Most of our calls, though, are normal. Like, we talk about stuff for 45 minutes or so and then I talk about force-feeding him my shit, and then we wrap it up and say good night until next time. In that prelude time, we talk about anything, and a couple of months ago I told him about my plans for the Phone Whore play and audio downloads. He said, show me the blog, maybe I have some ideas for marketing. I took a leap of faith and told him.

Since then he’s been away, to East Asia and Europe, on business. The fact that I even know why he hasn’t called, tells you a little something about our relationship. Last night, finally, he called. I was pleased to hear from him, and told him so. I asked him about the trip. I asked had he seen the blog yet. Yes, he said, It’s interesting. I’m a little hurt, though, that you haven’t mentioned me.

I told him that I felt protective of my connection with him, that it would feel strange to talk about in public. I told him that I wrote about him in Phone Whore, a whole paragraph. (Yes, I even asked him to donate to the play!) That seemed to settle it. But after we had our scene, and we said good night and hung up, I realized that it wasn’t settled. Not for me…

I know what you want to hear, Gary. Apparently the fierce possessiveness that you heard in my voice last night, the part that made you come, wasn’t enough to convince you. So I’ll tell you, right here, in public:

In my mind’s eye I can see you crumble and cry beneath wave after wave of filth. You are resplendent in your despair, and beautiful when you break. I wish I could be there when that dom couple down South degrades you so thoroughly. And I’m glad you keep choosing me to hear about it, and ask you pointed questions, and listen to your voice dropping low and trance-like, and make you relive that degradation all over again. I cherish that power. So much that I’m giving you this post as a thank-you gift.

So read it over again now, imagining it in my voice, and come all over that nice leather sofa of yours. Now lick it up. Do it.

.
.
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You’re welcome. Call me again soon.

I’m not going to deal with the 101 of cuckolding, because Dan Savage covers it nicely here and wikipedia goes into great detail also. For myself, after extensive reading of overwrought cuck fic and a couple of afternoons laughing at the bad acting at those interracial hot-wife sites (no links to that, that’s what google is for), this is where I’m at:

WTF.

I’m just not much closer to emotionally comprehending the turn-on. Sure, I had my theories, but the chart is starting to sprawl as my cuck-callers keep adding phrases and scenes and images to the mess: imagining your conservative wife letting loose with some horse-dicked stranger, in a way that she doesn’t with you. Smelling that distinct lust-must smell in the conjugal bed. Her getting knocked up and not by you. Being the clean-up boy as your reward (oh, homosex overtones, I never get enough of you). Watching her exit the restaurant with her boyfriend on the eve of your anniversary dinner, leaving you with the tab, defizzed champagne, and a melting tiramisu. A call I took last week made me cry, when one cuckold fantasizer asked me, “what will it feel like when my wife falls in love?”

This stuff is CHARGED. Last night I took a call where the hardest spot of resistance for the caller was when I told him, the husband, that he needed to open the door for my lover and welcome him into the house. He resisted, he was shocked and appalled, but he didn’t hang up, which is why I spent some time needling him about it. “Don’t you love me? Don’t you want to see me happy?” I asked, throwing an extra pout into my voice. “I can’t do it,” he kept saying. “It’s so humiliating.”

We ended up arguing for nearly 10 minutes, because here we were, 60 minutes into the call, and we had already imagined him taking the guest bedroom, right next to the master bedroom and hearing me get my brains fucked out. So what was it about opening the door and offering a drink to my lover that was so much harder? “He’s been in our bed before, you know.” “I know. But I can’t just welcome him in like that.” In the end, we negotiated–a cream pie in exchange for opening the door and being respectful–but over my head the lightbulb didn’t just go on; there were 200 of them flashing all around. Jeezus christ, I thought, all that psychological symbolism is right on. It’s like a porno and horror film all mixed together.

Whatever you do, cuckold, (don’t) open that door. After that, it’s all over but dessert.

