Pussy-Licker: Volunteered Slavery

The Sexual Politics of love and lust are more complex than they at first appear.

Who controls, and who agrees to be controlled?

In this story of perversity and obsession

TRISTAN TROTSKY

explores the rules to the limit...

*****

"Pornography leads to toothache."

He glances up. Mike's tall stooping frame caught against the glittering glass facets of the derelict Central Station. "How come?"

"Because, ultimately – it lies. Eventually it leaves a disquiet inside, a dull nagging unease that resembles toothache."

Dave halts halfway to the parked Nissan. Stands, legs apart, on the uneven concrete, chickweed and dandelions coming up through cracks in what had been the forecourt, and is now NPS. "It's tales of girls who go hump in the night. It's writing – fiction, like any other. It's just that some fictions feed the mind, and porn stimulates other parts of the body. The difference is anatomical, not qualitative."

"No." With certainty. Then, after a long pause, "women use their sexuality as a weapon to exploit men. They always have, they always will. Men have the greater need, women ration the supply to get what they want. Pornography leads you to believe otherwise. Leads you to believe sex is a mutual exchange, with no strings or hidden clauses. It lies, and by lying, creates yearnings that the real world can never satisfy."

He hesitates, key half-pointed at the car lock. The sun slanting in low now so the glass sections are set aflame and the garbage and debris become junk sculpture riddled with pointed shadows. "What's eating you? What's brought this onslaught of nihilism on? You getting misogynistic in your dotage?"

He grins, hands thrust deep in his loose parka in a gesture of suddenly embarrassed denial. "No, nothing like that. I'm not saying this out of bitterness or anger. I'm just trying to be rational. Trying to explain it, to be honest. This is true."

He pockets the car keys. His watch reads 07:18:46. He can afford to wait a little longer. "You want another drink? Where can we go? I don't really know Manchester that well."

The Bus Station is a cathedral of labyrinths beneath a mile of ferrocrete autodrome. Coaches whisper contrails of blue petrol exhaust-fumes beyond the glass where people wait for services that never arrived. The Café runs in lines of chessboard lino and tubular chairs fixed to the floor. The seats are of red flexible plastic that refuses to mould correctly to the contours of the spine.

"It begins with Angelina, I guess. I don't really know. Probably the seeds of it go back further than her, a long way, without my realising it. Probably a whole cul-de-sac of things develop making it inevitable, and she's just the catalyst. Perhaps – I don't know. Anyway, I receive this manuscript. In Italian. Addressed from Verona, but it arrives indirectly. It comes via a few agents who shunt it here and every-which-way, not quite sure what to do with it. And so it winds up with me for translation and sub-editing. You know Verona? Ever been there?"

He shakes his head, Pyrex coffee cup enveloped in both hands, elbows on the table leaning him forward to establish conversational territory.

"No, me neither." A look of disappointment. "But I imagine it. The Venetian Riviera, the lake. And I imagine her. Might be better that way, better it should stay where it is, out of touch, open to interpretation."

"So come on, who is she? A writer?"

"All I have is a manuscript, called 'Dolci E Perverse'. Thick, double-spaced A4's, neatly file-holed and bound. But there's no personal details and, to be honest, I'm scared to ask for them. It's autobiography, I'm sure, it's got to be. I've been over it so many times, and yet – sometimes... it's just that sometimes I feel that just possibly, say ninety-seven to three on a hundred scale, just possibly it could be pornography. Written by a man. Or written by a woman to exploit men. Or perhaps such differences are semantic, the relationships are merely those of the sexual politics of life. It's the same with Pauline Reage and 'The Story Of O' from 1954. Who wrote that? Who is Pauline Reage? It's not important. That's what I mean about the relationship of porn to life."

He pauses. "There aren't too many personal details so I have to invent them. The writing is grammatically wrong, often confusing tense and narrative points of view, there are breaks in perspective and tense, so I have to re-write it extensively. First I'll try it one way, then another, until I get a draft that sounds right. Until I can imagine her, her body, her voice, her actions. And I retain the different aspects, inter-relate them to build up a composite picture of events until I understand them and feel part of them and explain them to myself." He's talking faster now, compulsively. "For example, there's a sequence seen from the perspective of one her 'lovers'. The 'lovers' she takes with her husband's collusion, and in accordance with his express wishes..."

