I’ve looked for sexual stimulation from outside sources since I had my first orgasm at 12, when my best friend ventured down to my vagina and didn’t come up for two hours. I’ve been chasing that orgasm ever since; first, from a foot massager I got as a present for Chanukah and, soon after that, I was on the family computer printing off erotic writing surreptitiously. I would scurry up to my bedroom with five pages at a time, nervous, flushed and excited to read the new stories, hoping I caught a good one with the limited time I had to scan it on the screen.
There was one story in particular that I kept crumbled between the wall and the frame of my metal trundle bed. It was about a girl who went out in the middle of the night to buy cigarettes from the 7-Eleven across the street. It was pouring rain, and all she had on was a long white tank top, which soon became sheer, leaving her the sole participant in the parking lot’s wet t-shirt contest. Out of the shadows, five men appeared and took their turns with her, touching her and jerking off and fucking her. I loved this story, and would remember every so often that it was there, pull it out and read those last few sentences: the culmination of the gang bang, over and over again until I climaxed.
This all occurred before I had my own computer and discovered video, before I really knew what feminism was and how much it would complicate and enrich my life in the future, before I knew I was gay. I was just a happy, porn reading, vibrator-using, masturbating adolescent. Then feminist politics came along and started teasing me, turning my seemingly innocent masturbation tools around. At first it was just a slight jolt, like the spinning teacups at the county fair. But feminism has a way of reconfiguring things, questioning the power inherent in every aspect of our lives in a wonderfully challenging and frustrating way; and eventually, I was on a ride that more closely resembled the Batman rollercoaster.