Girls with Glasses

Two weeks ago I bet my friend Matt that I could casually drop in the words "come on your face" and "double penetration" into conversation at a barbecue we were going to on the Upper West Side. Double points if I could get the words into the same sentence. It wasn't that weird; I would only have to talk about work.

At the barbecue, Matt threw me softballs, "So, Neille, what were you looking at again today?" "Funny you should ask Matt?" And I was off.

Yes, I was working on developing a porn website. The work came along just as I quit a newspaper job. Neither websites nor porn were in the occupational plan, but the work paid double what I had been making in the last year as a reporter, and it would take exactly four weeks out of my journalistic career. Screw it. I said, Sure, and I sent my first invoice.

At first, I'll admit, it was fun. I poked around the site before the project started and was entranced by all the sex. There was office sex, pizza-delivery sex, nerdy-girl-and-teacher sex. The fantasies were kind of cute, charming even. A couple times, I even had to go to my room for some me-time. The site's image was "naughty but not nasty." Adultery was good, golden showers a no-no. Threesomes, yes, double penetration, no. Oh, and I got to say double penetration, like, four times in two days. For some reason, that was just rad. Just say it, "double penetration." Fun, right?

And it was excellent for parties. I would just casually drop in what I was doing for work at the moment, and suddenly every guy in the room was drifting over to me. This particular barbeque was filled with aspiring yuppie couples in their early 30s: advertising people, lawyers, real estate brokers-you know the type.

Funny how the words "double penetration" travel over loud music and across the room. It's like a dog whistle. Suddenly all the dudes were surrounding me, and their ladies were left bewildered in the kitchen, pouring themselves more wine.

At first, no guy wanted to admit they looked at porn; they just wanted to hear me talk about it. But soon enough, I'm getting URLs of the good, the bad and the totally nasty. One self-sacrificing soul would inevitably say, "Look, I could help you out with the site. You know, ideas and stuff. Just give me the password."

A guy I was casually dating asked, "So what part turned you on? Was it, umm, the two girls stuff?" I think he asked me that twice.

The first thing I learned during the conversation when I was offered the work was that every third sentence was likely a double entendre: "We'll put it to bed in four weeks" or "Just pull something out of your ass in the meeting."

When I was writing up my document, I said a certain concept would increase "stickiness," a word often used in web speak to mean users keep coming back. It's a word often used in porn speak to mean?well, much the same thing.

Sometime in the last week, I reached a breaking point. I would go to the site, find whatever I needed to do my work and close it immediately. I couldn't look at Penny Flame grinning over an eight-inch cock one second longer than necessary. In fact, I couldn't even masturbate anymore. Armies of glassy-eyed porn stars with shorn pubes invaded my fantasies, saying over and over, "You really want it, baby." I couldn't even hold hands with the dude I was semi-dating. It was all so fake, so boring and just so gross. Seeing sex so removed from any human feelings made it so damn unsexy, kind of like when I see my dog get a boner.

Still, some of it was educational. I learned three big things. First, no one in porn has pubic hair. Not the girls, not the dudes, nothing. Second, guys love girls with glasses. I know all the years I've spent in front of glowing screens has been taking its toll on the vision in my right eye but I'd been putting off going to the optometrist because I didn't want to get glasses. But damn, guys just love taking a chick's glasses off. And then, my third lesson, they love coming on her face.

And that's the way every single movie ends. Prior to that denouement, there's some truly ghastly acting to set the scene: girl gets called into the teacher's office because she cheated on a test. Then a 15-minute blow-job, followed by 20 or so minutes of sex in camera-friendly positions, including the favored-in-porn-but-terrible-in-real-life reverse cowgirl. And then finally, the guy comes on the girl's face. Always.

What is it with coming on a girl's face? Is it just a cinematic thing? There's not much to look at if the closing scene is behind the curtain, so to speak. From the dudes I polled, answers varied from, "It's really great when a girl is so into you she wants your jizz all over her" to "You just want to own that bitch, you know?"

I've had a fair amount of sex at this point. I've done it with men I loved and men who I'd cross the street to avoid for the rest of my life, and never has anyone ever hinted that he wanted to come on my face. Jesus, I thought to myself, is this why I'm not married? Why didn't anyone tell me? I just need to ask the guy to splooge on my face and he'll be mine forever. Rats.

The most mystifying part about it is that guys are much more revolted by their own spunk than girls. My girlfriends all said, "Hmm, interesting." But the dudes looked away in shame. At least I think it was shame.

In any case, I have an appointment for an eye exam.