–- 0 –-

"There are enormous dark eyes regarding me, the scary expression of some disturbed nocturnal creature. A lemur. A tarsier. She plays a little-girl look, investing it with something like romantic sadness. She might be about to confess some indiscretion, some 'I'm feeling naughty today', but instead her lips are moving and she's saying "I've taken the seed of a hundred men, yet – until this month, I've been a virgin."

In front of her there's a green velvet bedspread trimmed with white. The room is oak-panelled. Furniture and fittings are upholstered in the same cloyingly rich materials with heavy brocade curtains at the shuttered windows.

Her husband is also in the room, watching us. He sits formally with the jaded air of a world-weary Edwardian rué. "Learning fellatio is like learning to swallow oysters" he says, "or like swallowing your own snot."

Perhaps I imagine it – projecting my own thoughts onto her, but momentarily her resentment and humiliation seem to burn, with images of sperm gumming her face, making her eyelashes stick together. And when she speaks, her voice is husky with cum, the taste that's still in her mouth, bitter and salt. But crouching there is affecting her.

I watch, splay-legged on the bedspread. He watches us. Sees her breath coming hot, rapid and sultry, her nostrils flared. She's slightly built, small in stature with a sallow gipsy complexion. Slim, near anorexic, but for her breasts. They are contrastingly full, nipples dark and moist-shiny, pointing slightly away from each other, squinting outwards. There's a luxurious night-black pubic delta lush to her navel, a delicate Venetian fan of pubency, its musky scent makes my head spin, I could eat the heart out of it. The thought of it makes me weak at the knees and hard at the groin. Then there's the shock of heavily curling, crimped equally black hair falling to her waist, tenting her petulant face. She's brunette all the way down, and bare-foot all the way up. Her hair is all over her face and she's shaking it away, and with each tremor of her breasts her fingers melt on my skin, moving like liquid sex.

I'm gritting my teeth in anticipation. And she murmurs me into her, her pursed red lipsticked lips sliding clinging wet and warm over plum-coloured springy knob-end in a snake's flicker of tongues. Her mouth closing around the swollen velvet tip, biting the purple-headed glans softly, then proceeding to take more and more of the thick veiny shaft, biting it all the time, something masochistic in the way she's accepting it. I can see her white teeth nibbling round the shiny tight rim of the big round bulb, her tongue mating it in that soft moist heaven, that slow-burning genital heat, her black hair brushing cock and balls as she sucks. Now she's chewing wantonly like a savage, performing not because she must, but because she can't hold back. An urgency that's debased and animal.

Her husband's eyes gloat.

My mouth opens in a silent howl as I come up tight against the restriction of her throat, my penis so stiff it hurts, tortured beyond endurance as she buries it in her face, attacking with teeth, tongue and lips. By now she's taking almost all the length down, rubbing the base hard as she jerks her mouth back and forth, riding it up and down ravenously, her cheeks blown out taut, distorted by its shape, then greedily caving, sucking, working furiously, long red-varnished fingernails playing a tingling cascade of butterflies over my testicles. I ejaculate uncontrollably, imagine semen oozing over her teeth as I'm drowning in her saliva, and when I've finished orgasming down the luscious cave of her throat, with a primitive slurping sound she's allowing the sulky brute cock to slip voluptuously out from between her well-fucked lips. Her face messy with fluid, the juice-covered cock held against her cheek dripping and dribbling like a leaky tap.

Her husband watching. She turns to him passively for his approval. He nods. Perhaps he's achieved erection, which surely is the whole object of the exercise?

I sense that already he's planning her next suck..."

–- 0 –-

Later, shunting the Nissan back through traffic towards Mike's flat, lights come up in the streets beyond, striplights, neons and argons. Dave glances across. "So you're modifying someone else's fantasy?"

"Or someone else's life. That's what makes it so intriguing. Am I really getting closer to her personality, into her psyche? Understanding her true sexuality? Or just elaborating someone's masturbation fantasy? I don't know. I imagine her voice in my head. It's there all the time. It's there now. She knows I'm here with you. She knows what I'm saying. She's laughing at my doubts."

"How do you imagine her?"