A couple of different schools of thought emerged in this thread about training. One was that just about anybody could learn to be a decent PSO, if they had proper training. The other camp basically believe in survival of the fittest; throw your candidates into the deep end of this really scary, dank pond, they say, and see who resurfaces.

It sounds harsh, but I’m starting to appreciate the sink-or-swim approach. I mean, look at the skill set needed for PSO work: outgoing, talkative, mentally flexible, sexually open, unflappable. It’s not even a skill set, is it? It’s a personality profile, emerging from life experience in a way that is difficult to trace and impossible to replicate. Like morel mushrooms or edible acorns, they show up where they show up. You can’t grow them, you just appreciate them when you find them.

So actually, I don’t know how to raise a PSO. (That’s just as well; I don’t think there’s a lot of call for that parenting manual.) But the folks who would try to train people for the lines, their “training packets” are not helpful, either…. “Be yourself.” “Follow their lead.” “Keep ‘em talking.” How? HOW?? If the rough-and-tumble, give-and-take of conversation with strangers doesn’t come naturally to you already, it sure as shit isn’t going to suddenly happen when you’re talking about shoving a dirty dildo into someone’s mouth.

The truth is, every decent-to-good PSO needs those traits, but we all get there in different ways. Me? I got my go-get-’em chops and assertive voice from being raised in a big family, doing activism, living through a sequence of unlikely personal choices that blew the doors off my sexuality. Someone else might come to it after a lonely childhood, two marriages, and four years of telesales. There’s no pattern to it, no sequence of learnings that can be recorded and slipped into a training module.

So we stumble into the deep end, all of us newbies, and some of us, somehow, get our heads above water and breathe. It’s a messy way to recruit, but it might be the only way.

Here I’d rather spend time on stuff that gets less play in the perversity petting zoo, stuff that maybe sends even me for a loop. This week in The More You Know!, Cameryn gets her first two tickling calls!

Right. I can sense your furrowed brow right through the screen: How the fuck do you indulge a tickling fetish over the phone? The answer, it turns out, is easy: lots of laughing.

Last week’s call at least touched on territory that was familiar to me. The caller wanted to be humiliated, and tickling was part of that process. He retold at length the “pre-teen as unwilling male stripper at a party full of MILFs” subplot from American Pie 3 (which I may have to see now, oh god), and then told me to step into those MILF high heels and tell me what I’d do to him as poor little Scooter. Goochie goochie goo! Oooh, look how red his face is getting! I was tickling him and embarrassing him and laughing at him for an hour and 20 minutes, people.

This week’s tickle call was flipped: I was supposed to be the tickl-ee (?!). The caller told me that I was a scientist who had developed a new sex machine that ran on laughter, and he was my assistant. I asked him to strap me into the machine and tickle me, and not to let me out until the experiment was completed. “In the name of science,” I intoned. He riposted with “I’m going to start licking your armpits.”

BWAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-NO-NO-NO-NO-PLEASE-NO-HEE-HEE-HEE-OH-GOD!

Now, in real life, I am ticklish. In the right mood, I will start snickering and twitching away from an evil grin and some wiggling fingers two feet away. But that wasn’t this. Truth is, I’ve been bottling up my laughter for months about some of the ridiculous scenarios on the lines, and this lucky tickling bastard got all of it.

HEE HEE HEE HEE HEE OW OW STOP HEE HEE HEE.

Whew.

I needed that.

This also means that Phone Whore (“a one-act play with frequent interruptions”) only has $3350 to go to cover entry fees for six Fringe Festivals in the Canadian Fringe Circuit lottery, and believe me, people, I will be pimping for dollars on a regular basis. My new web site, going up sometime this week, is going to have a special fund-raising page on it, and the facebook campaign starts right after I publish this entry. I’m even hosting a two-hour online radio event in September, with some friends and fans running a PBS-style phone bank in the next room.

