Choto Temple Ch. 07

"It pissed off a lot of feminists, too?"

"Yes," he admitted. "The ones who confuse sex with sexism, I think. Certainly not all of them."

"No. But it created a lively debate."

"You could call it that," he agreed.

"But really," he continued, "I think it was an important point to make. It's OK to enjoy yourself. You don't have to suffer in order to be a good person, necessarily. I mean sometimes you do. But not every time.

"Anyway, it was amazing having the Al-Jazeera folks over. A couple of their tech people were very helpful with Katya, in particular. In terms of helping her figure out how to weed through the emails we were getting. To extract some of the useful bits. They also put us in touch with a great lawyer who was extremely helpful."

"How so?"

"Well among other things, she was responsible for the fact that we eventually opened up shop in Oregon.

"Oregon was one of the states where what we ended up doing was legal. In Connecticut, any transaction where something of value is being exchanged for sexual purposes is considered prostitution and strictly forbidden.

"The lawyer thought that this would probably apply to me, though she said she'd be happy to find out in court if I wanted to challenge this. She thought there was a high likelihood it would go in my favor. But that it would be a long and expensive legal battle.

"But then she said that porn, on the other hand, was perfectly legal. So as long as we filmed everything and put it up on the web, we were fine."

"That's why you started filming?"

Zerzinski sighed deeply before continuing.

"The thing is, Dan, a little knowledge is the most dangerous thing sometimes. See, if you had known this, it might affect how you view me a bit, no? But if all you know is we just started filming, rather than knowing why, or any of the background, that can be a bit different, eh?"

I nodded in agreement.

"So yeah," he went on, "it was actually the lawyer's idea to start filming, as a sort of theatrical and practical act of a sort of civil disobedience."

"And who went on camera first?"

"Well Katya thought it would cause a good stir if the first women invited over in the midst of the throngs of media outside the house were that cheerleading squad."

"The whole squad?"

"Of course. In uniform.

"They were from SUNY New Paltz. Not far away, it turned out. Katya got in touch with them. She explained the filming thing, getting tested for STDs first and all that.

"Within twenty minutes she heard back from the squad captain. That 14 of the 18 members of the squad wanted to do it."

"To do you," I said helpfully. "On camera."

"Indeed." He paused. "Reality is way stranger than fiction. Though in this case, it was a variation on a scenario that fiction had covered fairly thoroughly."