Prologue

The Edge of the Bed: How Dirty Pictures Changed My Life
by Lisa Palac

Book Description

I never masturbated or had an orgasm until a vibrator fell on my head when I was twenty-years old. I took it as a sign.

Lisa Palac's first encounter with an autoerotic device was an earthshaking event-it brought on her first orgasm, and put both pleasure and self-knowledge in the palm of her hand. From then on, Lisa took charge of her own sexual destiny, and even made a career out of erotic independence: she began writing feminist erotica, launched an avant-garde sex magazine and a 3-D erotic audio series, crash-landed on the digital frontier of cybersex and was ultimately crowned “the queen of high-tech porn” by the New York Times.

Now, in The Edge of the Bed, Lisa takes a frank, funny and often poignant look at the evolution of her own sexual persona, and chronicles the challenges faced by women who openly embrace both unconventional sex and traditional relationships.

She charts her dizzying course from midwestern Catholic schoolgirl to anti-smut crusader to sex-positive feminist and cutting-edge pornographer. Along the way, she explores the liberating effects of pornography, the eroticism of religion, the unprecedented sexual honesty created by cyberspace and the persistent myths of masculinity and femininity. She asks the questions so many women-and men-have asked themselves, such as Why do sexual desires and sexual politics rarely agree? What makes danger so appealing? And is there too much sex in pop culture or just too much sexual hypocrisy?

Of course, it's one thing to promote sexual freedom and another to live it out, and Lisa's adventures are both hilarious and enlightening. With its wit, candor and engaging cast of characters, Palac's Edge of the Bed is a unique personal history, and a lively exploration of the complicated world of love and sex.

“The changing times are embodied in the sexual pilgrimage of Lisa Palac…” - Esquire

“I was thrilled when Lisa told me she was going to tackle her end of our erotic revolution, because there's more to this story than a wink and a nod, and it will influence women's lives for a long time to come.” - Susie Bright, from the Introduction

Prologue

I never masturbated or had an orgasm until a vibrator fell on my head when I was twenty years old. I took it as a sign.

My story unfolds like a pornographic version of Chicken Little. I had just moved into my very first low-rent apartment and was on tiptoes dusting a high closet shelf when a small rubber object fell from the sky and bonked me. My college roommate, Sooze, and I both stared at this thing on the floor, then slightly backed away from it like it was radioactive. It was flesh-colored and shaped vaguely like a fat Christmas tree. There was a white wire that came out of the base and attached to a battery pack.

“What is it?”
“I think it's some kind of … vibrator.”
“Gross.”

I'd read about vibrators before but had never actually seen one up close. I immediately flashed on where this item must have been and the fact that it fell on my head. Neither of us wanted to pick it up, but soon we were laughing so hard, we couldn't do much of anything. Finally we scooped it up into a shoe box and decided we would exhibit it at our next party as a gag. We hid the vibrator under the sink in the bathroom and made sure the toilet paper was just about to run out. A search in the obvious places for a new roll inevitably led to a sighting of it. Hilarious.

I found these types of practical jokes so amusing that I lugged the vibrator with me as I moved from apartment to apartment. Then one day I decided the joke was getting old. As I was dangling the vibrator over the trash can, inspiration appeared like a cartoon bubble above my head with these words: Try It.

I did everything but boil the thing to ensure I wouldn't contract a disease. I turned the vibrator on and set it down on the bed, as a test. In my paranoid state, it sounded like a lawn mower. Leaving the vibrator running, I piled lots of blankets on top of it and walked ott of the room to see if I could hear it. The faint buzzing could be interpreted as a blender. I could put some music on, which would cover up the buzz, but then I wouldn't be able to hear my roommate when she came home. If she busted me playing with myself, well, the humiliation would be unspeakable.

Suddenly the whole experiment started to get so complicated I was tempted to forget it. So before I chickened out, I tore off my clothes and lay down. I couldn't figure out why the thing was shaped so oddly, like a rubber Popside with these three ridges that increased in diameter. Was I supposed to put it inside or outside or what? I can t believe I am so dumb I don t know how to use a vibrator.

Despite the fact that I was alone, I was extremely self-conscious. I decided to put it between my legs and move it around on the outside first and see what happened. In a matter of seconds, maybe sixty, I felt something. It was the same sensation I once got doing The Bicycle in an aerobics class; the same tingly feeling I once woke up with after a psychedelic wet dream about making out with my boyfriend. But those sensations had been random; I didn't know how to stir them up on command. This sensation on my clitoris was directly related to the machine in my right hand, and it was much more than a tiny tingle. And then I came.

“Jesus,” I thought, as I peeled myself off the ceiling, “so that's the Big O I'm always reading about in Cosmo.”

It was about time, too. How could it have taken me twenty years?

...