In the meantime, if you feel the urge to donate now, email me and I’ll get the Paypal invoice sent out to you toot sweet. (All the shiny Paypal buttons are still at the factory, sorry.) And here’s the wonderful new fine print for my fiscal sponsor. Thank you, NELA and ISWFACE!

The Phone Whore 2010 tour, produced by Little Black Book Productions and co-presented by NELA, is a fiscally sponsored project of ISWFACE, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, tax-exempt organization. Contributions in support of Litttle Black Book Productions’ work are greatly appreciated and may be made to ISWFACE, earmarked for “ISWFACE artist approved project named LBB Productions”. All contributions are fully deductible to the extent allowed by law.

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“But Cameryn, why don’t you just sell those audio stories you keep going on about, and fund the project that way? This makes you sound like a charity.”

First of all, Phone Whore—the play—is a charity. That is, it’s a fiscally sponsored project of a 501(c)(3) organization. One of the perks of operating as a non-profit is getting to be even more shameless about asking for money.

Secondly, I will be moving to camerynmoore.com shortly (still putting paint on the window trim, kinda thing), and there I will have an actual for-profit storefront for my audio raunch. Sex does sell, obviously, and it’s going to be paying my rent, people.

But art (even with sex in it) needs extra support. The Phone Whore 2010 tour is a separate endeavor, and it’s art, and it needs your help to launch. And that’s what this donation drive is about.

Going through this process is… odd. In other communities I’m occasionally seen as, if not a leader, at least someone who’s in a visible/influential/pioneering position. With sex work, no one is expecting me to have an opinion and/or ideas for action about this work and issues affecting it. I’m kinda relieved.

Relieved, and a little restless. That’s who I am. I’m sitting here thinking, huh, what should I do next? How else can I better get to know the other artists in my community? What should I know about other genres of sex work? How, on my limited income, can I support organizations that are making important programming and activism occur?

Call me a type-A personality; that’s A for activist. (Also artist. And articulate. And anally fixated. But that’s a different blog, sorry Anyway, as soon as “sex worker” became a part of my identity–that is, about four weeks after I got my first caller off–I went there: “what should I do now?”

I don’t have an answer to that question immediately. It’s gotta simmer for a little while yet. In the meantime, I’m working on my play, Phone Whore (more on that next week), which will certainly constitute visibility work in the world of theater. And I’m trying to broaden my blog reading outside my usual size-acceptance fields. Found Audacia Ray’s blog recently, with this post that spoke strongly to my activist self.

Audacia’s definitely getting on my forthcoming blog roll, along with other sex worker sites that, in my opinion, further the cause and/or give good read. Got suggestions for other sites to check out in the areas of sex work and sex education? Give them a shout-out here!

(sung to the tune of Big Rock Candy Mountains, which you can hear versions of all over, in O Brother, Where Art Thou, and also in kids’ radio programming sometimes)

Big Cock Candy Mountains

In the Big Cock Candy Mountains there’s a land that’s fair and bright
Where the girls all shave their bushes and you eat out every night
Where the glory holes are open and the sun shines every day
On the birds and the bees and the testicle trees
Where the urine streams, where the dildo reams
In the Big Cock Candy Mountains

In the Big Cock Candy Mountains all the cocks are hard all day
And the dogs are always willing and the boys all like to play
And every drawer is brimming with piles of lingerie.
Oh, I’m bound to come, gonna get me some
where the beds will shake and vibrators hum
In the Big Cock Candy Mountains

In the Big Cock Candy Mountains you never change the sheets
And the little streams of pussy juice leave white spots on the seats.
The choirboys go commando and the priests don’t seem to mind.
There’s a lake of poo and other goo
If you step in that, I’ll lick your shoe
In the Big Cock Candy Mountains

