Sex

My Week as a ‘Stunt Cock’

You learn a lot about masculinity when you try having sex for money.
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Photo by Hello I'm Nik via Unsplash

It's an odd thing, to be sitting across the table from a guy who's going to buy your semen.

We'll call him Raymond. He's pudgy. Nerdy-looking, with a big laugh. He’s wearing glasses, and a T-shirt with a pop culture reference I don't understand. Raymond is a cuckold—the kind of guy who gets off on seeing powerful women have sex with other men. Who gets off on orgasm denial and enforced chastity, on humiliation and being treated like a second-rate sexual citizen.

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To my right sits Mistress T.

She's a professional dominatrix. She's also one of the best-known women in the field of femdom fetish pornography. Her Twitter feed has more than 70,000 followers. Her fans are all over Canada, the US, and Europe. Each day she fields dozens of emails from men desperate to be her slaves, wanting to meet her in person, to pay hundreds of dollars to eat dinner with her. She lives in a very nice house (“the house that masturbation built,” she chuckles) with a dungeon in the basement. She's also a good friend. I recently pitched in to help finish her memoirs.

Tonight, I'm pitching in in a different way.

Raymond has driven up from the States to spend a few hours with us. He's going to pay for dinner and drinks. He's going to come with us to a showing of Henry & June at a nearby movie theatre. After that, we're all going to go back to her place, where I'm going to have sex with her while he sits in the corner and watches, and she tells him how he'll never be man enough to do what I'm doing. For this, I will be paid $200—$100 for the act itself, and $100 for whatever biological material I leave behind (he’d specified it be fresh, although beyond that, I've asked to be kept in the dark about what he plans to do with it).

Mistress T will be paid much more. Raymond is one of her regular clients. They have a domme/client relationship that stretches back years. Tonight, I'm essentially an accessory; what Mistress T has, on several occasions, referred to as a “stunt cock.” A sexual object to service her for someone else's gratification, and to put money into her bank account. This is also not the first time this week I've had sex for public consumption; three days earlier, I went to a condo in the suburbs to shoot pornography with a reasonably well-known adult performer (more on that later). Pornography being decidedly outside my wheelhouse, I’d gone to Mistress T for advice—a conversation which ultimately led us to this high-end Lebanese restaurant, across from the man who's going to buy my semen.

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“The guy’s basically a prop,” she explained. “He has to get hard when I need him to, and be able to finish within a reasonable amount of time.”

“Jeez. I’m not sure I can do that.”

She shrugged. “I usually give my guys one Mulligan. After that, they're out.”

It wasn't exactly the pep-talk I was hoping for.

Sitting across from Raymond at the table, I keep wondering exactly how the hell any of this came about. I’ve never considered myself all that attractive. I don’t possess some kind of sheer, animal magnetism. I’m just some awkward dude with a larger-than-average head. But whether I understand the reasons or not, I'm about to get a brief look at the lives of people who have sex for money, and the people who pay them. I'm about to spend a week in the life of a “stunt cock.”

I pray to God I won't need a Mulligan.

***

The first time I met Alyssa, she was wearing a walking cast.

“I went too hard at the gym,” she said, sheepishly.

She was beautiful, as one would expect a pornstar to be, with a slight Eastern European accent. She was also dressed-down—no makeup and a baggy sweatshirt—having just finished shooting a scene earlier that morning. We met at a nearby coffee shop for what was ostensibly a meet-and-greet; we had connected well online, but if you're thinking of having sex with a stranger on camera, it’s understandable you’d first want to meet face to face. In contrast to Mistress T's dubious pep-talk, Alyssa was remarkably good at putting me at ease.

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“It's all about making sure you're comfortable,” she said. “I've been doing this since I was 19, so I'm cool doing just about anything in front of the camera.”

I'd met Alyssa through Facebook about ten days earlier. We had a mutual friend in common, someone who had, years ago, mentioned her, and her status as a porn performer. The conversation came completely out of nowhere, and went something like this:

Me: To what do I owe the pleasure of this friend request? Have we met? Maybe at [name of mutual friend who has politely asked not to be mentioned]'s birthday?

Her: I just thought you were cute. LOL.

Me: Right back at you!

[15 minutes of small talk about breakups and rescue dogs]

Her : So, do you want to shoot something?

Me: Seriously?

It wasn't about the money; men in porn make substantially less than their female counterparts, and guys who end up on the amateur side, like me, are typically working pro bono (that's right, you heard me). Clips on a performer's onlyfans.com page sell for less than their more commercial work, so first and foremost, they need to have as little overhead as possible. No crew, amateur performers. And in many ways, that made the idea more appealing; less money, less pressure. Plus, as Alyssa assured me, it would be POV, and any fears about having an orgasm on command (something that struck terror into my heart) could be circumvented through the cunning use of fake ejaculate(!)—apparently a common trick of the trade.

