Prologue

The Edge of the Bed: How Dirty Pictures Changed My Life
I never masturbated or had an orgasm awaiting a vibrator chop on my skull when I was twenty-living old. I took it as a notice.

Lisa Palac's first encounter with an autoerotic symbol was an earthshaking affair-it brought on her first orgasm, and put both pleasure and identity wisdom in the palm of her hand. From then on, Lisa took charge of her own sexual future, and even made a career out of erotic independence: she began script feminist erotica, launched an avant-garde sex magazine and a 3-D erotic audio chain, bump-landed on the digital boundary of cybersex and was ultimately crowned “the king of high-tech porn” by the New York Times.

Now, in The Edge of the Bed, Lisa takes a free, strange and regularly touching look at the evolution of her own sexual facade, and chronicles the challenges faced by women who openly support the unconventional sex and traditional relationships.

She charts her dizzying course from midwestern Catholic schoolgirl to opposing-gossip crusader to sex-activist feminist and heartless-tactic pornographer. Along the way, she explores the liberating gear of pornography, the eroticism of faith, the unprecedented sexual honesty produced 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 needs and sexual politics seldom agree? What makes danger so appealing? And is their too much sex in pop mores or just too much sexual hypocrisy?

Of course, it's one thing to promote sexual openness and another to live it out, and Lisa's adventures are both hilarious and enlightening. With its wit, honesty and engaging cast of characters, Palac's Edge of the Bed is a single special record, and a lively exploration of the complicated world of darling and sex.

“The shifting epoch are alive in the sexual pilgrimage of Lisa Palac…” - Esquire

“I was tickled when Lisa told me she was going to tackle her end of our erotic revolution, because there's more to this chronicle than a shine and a nod, and it will inspire 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 chop on my lead when I was twenty existence old. I took it as a symptom.

My rumor unfolds like a pornographic kind of Chicken Little. I had just stirred into my very first low-rent residence and was on tiptoes dusting a high closet bookshelf when a small rubber demur baffle from the sky and bonked me. My college roommate, Sooze, and I both stared at this thing on the floor, then somewhat backed away from it like it was radioactive. It flesh-dyed and shaped pensively like a fat Christmas hierarchy. There was an ashen line that came out of the pedestal and close to a series push.

“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 point must have been and the verity that it chop on my journey. Neither of us hunted to prize it up, but presently we were laughing so hard, we couldn't do much of something. Finally we scooped it up into a shoe box and decisive we would exhibit it at our next bash as a gag. We hid the vibrator under the sink in the bathroom and made loyal the toilet paper was just about to run out. A pursuit in the evident chairs for a new spool inevitably led to a sighting of it. Hilarious.

I found these types of helpful jokes so witty that I lugged the vibrator with me as I moved from residence to apartment. Then one day I definite the joke was getting old. As I was lifeless the vibrator over the scrap can, inspiration appeared like a cartoon bubble above my head with the language: Try It.

I did everything but boil the thing to guarantee I wouldn't treaty a disease. I turned the vibrator on and set it down on the bed, as an ordeal. In my paranoid territory, it sounded like a lawn mower. Leaving the vibrator operation, I piled oodles of blankets on top of it and walked ott of the space to see if I could gather it. The faint vibrant could be interpreted as a mixer. I could put some song on, which would encompass up the noise, but then I wouldn't be able to hear my roommate when she came home. If she broken me playing with myself, well, the humiliation would be unspeakable.

Suddenly the full 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 cost out why the thing was shaped so oddly, like a rubber Popside with these three ridges that improved in diameter. Was I intended to put it inside or external or what? I can t suppose I am so dumb I don t know how to use a vibrator.

Despite the statement that I was isolated, I was very character-conscious. I resolute to put it between my legs and move it around on the outside first and see what happened. In a matter of seconds, perhaps sixty, I felt something. It was the same sensation I once got burden The Bicycle in the exercises flare; the same tingly belief I once woke up with after a psychedelic wet daydream about making out with my boyfriend. Nevertheless those sensations had been haphazard; I didn't know how to stir them up on sway. This sensation on my clitoris was right related to the appliance in my right hand, and it was much more than a tiny prickling. And then I came.

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

It was about time, too. How could it have full me twenty being?

...

