Stoya™

August 31st, NYC

I’m hosting this party for Fleshbot/Lux Alptraum in a couple of weeks.

Speaking of Lux, she’s submitted a proposal for a panel at SXSW on Sex and Social Media. It’d be pretty cool if you went and voted for it, since that’s apparently how panels get approved. Here’s the link: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/1010

The Trip Home

Somehow we’ve gotten everything on my list done in time to take the subway home. I’m torn between feeling satisfied by the efficiency and feeling lame because we’ll be in bed before one am. I’m also drunk. Breakfast was a long time ago, women have a lower alcohol tolerance than men (they’ve done scientific studies), and I’ve been keeping up with Matt drink-for-drink. He suggests we get coffee on the way to the train station. I state my preference for and receive chai. As soon as all that caffeine and sugar hits my system I go from docile and toasted to highly energetic and rambunctious.

I’m blaming the lack of photos in this post on the fact that I got drunk and forgot to keep posing for them.

There is a very long escalator leading from street level down to the subway platform. Standing in front of me is a woman with a furry pink scarf. She’s absorbed in a conversation with the woman on the step below her. I’m staring at the scarf trying to figure out if I can pet it without her noticing. It looks really soft and I wanted to pet
kittens earlier in the day and didn’t have the chance. The scarf is on top of her hair, which is on top of her winter coat. She’s probably wearing at least a shirt, if not an undershirt as well. There are so many layers between the scarf and her skin that she’d have to be like the girl from The Princess and the Pea to feel anything. I must have some facial expression that conveys the mischief going on in my brain, because Matt leans over and asks what I’m up to.

“Nothing.”

My hand reaches out to touch the pink fur, letting him know that I am in fact totally up to something. Up to something really weird that he’s going to have a hard time talking our way out of if I get caught. He gently slaps my hand down and reminds me that we’re in a foreign country. He’s distracted by trying to formulate a convincing argument against touching this stranger. We’re getting close to the end of the escalator and I’m running out of time. My right arm is trapped, constrained by Matt’s hand and what I’m currently perceiving as his spoilsport streak, but my left arm is gloriously free. Very gently I reach over and stroke this woman’s fuzzy cold-weather accessory with my index finger.

“Yes! What? I think it’s healthy to indulge my bizarre compulsions. It was harmless. She’ll never know.”

… and she never would have known, were it not for her friend who was standing behind us watching the whole scene unfold.

Oops.

In my defense, groping people on public transportation is practically tradition. It happens so often in Japan that they have special pink cars reserved for women during the crowded morning rush, when most gropers supposedly strike. There’s enough of a market for train groping fantasies that Tokyo has multiple brothels with fake train cars where the prostitutes act like innocent commuters. They have a Groping Prevention Week. Before you suggest that I should have brought a furry scarf to a prostitute, let me remind you that the really exciting parts of the red light districts are off limits to me because of my race and gender.

I now feel like I’ve experienced illicit groping from both sides, as the gropee and the groper. As the groper, I kind of feel like a jerk. Feel free to tell me how much of a jerk you think I am at the Fleshbot Awards tonight.* All Twitter verifications of jerk status will be ignored.

(reposted from Fleshbot)

*Except, you know, the Fleshbot Awards were weeks ago and now you’ve totally missed your window to point out my character flaws.

They Call It The Pink Trade Here

Akihabara is full of electronics and anime. It’s the Tokyo that American fans of manga imagine, home to the world’s first dedicated robot store and covered in signs depicting cartoon girls with giant eyes and inhuman waist to hip ratios. Epileptic fit-inducing displays of flashing lights lure customers into shops full of electronics and raw materials for customization or building from scratch.Other store fronts display an incredible range of anime and collectible statues, half of which looks like it could be porn. This would be cause for investigation were it not for the actual porn store, eight stories high.

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It’s across from the four story porn store, and down the street from the five story adult shop, but “bigger” and “porn” seem to be concepts which go together well, so we head into the super-sized one.

Aside from the scat DVDs displayed next to the entrance, the pixelated genitals, and a more varied selection of anime/cosplay themed blow up dolls and skimpy costumes, it looks just like an American or European adult store. I’m disappointed. See, my first encounter with Japanese porn was downright bizarre:

On my first trip to Japan, I was introduced to an artist named Daikichi Amano. He brought me a small wooden box containing prints of his work. Surreal photographs of partially nude women wearing butterflies , tree bark, swans, or various ocean-dwelling creatures. The girls were all alive, the animals ranged from live through dead, sometimes expiring as the photos were being taken. In one, a girl wears an octopus as a hat. In another, a vagina holds bright green moss and tiny lizards. It sounds weird… because it
is. He told me that he considers himself a pornographer. I started to say that nudity and sexual themes are common in art, that the differences between tanned leather and freshly plucked goose are mostly semantic, although I could see the olfactory repercussions as well. His work lays bare the base nature of humanity in an aesthetically pleasing way, exposes the raw instincts to kill and fuck, and presents them in a format so intricate and beautiful that the viewer is drawn in before they have a chance to close their minds to what is being shown. He silently trumped my defense of his art by handing me a compilation of his Genki Genki work. I would tell you to google it, but I’m not sure what the legality of accessing a (mostly) maritime bestiality website is in most countries. Yes sir, that is definitely porn and you directed and filmed it, meaning you would be classified as a pornographer. I was and still am classified as a pornographer, but I make a very different sort of porn.

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Obviously I took it back to the hotel and watched it. I watched an entire film of women having sex with a variety of not human creatures. A couple of hours later, Daikichi arrived at the room, having planned a karaoke excursion. Among other negative qualities, karaoke bars are loud places and I was much more interested in asking questions in an environment where I would have a higher chance of effective communication. The first thing I wanted to know was where he had acquired a lesbian canine. Live fish, frogs, and octopi seem fairly easy to come by, but I didn’t think someone would purchase a dog just to film one sex scene. It turns out the dog belonged to Daikichi, she was his pet, and he’d filmed that one scene when he first started making pornographic films but wouldn’t do it again. He felt bad for the dog because she’d been sick afterwards, she’d ingested too much condensed milk during the filming (that’s how they got the dog to perform oral sex on her human partner) and he doesn’t like to see creatures actually suffer. He indicated that the woman in the scene had been more than willing to participate, and did not feel bad for her.

Fascinating.

Meanwhile, back on the fourth floor of the eight story porn shop, I am standing under a blow-up Cheshire Penis.

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(reposted from Fleshbot)

I met Buck Angel…

… and Ellen Stagg took some amazing photographs of us. You can see the rest on (nsfw) Fleshbot.com

If you haven’t yet heard of Buck and want to learn more, please allow me to encourage you to visit his website.