"Different ways to suit different moods." An amused shrug. "And to suit my own tastes. But there are general guidelines. She's Italian, so I say olive, Mediterranean complexion. Dark. But not too dark, what they used to call 'dusky'. And young, twenty? Twenty-two? Sometimes I try twenty-four, but that's too old, or eighteen – but that's too early. No, it's got to be twenty. And as the narrative is set in the early Seventies, that makes her only in her late forties now, right? And she's got black hair, long black hair, thick and curled loose around her face and shoulders, sometimes to her waist, yes, that's my favourite one. An ebony tent of hair to her waist so her face, shoulders and nipples peep through a fine veil of it. Bardot lips, bee-stung lips, thick, almost Negroid, in a woman-child pout, like a Euro-movie. Bardot's sullen sensuality, and something else, something demure, innocent, even in debauchery. A face to launch dreams. Turned-up nose and huge, deep, limpid brown eyes, eyes that make you stand and deliver with just a glance. Delicately formed, doll-like, but with large full breasts, nipples the colour of copper coins and twice as large as fifty-pence pieces..."

"But of course, that's all your fictions. There's no way you can even tell the author's genuine gender. Is there nothing in the style of the writing that gives clues? Isn't the way a man writes porn different to the way a woman writes it?"

"I've thought about that. Certainly there are differences. I've read and studied a lot. Men write harder, they emphasise arousal, even the nipples and the clitoris become massively erect, described like the penis. Women write softer, more fluid. But even that's a double-blind because it relates to the audience they write for, they deliberately cater to the fixations of their readers. And male fantasies and female fantasies are not the same – despite what they say."

"How does it all begin...?"

–- 0 –-

"Angelina's father, Sergio Badini, is as ruthlessly ambitious in Business as he is strict and authoritarian at home. He comes from poverty, back street petty crime, black markets, the slums, until he's briefly imprisoned during the final chaotic days of World War II. It's here he meets, and comes under the influence of Ennio Cavellino, who's jailed for Fascist political offences. Cavellino's in an old established family, aristocracy clear back to Genoese Merchant Princes. Yet they strike up a bond that remains today.

Immediately following the war – on a loan from Cavellino, Badini buys his first legitimate business, a general store in Verona. He works hard, using his black market skills and contacts, expanding clear through the Italian ricostruzione of the Fifties until, with two shops, he's able to exploit the 'age of the common man', switching format to ride the Supermercato (Supermarket) boom until he owns a string of them clear across North-East Italy. While the aristocracy – already in decline, is being taxed to near extinction by successive left-of-centre Governments. Cavellino hence has social prestige and title, but no cash. Badini has commercial success, but hungers for respectability. The imbalance is corrected by an arrangement – Angelina. It could be that simple, a contract of mutual advantage to both parties, the text isn't too specific.

In 'Dolci E Perverse' she writes "Cavellino is older, much older, slightly corpulent, bewhiskered, but always elegantly and expensively tailored, precise and immaculate in manners. Always more the indulgent uncle than the Lover. And he's always there, as far back as I can remember – there at Parties with my Mother, I sit on his knee as a child. He's there on outings and picnics. He's always part of the extended family, buying me presents and clothes. It's natural for me to have no modesty before him, to sunbathe fashionably topless during long languorous Julys spent in our villa garden, the shading cypress trees and the summer-house overlooking the curve of Lake Garda, and as I mature I'm flattered by his interest in my body, although it's a warm, safe, feeling. He calls me his 'Toy', his 'Little Property', and I feel protected, enclosed by his possessiveness. I strive to gain his approval.

When my family applies gentle encouragement it seems natural we should marry, and that the roles should remain pretty much as they've always been. I've been brought up to respect the wishes of those I care for. My loyalties are simply transferred to my husband. I'm content to surrender all questions of freedom to his proprietorial and paternalistic authority. Our marriage is unconsummated. Ennio is impotent, unable to sustain erection, so I stay chaste. But he loves me to be naked for him, to dress provocatively – at his instigation, around the house, I might wear just frilly red garter-belt and pale mauve stockings, or outside I'll wear sheer blouses, no underwear, so my nipples are clearly outlined (everything he wishes me to wear draws attention to them) and skin-hugging slacks, or short short micro-skirts. Sometimes I feel self-conscious, but he enjoys other men's covetous glances, and through his approval, I gain my reward. It stays that way, until the American hitch-hiker..."