In the Big Cock Candy Mountains the floors are always clean
So if that horny mood should hit, you can drop and start your scene
The men are long and tall here, ev’ry girl a sex machine
I’m a-gonna to stay where you fuck all day
Where the cream and honey just flow that way
In the Big Cock Candy Mountains

(tip of the battered hat to Harry McClintock)

Well, most of my callers aren’t tops. Most probably don’t even know what that means. Most are sissy-girls and mommyfuckers, or guys who want me to be vicious and yank their pink satin thongs into a wedgie. The ones who call and want to get rough and/or nasty are staying in their own head, and throwing shit at me to get their rocks off. Whether that shit sticks to me or not is really irrelevant. In line with the 7-minute sub, I guess these guys would be the 10-minute tops.

Well, last week I got a caller who actually did a fucking intake interview: what I liked, what I thought I was good at, what I looked like when I was 12, what I fantasized about with my real-life partners, and what I’ve actually done and enjoyed in real life. Something about the way he did it, I let my guard down. And then he turned it around on me, and I was … floored.

He had paid attention, picking up all my details and weaving them into something else that I could tell was his turn-on, but with enough of my own real-life bits to make it very, very sticky. Not like syrup is sticky, or velcro, but like a cape made of barbed hooks is sticky: once it’s on you, it’s in you, and if someone pulls at it, you go wherever they take you.

It was unnerving to be on the other end of that treatment. He figured out some of what made me tick, made up the rest with a pretty good guess, and I was putty. He was good. He was merciless. He was a foul-mouthed bastard. He was … actually, he was to me as I am to the vast majority of my callers

It was an open-ended call, so the profit motive was strong to keep him going, at least in the beginning. But by the end of the call, I was sweating and panting and torn between wanting the story to keep going and needing it to stop because I was afraid I might faint. Afterwards, while I was trembling and rehydrating, it hit me that I had never felt more deserving of the phrase “sex worker”.

He called me the next night, too, and when the dispatcher gave me the call, she said, huh, that’s weird, he normally only calls the really young girls. And I laughed and said something blasé about my roleplaying skills. I didn’t say anything about the excited little girl jumping up and down inside me. She’s not a marketable skill. She’s just me, and doesn’t come out for anyone but a real daddy.

Things I didn’t think I’d like about doing phone sex

• post-coital laughing. On the good calls, after I hear them finish and they’re winding down, I always feel like laughing. It’s something like joy that I can’t hold in. I make some crack about doing a Jackson Pollock number on the wall (if they’re that educated), or about both of us having to sleep in the wet spot. But that’s just a cover for the fact that I want to giggle at how much fun it’s possible to have doing this.

The corollary is…

• making callers laugh. When I started, I was warned that I shouldn’t crack jokes. Unless it’s a Tiny Penis/Humiliation call, in which case the more and nastier jokes I make the better. But by nature I am a jokester, a performer: I crave response. So I poke and tease and make smart-ass remarks. Making them laugh out loud is almost as good as hearing them shout themselves hoarse when they come.
• not having to dress up to go to work. To any phone-sex johns who may have stumbled across this blog, please accept my apologies for bursting your bubble, but seriously, pajama city.

Twelve beguiling sex bloggers from NYC, photographed by top-name fetish, fashion, and art photographers. This shit is classy raunch, y’all! The result is a high-gloss, almost certainly NSFW 2010 calendar, with proceeds from the sales benefiting Sex Work Awareness, which does awesome programming in the areas of education, outreach, and advocacy for sex workers.

They’re taking pre-orders at the calendar site already (first link above), which means I have time to set up a little piggy bank and throw my change in for it (did I mention it’s been really slow?). Anyway, that calendar will go great on my thickly padded (ie, sound-insulated) wall, next to the kinky clip-on mini koala bears and the Mardi Gras pig pendant (“show us your teats!”).

(Slight tangent: What else should I get for my room to make it even more a comfy, cozy den of iniquity? What do you think, or what do you imagine, every PSO should have in their workspace?)