and down.

I figure it must have been done for effect because even I know it’s pretty hard to get an electric shock from a car battery. A mild buzz, maybe, but nothing lethal. Even so, there are more electrical cables clustered around Anna’s nether region than the backside of an office mainframe. And it makes me nervous.

It’s as if this Anna, the one I’m watching, is a different person. Not the Anna who sits behind me in class. Not even the one who pulled up her sleeves and showed me the deep welts and livid bruises on her wrists and arms.

This Anna deliberately puts herself in harm’s way. Not knowing exactly what she’s getting into or how she’ll react. Whether she can take it or if it will break her.

Even so, I find it absolutely compelling. I can’t stop watching. I’m glued to the screen. I need to see what will happen next. I’m drawn to it the way I’m always drawn towards things that scare me. I see myself in Anna, just as I saw myself in Séverine. And I want to understand why.