These days, whenever someone asks me the inevitable cocktail question, “What do you do?” I give them the straightforward yet morally neutral and conveniently abstract answer: “I'm a writer.” It's the truth, but not exactly the whole truth. In the years since that rubber object fell from the sky, I've worked as a sex magazine editor, an erotic multimedia producer, a freelance journalist covering sexual politics and a writer of countless Penthouse-style letters. I've been called the Queen of HighTech Sex, a Do Me Feminist and a Sex-Positive Feminist Pornographer, among other things. Of course, a few of these titles were self-selected. When I got my first official editorial job at a hard-core sex magazine, I got a big kick out of answering The Question with “I'm a pornographer.” I was trying pretty hard to prove that even nice corn-fed midwestern girls could be interested in the sexually explicit. But eventually I decided that blasting people off their chairs with the “shocking” truth about my professional life wasn't an approach that should be used indiscriminately in every social situation. Frankly, I didn't want to shock people-the word pornography did it almost every time-since most of them already listed shock as one of their primary responses to the discussion of sex. I wanted them to relax and feel like talking about sex could be done with the same candor and relevance as talking about art, music, travel, the sunrise or any other topic that comes up over dinner. And so I began checking the less confrontational box marked writer.

Naturally, my answer to The Question is always followed by “So, what do you write about?”

“Sex,” I say, without rushing to cover it up with a nervous laugh.

From here the conversation can take a number of different directions. A few pie-eyed people will completely change the subject or even politely excuse themselves. A few more will crack jokes like Sex? You must have a lot of experience. Heh heh. Or Sex? Now there's a subject I know something about! Wink wink. But most people? They sincerely go off. They want to exchange opinions on sex toys, S/M, erotica, anal sex, cybersex-you name it. They want to ask a million questions- the ones they've always been too embarrassed to ask-about sexual fantasies, positions and health. Ultimately, courageously, they want to spill their sexual secrets. It is with great interest and a soft heart that I listen to their personal confessions-which so often end with “I've never told anyone that before”-because I have spent much of my adult life examining my sexual conscience in public. Telling the whole world things I've never told anyone before.

One of the most popular questions people ask is “How did you get so interested in sex?” I tell them I was raised Catholic. We all have a good yuk over that one. Ah, Catholicism. Where sex is dirty and the thrill of transgression is endless! While there's no denying that my religious upbringing certainly influenced my sexual attitudes, it was hardly the only factor. My parents, popular culture, feminism, anti-porn ideology, digital technology and the sexual intelligentsia of San Francisco all made priceless contributions. But the most truthful answer to the question is also the simplest one: Because everyone is interested in sex. Those three little letters suck us into their vortex so fast, even the most jaded and cynical are unable to resist anything with the word SEX printed on it. Acknowledging our sexual interest, though, is never easy. How can it be when sex is at once trivial, pivotal, disgusting, beautiful, embarrassing, empowering and the reason we're all here?

This book is a document of my own sexual journey, of my erotic interests and cultural observations. I've written it because I believe that honesty encourages honesty. Telling the truth about sex-the most intimate, contradiction-filled, hard-to-be-honest-about subject of them all-has given me the courage to face the rest of my complicated life as honestly as I can.

I believe I'm a better person because of-not in spite of- all the sex I've been exposed to. The sexual images and ideas thrown at me by rock and roll, porn, television, Hollywood movies and cyberspace have ultimately left me feeling more liberated than oppressed, more enlightened than frightened. Occasionally someone will pick a fight with me, asking pointy questions like “What about snuff films?” or “What about kids looking at porn on the Internet? Let's see you try to put your little sex-positive spin on that!” While I do, in fact, have my spins on these sorts of questions (all of which are in this book), I have no interest in seeing human sexuality as a globe of perfection, in always looking on the bright side. Everybody knows the world is not an eternally cheerful place where life is beautiful all the time. Why should our erotic world be an exception? It's easy to fall back on aphorisms like “Our culture is so afraid of sex” as a way of explaining my fears. But the truth is, I am wary of sex. Of its transformative powers, its troublesome spells. Flames of passion, hot sex, molten lust, burning desire-it all sounds very poetic except for the fact that actually being on fire is terribly painful.

Learning to speak the truth about sex, trying to figure out how-or if-my erotic desires can be reconciled with my politics, finding the spiritual places where physical intimacy takes me-these are some of the most important things I've ever done. But I'm no sex expert. I don't have a secret sex handshake or magic X-ray glasses. What I know came from my dogged determination to look at and talk about the things I wasn't supposed to-even though most of them had been shoved right under my nose.

Climbing trees of knowledge has taught me many things, including this: The rubber object that fell out of the doset wasn't a vibrator exactly-it was a butt-plug. It may have taken twenty years and an appliance to put sexual pleasure in the palm of my hand, but I've sure made up for lost time.

© by Lisa Palac

About the Author

Lisa Palac was the founding editor of the cybersex magazine Future Sex and produced the virtual reality CD series Cyborgasm. She has also worked as senior editor of On Our Backs magazine, written for the San Francisco Examiner, The Village Voice, Playboy and others and lectured widely. In 1997 she was married in a traditional civil service.