Have You Seen My Orgasm Face?
By: Danika Bloom
Tags: Sexuality, Sex, Self, Culture, Feminism

Yesterday I received an email from a company that I buy my anti-virus software from, telling me my annual subscription to their software had just been automatically paid.

I’d never worried about anti-virus software until July 14, 2018. On that day, one year ago, I received an email that made my heart race, my skin get clammy and my head light. It was a combination of feelings I’d normally only experience after several minutes of top-notch love-making.

And that wasn’t an entirely inappropriate reaction to the message I read, which went something like this:

Hello! I am a hacker who has had access to your operating system for a few months now. I infected your computer with malware through an adult site that you visited. This Trojan Virus gives me full access and control over your computer which means that I can see everything on your screen, turn on the camera and microphone, but you do not know about it. I know your password is adison. I also have access to all your contacts and all your correspondence. I made a video showing how you satisfy yourself. I’ve edited it with the porn that you watched while masturbating. With one click of the mouse, I can send this video to all your contacts. If you want to prevent this, transfer $800 to my bitcoin address. Etcetra and so on… Best regards!

And yes, the message was signed, “Best regards!”

To make matters even scarier, not only did the sender get one of my very old passwords right, just days before I received this email I’d noticed that my mouse had moved across my screen on its own. It freaked me out when it happened but I’d put it down to something nonthreatening, like a poltergeist.

Had I received that email six months earlier, I’d have laughed and deleted it, knowing for certain that it was phishing, because I hadn’t visited any porn sites. But, last year I was in deep research for a book about sex, religion and politics, which means that I had been spending time on sites that were outside of my normal browsing habits. This included several sites that quoted the Bible and a good handful of pornhubs as well.

I spent an hour fretting and fussing before sending an embarrassed email to my two business partners, to let them know that we might have some explaining to do to our clients since I didn’t have an extra $800 lying around.

They reacted exactly as I should have expected.

“Oh my God, Donna, you were watching porn? That’s disgusting! How could you? You’ve put our business risk…” “It was for research.” I pleaded with them to understand.

Oh. How. They. Laughed.

I bought the virus protection that one of them recommended and ran it. My laptop was clean — even though my conscience was not.

The upside of being sextorted

Once I was out of the porn-watching closet — for research purposes, I swear! — it became easier to write about the topics I was…um… looking at.

My lifetime of experiences has taught me that there is an undeniable communion between sex, religion, and politics — at least there has been in my 53 years of life and in the blood that I inherited from my parents and their parents and their parents and so on.

I came up with a shorthand way to describe what I think has caused all of my sexual hang-ups.

It’s a new word: ‘crule’. It stands for a cruel cultural rule.

The way I see it, you’re the victim of a crule if:

you masturbate but hide that fact from a loved one.

you’ve watched porn and feel ashamed about it.

you’ve had an abortion, but only your closest friends know.

you’re uncomfortable sharing your support of gay marriage with your faith community peers.

you’d love to explore a non-monogamous relationship but are terrified about what that might mean — about you and your commitment to your partner.

any part of your upbringing included judgement like, “Girls who get themselves in trouble deserve the consequences.”

Crules can be real orgasm killers

If you’re a woman who is not having sex that blows your socks off, there's a good chance that the source of your orgasm killjoy has nothing to do with any flaws of your body.

Over the decades, hundreds, if not thousands, of researchers across a variety of fields have examined women’s sex lives. One of the questions asked over and over is how often research subjects experience a vaginal orgasm. The numbers, of course, vary from study to study, but a conservative estimate is that

at least forty percent of all women have never or very rarely had an orgasm during penetration.

A pharmaceutical company helped us understand that it is not a physical flaw that’s created a society of orgasm-disabled women. It was a recently failed “little pink pill for women,” created to help women who suffer from Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder improve their low or non-existent libido, that gave us that information.

The concept was sound: unlike Viagra, which addresses the physical issue of blood flow to a man’s penis, this drug works on women’s brains to reduce inhibition signals.

Unfortunately, it’s proven to be a dog of a drug with little to no impact on women’s desire to get down and dirty.

According to researchers, the most important influences on female sexuality are things that a pharmaceutical can’t touch: culture and society.

So if you’re a woman for whom sex is more ho-hum than ho-yeah!, crules may very well be the cause of your sexual disempowerment.

Want to change the world? Have an orgasm.

From how much we love our bodies to how comfortable we are asking our partner to try something new, once we feel great about getting naked and sweaty, our partners will feel better about themselves, too. It will create a sexy cycle of all-around empowerment and joy.

And then there’s the ripple effect. The so-called ‘feel good’ hormones, endorphins and oxytocin, are released when we orgasm. The benefits to women’s health and well-being have been studied and proven for decades.

Orgasms help us relax, improve our stamina and our social skills and make us more patient. The list of benefits is long and hard (to argue). The upshot is that when we can experience all the benefits of shame-free, guilt-free sex — including masturbation with or without the assistance or porn — we become more empathetic partners, more tolerant caregivers, more focused employees and nicer drivers, which makes everyone around us happier.

Helping women and men identify and throw away all the crules piled up on and around us in our bedrooms could have a devastatingly beautiful impact on our collective level of joy.

Back to my porn ‘habit’…

I truly, honestly, derive little pleasure from watching porn. And it’s true that in the past I’ve been a bit judgy about people who do. Well, one person in particular: the man I share a bed with. But, I have never judged reading erotic stories for the purpose of experiencing that face that the sextortionists are trying to make hay with.

It was a comment on one of my other stories that made me consider the hypocrisy of this double-standard. All he said was,

“As for the porn thing, we’re visual creatures, like I tell my wife: Men look at porn, women read their porn.”

Mind blown.

Today, in light of my year of research and writing and opening my mind to see the crules that lead me to judge myself and others when we’re experiencing pleasure at our own hand, I’d be fine to have my orgasm face shared with my adult contact list.

In fact, wouldn’t it be an empowering exercise to create a website where anyone who has received one of these sextortion emails, could upload their porn-pleasure photos, as a “Fuck you!” to the fear that the phishers are trying to create? Nothing explicit, just the faces of thousands of humans having a healthy sex life with themselves.

It would be beautiful. I’d send money to support that.