* I started this story shortly after I finished Show Me, Sir, but just never finished it. Here's hoping I can finish it now.
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CHAPTER ONE: TAG IT - PART ONE
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Pip Jones nibbled on a milk chocolate-covered pretzel and stared at the latest Deviant Nerd blog piece she was writing for the Infommunity website. She licked her similarly shaded skin free of the sweet before tucking a few stray black curls back into the cloth band holding her hair off her face. She glared at her computer screen, dissatisfied.
Every year, this perennial study crops up reminding us yet again that, when wired-up and monitored, the average heterosexual woman is a lot more flexible in her fantasies, finding a broad range of pairings—men with women, women with women, men with men, and multiple pairings—arousing.
It wasn’t new news, but inevitably it got paraded around the web and news circuit like it was groundbreaking.
Pip popped another pretzel past her painted mouth and shifted in her ergonomic office chair, leaning back to lay her forearms on the cushioned armrests. But, she supposed, the very fact that every year, without fail, it peaked the interest of the public was, in and of itself, newsworthy.
As a sexually adventurous, pansexual woman, she supposed it was nice to have science confirm what she’d always suspected, that she wasn’t the only one who eagerly and a bit guiltily enjoyed a wide and varied porn collection.
But there was still something troubling about the way this study was being presented. The sensational, sexy splash it was making in the wider, less literate world. The hash-tagged headlines and contextless sound-bites, that delivered the flashiest form of findings, answered few questions and begged for more research.
Wasn’t that the sin and curse of information-sharing today? That, with the constant and deafening deluge of facts and opinions, of interpretations and flat-out over-reaching, you had to grab consumers fast and had to get your voice out there. However you had to. Whatever the cost.
Pip pushed the brightly colored, crinkly snack bag away before perching forward at her desk and placing her fingers over the home keys.
While I’m intrigued and excited that science—and the public—is slowly, year by year, catching on to the idea that female sexuality may not work the way it once assumed it did, a part of me wonders how the lens in which we’ve viewed female sexuality for so long too often sees and reflects this information back. Are we spending valuable funding dollars on studies that claim discovery and innovation without actually telling us anything new, useful, or even true about sexuality?
After all, sexual identity was much more complex than a single physiological response to visual stimuli. There were contexts and emotional attachments involved that the limits of the study couldn’t capture. And, while she wasn’t happy about the current cultural climate toward bisexuality, it certainly wouldn’t help with bisexual erasure to lump all women into the category regardless of their self-identification.
More and better study is clearly needed.
Not the taggiest of taglines, she knew. With sales figures and ad revenue and viewer counts in mind, Pip knew she ought to edit the piece to be more racy or pithy. Make it something like the other sites, where they asked if this meant that all women were just secretly slutty or really closet bisexuals. And, even if some of those articles had gone on to explain why that probably wasn’t the case, they’d still left readers with that much more provocative thought in their heads, not exactly leaving much room for the more mundane minutiae.
“Just in: Study finds that porn turns people on!” Pip heard a low voice chuckle from the cubicle next to her. “Will’s really letting you post that hard-hitting break-through on the site?”
Pip looked up to see Phil Schaffer, the host of one of Infommunity’s most popular and longest-running podcasts, Ask the Egghead, her cubemate, and—if she was honest—a bit of a science-snob.
Which, she supposed, he had a right to be; hard to be a host of a science show and not have a bit of professional elitism. But still.
“Hey, considering that science only started to publish the exact anatomy of the clitoris in 1998,” Pip said, quirking an already fashionably arched eyebrow at the sarcastic, sweater-vested man resting his sandy-blond head on the half-wall separating them, “I’m willing to get all kinds of hard over any study seeking to dive deep into female sexuality.”
And, there, she had her tagline.
She quickly typed it at the bottom of the page to tweak later.
Phil simply shook his head disapprovingly, but she could see the smile he tried to hide on his downward tipped face, his pale, blanched almond-colored skin flushing with the effort. She snickered a bit and typed, perversely enjoying how easy it was to tweak Phil’s more delicate sensibilities.
Despite being technologically and scientifically forward-thinking, Phil was adorably old-fashioned. There was just something about him that reminded her of sock hops and soda shops. Every time she looked at him, she was reminded of some high school, heart-throb science teacher—the one girls sat up front in class for, doodling his name with heart-dotted i’s in the margins of their notebooks. Pip watched him pick a piece of dark gray sweater lint from his plaid button-up, thinking he looked like a strange cross between Bill Nye and an outlet store catalog model. He looked homey. Trustworthy and reliable. He was attractive, to be sure, but mostly Phil felt safe.
Pip was sure he did—studies showed most people did—but she just couldn’t quite picture Phil looking at porn. The closest she could come up with was imagining him breathing heavily to the latest Scientific American piece or drooling over the latest issue of Wired.
They had an unconventional friendship, she and Phil. Pip had only been working at Infommunity, a small but rapidly growing online encyclopedia site, for a little less than a year, but almost from the start Phil had been what could only be described as a supportive skeptic to Pip’s addition to the Infommunity family.
“Wanna grab a coffee before you change the world with your important lady-porn update?” He stepped out from behind the partition to grab the back of her chair. Rocking the chair teasingly, he practically sung, his gray eyes lighting up with humor from behind his glasses, “It’s statistically proven that both caffeine and regular breaks increase productivity in the workplace.”
Pip smiled, saved her file, and spun around. She reached for her coat and slung it over her arm as she stood up. “Well, if the stats back it up...”
They wove through the busy, colorful rows of cubicles filled with furiously typing and talking coworkers. The clicking sound of keys and collaboration was comforting. After years of juggling multiple crappy retail or service industry jobs just to make ends meet—while also maintaining her own blog and podcast—Pip was still a little awed at working somewhere so full of passion and drive for what they did.
At the elevators, Phil reached out to press the call button. “I wonder how those scientists approached the grant committee about that study.” He shook his head musingly. “ ‘I want to show a bunch of people porn and see what pops up.’ ”
“Well, when put like that,” Pip said when the doors opened, “how could they say no?”
He chuckled and held the doors for her, letting her enter first, the sound low and almost stifled—as if he wanted to laugh but didn’t quite approve of it. “There’s still so much we don’t know—the cure for cancer, AIDS.” He leaned back against the side of the elevator, facing her, while the door shut. “Hell, we don’t even have the cure for the common cold down yet—but we have grant money for studies to make sure porn is doing its job.”
“They weren’t testing the porn.” Pip rolled her eyes. “They were seeing what people responded to sexually. To see how we’re hard-wired.”
“Because we needed organized, funded studies to tell us that watching other people have sex is sexually arousing.” He scoffed while they watched the floor’s lights glow with their descent. “Because we couldn’t have inferred that all on our own from the visual nature of humans and the booming popularity of the pornography industry.”
“For guys, sure.” Pip shrugged. “But the idea that women enjoy porn and sex just as much as men is still an idea that too many people are uncertain of and deeply uncomfortable with.” She pushed away from the elevator’s mirrored wall when it rang for the first floor. “Hell, I still constantly get questions from readers and listeners—of all genders—who are sure the female orgasm is a myth.”
She shrugged and walked out into their building’s lobby. “Say what you want about the obviousness of this study,” she said before slipping on her red Carmen Sandeigo-esque, double-breasted trench coat, “but, as a girl who spent puberty in church choirs and public school abstinence-only education, this study would have done wonders for teenage-me.”
Phil snorted. “I’m sure,” he drawled, disdain and disapproval dripping from his voice.
“Excuse me?” Pip stopped in her tracks. “What is that supposed to mean?”
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