These years, when somebody asks me the inevitable mixture doubt, “What do you do?” I give them the straightforward yet morally neutral and conveniently abstract answer: “I'm a critic.” It's the veracity, but not just the entirety precision. In the years since that rubber intention destroy from the sky, I've worked as a sex magazine editor, an erotic multimedia producer, a temporary journalist protect sexual politics and a poet of countless Penthouse-grandeur lettering. I've been called the Queen of HighTech Sex, a Do Me Feminist and a Sex-Positive Feminist Pornographer, among other effects. Of course, a few of these titles were nature-preferred. When I got my first approved editorial job at a hard-spirit sex magazine, I got a big kick out of answering The Question with “I'm a pornographer.” I was demanding appealing hard to prove that even kind corn-fed midwestern girls could be interested in the sexually candid. Nevertheless eventually I decided that blasting people off their chairs with the “shocking” integrity about my professional life wasn't an approach that should be worn indiscriminately in every gathering spot. Frankly, I didn't want to shock people-the word pornography did it almost every time-since most of them already planned shock as one of their crucial responses to the discussion of sex. I wanted them to relax and feel like chatting about sex could be done with the same frankness and weight as talking about art, tune, travel, the sunrise or any other matter that comes up over feast. And so I began checking the less confrontational box evident writer.

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

“Sex,” I say, without rushing to cover it up with an edgy laugh.

From here the conversation can take several different directions. A few pie-eyed people will completely change the theme or even civilly absolve themselves. A few more will crack jokes like Sex? You must have a lot of experience. heh. Or Sex? Now there's a matter I know something about! Wink twinkle. Nevertheless most people? They earnestly go off. They want to switch 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 wellbeing. Ultimately, courageously, they want to spill their sexual secrets. It is with great notice and a diffused sympathy that I eavesdrop to their special confessions-which so regularly end with “I've never told somebody that before”-because I have spent much of my adult life examining my sexual conscience in open. Telling the intact world equipment I've never told any one before.

One of the most accepted 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 soiled and the kick of transgression is endless! While there's no denying that my devout upbringing trusty influenced my sexual attitudes, it was barely the only dynamic. My parents, prevalent nation, feminism, unwilling-porn ideology, digital technology and the sexual intelligentsia of San Francisco all made priceless contributions. Nevertheless the most proper answer for the question is also the simplest one: Because each is interested in sex. Those three little mail suck us into their current so sharp, even the most tired and cynical are incapable to resist anything with the word SEX written on it. Acknowledging our sexual notice, although, is never simple. How can it be when sex is at once frivolous, central, disgusting, lovely, embarrassing, empowering and the intention we're all here?

This booked is a record of my own sexual journey, of my erotic interests and cultural observations. I've written it because I think that honesty encourages honesty. Telling the accuracy about sex-the most intimate, contradiction-crammed, hard-to-be-sincere-about subject of them all-has given me the courage to face the remnants of my complicated life as honestly as I can.

I judge I'm a better self because of-not despite- all the sex I've been exposed to. The sexual metaphors and ideas fearful at me by rock and move, porn, television, Hollywood movies and cyberspace have ultimately left me reaction more modern than oppressed, more enlightened than frightened. Occasionally someone will collect a clash with me, asking spiky 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-sure spin on that!” While I do, in actuality, have my spins on these sorts of questions (all which are in this book), I have no advantage in seeing person sexuality as a world of perfection, in always looking on the upbeat plane. Everybody knows the world is not an eternally cheerful place where life is exquisite all the time. Why should our erotic world be an exception? It's simple to reduction back on aphorisms like “Our ethnicity is so afraid of sex” to SPexplaining my fears. Nevertheless the accuracy is, I am wary of sex. Of its transformative powers, its troublesome spells. Flames of passion, hot sex, molten lust, burning yearning-it all sounds very poetic except for the fact that actually being on fire is horribly labored.

Learning to address the accuracy about sex, difficult to diagram out how-or if-my erotic desires can be reconciled with my politics, discovery the spiritual chairs where real intimacy takes me-these are some of the most important clothes I've ever done. Nevertheless I'm no sex skilled. I don't have a closet sex handclasp or artifice X-ray glasses. What I know came from my tenacious determination to look at, and meeting about the gear I wasn't assumed to-even still most of them had been shoved right under my nose.

Climbing leaves of expertise has qualified me many things, counting this: The rubber intention that destroy out of the doset wasn't a vibrator exactly-it was a base-push. It may have full twenty years and an appliance to put sexual pleasure in the palm of my hand, but I've sure made up for perplexed time.