The story seems straightforward, but there are hints, suggestions, of other factors. The 'arranged' marriage, the 'transfer of ownership', seem to be the payback of a debt. The final repayment on the original loan that funded Badini's first commercial venture? The arrangement must have been explicit, with a contract rider, a pact of some kind. A 'deliver unto me your firstborn.' There's a kind of moral queasiness about that which I find unsettling. Of course, at any point – if she'd found the arrangements not to her taste, she was well able to back out. The option was always there for her. This is not the Seventeenth Century. This is not the Third World. This is the age of Feminism and the Gender Revolution. But I feel that – to a degree Angelina was guided, if not quite conditioned or pre-programmed. In many ways a strong self-willed person, she yet writes of having taken pride in playing the role of 'property' from the beginning, while in maturity she is content to accept the material and economic benefits of accepting the part, almost, of an item of trade. So how binding an arrangement can this be? How deeply rooted?

I imagine the two men isolated together in that prison cell, from vastly different social classes, but they've become comrades in some bizarre crusade. Martyrs for Fascism. Cavellino and Badini must have expected execution at any moment, and the imminence of death concentrates the mind, produces an intimacy, a bonding, like no other. I believe the social experiment begins here, with that trading of confidences, that hatching of impossible dreams and yearned-for futures that must have occurred in that bleak cell. The combination of Aristocracy with Capitalism must have seemed irresistible. Even the mode of sexuality subsequently employed suggests this. And all of the events that are to happen must have flowed from that moment. All – that is, until her actions cause the rules to be adjusted..."

–- 0 –-

Mike's flat consists of the upper storey of a gently decaying Regency house set back slightly from the road, fenced off by an overgrown garden, shaded in by tall unruly trees. The walls of his room are black. An angle-poise lamp illuminates the computer in one corner, green digital numbers read out from a DVD in another, beneath a silk-screen poster by Peter Blake. He ignores the CD, but places a vinyl album on the music-centre turntable instead, cues up the stylus, and Roland Kirk's 'Volunteered Slavery' pulses and dances from the wall-mounted speakers.

"I still break out in a cold sweat when I think of what I make her do to me" he says, in a voice pitched just above the jazz saxophone. Mike, the Thin White Duke of the Manchester Lit-scene, hacking out translations, ghosting biographies for Rock Stars and Sports Personalities, living through various other dubious and vicarious enterprises. "I see her all the time now. She sucks on her forefinger, playfully, in a highly suggestive manner, one so lascivious it could be prosecuted under some obscenity law. She's tactile, she touches things, tiny secret touches, she does it compulsively, chair-backs, surfaces... people. People. She sticks her tongue out at me cheekily, but as the tongue protrudes between her lips it suggests a fleeting ghost of the clitoris in the vagina. She licks her lips like they do on the TV commercials, her throat moving up and down like she's swallowing. And I imagine she might be swallowing something of mine. For me she is the feminine mystique, the Belle De Jour..."

"But her being inaccessible, near-mythic, has got to be a part of that attraction?"

"But is that a good or a bad thing?" He shrugs expressively. Passes an A4 ring-plan folder across to him. This is 'Dolci E Perverse'. He opens it at random, reads the small tight handwriting and the areas of typescript, skipping and skimming the narrative.

This section – detailing Angelina's first submission, is written in the first person... "...motoring through the lower slopes of the Alps, descending through lines of trees that spoke past the windshield and curve back, domiciles set like fossils in the valleys, swinging past us on the end of long gradients and steep beaten-earth driveways. Dust hangs on the air, the air hangs heavy with imminent thunder, but the engine swallows sound like we're travelling underwater, amputated, disconnected from what we're seeing...

...and we pick up this American student, College kid, shoulder-length auburn hair, hitch-hiking on a year's sabbatical to 'do' Europe... young, bronzed, vibrantly athletic, just a few years my senior, relaxed in the way that Americans are relaxed, flirtatious in that unconscious intimacy that American can achieve within moments of meeting. I'm wearing an expensive blouse so sheer my nipples must be clearly visible, I'm conscious of the weight and the movement of my breasts beneath the thin material. Shy of his obvious interest, but also flattered by it... a stop at a Ristoranté for lunch, drinking red wine as clear as blood, they're deep in conversation – in English, from which I'm excluded, recognising a word here or there, but unable to piece them together, so I drink more wine, its warm blur softening the words into smooth reassuring consistencies...