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Between Messenger and the coffee shop, we'd known each other for approximately two hours by the time I arrived at Alyssa’s townhouse, a place she shares with her mother and two rescue dogs. She was naked when I arrived, wandering around with the carefree air of someone who spends a lot of time without clothes. As I sat awkwardly on the couch, making small talk, she puttered around, applying makeup—a time-consuming process when you're going to be naked under bright lights. We chatted about her experience in the business—about how she’d started in her late teens, about her work with guys like Tommy Gunn and Evan Stone, about a shoot she’d just finished for blacked.com (“I'm still getting used to huge cocks,” she laughed. “I almost died”).

“You live here with your Mom?” I asked.

“Yeah, but don't worry,” she laughs. “She always goes out when I'm shooting.”

To counter my own neurosis, I'd popped a benzodiazepine and half a Viagra before I arrived, which, while functionally helpful, had also giving me a roaring headache. I immediately downed a couple of Advil and tried to ignore my own racing heart. Eventually, Alyssa came and sat on my lap, and we spent a few minutes getting physically comfortable—petting each other, making out. After that, we retired to the bedroom to shoot (but not before one of the rescue dogs bit me directly below the ass). Owing to the aforementioned pharmaceuticals, the shoot itself was less scary than I'd imagined. For one thing, being sexual with an adult performer on-camera is exactly as enjoyable as you’d think. For another, Alyssa was an incredibly good-hearted, thoughtful person, who made me feel more comfortable than I thought was possible, given that we were both connected to a virtual stranger at the genitals. Apart from the challenge of remaining functional with a camera in one hand, it was startlingly easy work. We would stop and start. Shoot in pieces. Chill for a few minutes and talk when I got tired. The whole process took less than two hours. The orgasm remained elusive, as I'd suspected it would, but, as Alyssa said, that's what the fake stuff is for (good enough for video, although I suspect it wouldn't fool a conoissuer like Raymond).

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Later that evening, I debriefed with Mistress T.

“Kids these days,” she said, faking a tear. “They grow up so fast.” Then, she sat back in her chair. “Now that you're an ‘experienced’ sex worker,” she said, “how would you like to make some money?”

Which is what brought us to Raymond.

He's currently regaling us with stories about his sex-life—a collection of client relationships with dommes in other cities who abuse and belittle him for his own gratification. My pharmaceutical concoction for the evening is identical to what I used with Alyssa, and by the time we arrive at the movie theatre, my head is pounding all over again. We take the balcony, and get into some heavy petting while Raymond sits beside us. By this point, it’s all starting to feel pretty weird. Raymond is facing forward, with no visible reaction—although, to be honest, I'm not sure a reaction would be any better.

Two hours later, when we get to Mistress T's place, those feelings of unease are still there. Raymond lifts up his shirt momentarily to show that he has “Cuckold” tattooed across his stomach, and a small part of me admires his commitment. In cuck parlance, I'm the “bull”—something I find hysterical given my general lack of muscles/confidence/general physical strength. But if I’m the bull, what the hell does that make him? We make small talk while Mistress T changes into an outfit he bought her—a red, lacey one-piece, and as we lie down on the bed, she banishes him into the corner.

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At the request of another domme from San Francisco, Raymond is “in chastity,” so he won't be touching himself. He'll just be watching from the darkness. And although Mistress T and I have been sexual in the past, this is different. We’re going through the same motions, but with the volume turned up for public consumption. Sex as theatre. It lasts about 45 minutes, while I do what's expected of a “bull” and Mistress T gives occasional glances at Raymond, in his corner, and tells him he'll never have what it takes to fuck her like this. And then she sends me upstairs, while she and Raymond debrief, and she gives him the agreed-upon prophylactic, to do with as he pleases (to circumvent my orgasm issues, this was prepared the night before and refrigerated. Yes, I'm serious).

As I wait for Mistress T in the second-floor bedroom, I reflect on my week of stunt cocking.

Despite moments of weirdness, I’m struck by how distinctly unweird the whole thing turned out to be. Before this, I’d always had a specific image of the men who engaged in sex work. “Bulls.”

“Stunt cocks.” Visions of unchecked masculinity. Essentially sex organs with a dude attached. But the experience makes me think: maybe I saw them that way because, like Raymond, I see the men in sex work as a proxy; fucking someone I’d like to fuck, the way I’d like to fuck them. Watching, we don’t really care about their nerves, or their Viagra headache, or whether or not their biological material was real, fake, or came out of the refrigerator. Nor do we need to. He’s as much a part of the fantasy as she is. Mistress T and Alyssa are very different people in real life. Maybe the same is true of the bulls and stunt cocks of the world. Maybe, like me, they’re just awkward dudes with larger-than-average heads who are wondering how the hell any of this came about.

A minute later, Mistress T opens the bedroom door, and showers the room with hundred dollar bills.

“Welcome to the Dark Side,” she says. “So… do you want to know what he did with the condom?”

Before I can answer, she tells me. Let’s just say I now understand his desire for freshness.

*Author's name has been changed.

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