“Well congratulations on your new baby, but we have got to take care of your other baby—your vagina!”
Everyone in the class laughed hysterically again. This was like a grown-up professionals’ sleepover party. Where did these women come from? Did my mother go to stuff like this?
Dr. Erica laid down on the ground and got into different positions she recommended for more comfortable penetration. She also went over some breathing exercises, and she pulled out something called a “lube shooter” out of her briefcase and recommended using it to coat the entire inside of the vagina with something she called “emergency lube,” which was an incredibly thick silicone gel that had a similar consistency to Drano. This woman really had a lube for every occasion.
After the lecture was over, the women got their books signed and some of them asked her more confidential questions. I decided to purchase a book myself, and I waited in the line to get it signed. I had now been in the store for over an hour and all I purchased was a coffee so, this felt like the appropriate thing to do. And who knows, maybe I could learn some new things about orgasms that could come in handy.
“Thanks for coming!” Dr. Erica said.
“Thank you!” I said. “I’ve been trying to explore myself a little more, and this was inspiring.” I was being genuine.
“That’s wonderful! Treat your body and soul with lots of love and lots of lube!” she replied, as she signed the book with love and lube, Dr. Erica.
This woman and her lube. She must have like, kegs full of it at home.
“Hey, so, I actually work at a different store, and—I was wondering—do you have, like, booking information?”
“Yes, my manager’s information is all on my website. You can contact her.”
“Oh, yeah, of course. Thanks!”
I walked to my car, and out of curiosity, launched her website in a browser on my phone. There was a calendar with her “appearances” listed on it, and the next year was completely full, with engagements all over the country and a few internationally. This woman was apparently like the Lady Gaga of masturbating.
Well, I was not a doctor and I never wrote a book. And I didn’t have a website or a manager. But I was unofficially the manager of Dreamz, (by unofficially, I mean I was the only one in the store for about 50 hours a week so I think by default that made me the manager). If I read Dr. Erica’s book, and maybe some more books like this, and I tried out a bunch of different sex toys, maybe I could try to teach a class? It would be great to have a real event in the store. Cheetos and punch don’t exactly count as an event. There is so much down time in the store, a thirty-minute class wouldn’t interfere with my other duties.
Dreamz really did need more females coming into the store. A masturbation class just for women would be great. I had so little sexual experience and definitely wasn’t qualified to teach it, but there I was, sitting in my car, staring at a giant billboard of Jimmy, who had no experience at all when he volunteered to DJ our high school prom, and look where that got him.
11
I decided to host a masturbation seminar for women. I didn’t want to call it “teaching a class,” because I truly didn’t have the credentials to teach, but a host merely brings people together (something I did have the authority to do). I set a date, and I made a Facebook invite for it, with a pretty cover image and everything. It was somewhat official!
The next few weeks went by quickly. I had a real goal, and a project to work on. I stopped spending my downtime at the store looking at the clock and waiting for it to change, or pretending to sweep the floor. I told Sandy about it. I didn’t ask her permission, I just told her I wanted to plan an event in the store for women and she sort of patted me on the head, smiled and laughed, and said “Okay, hon.’”
Unlike the Hustler store, we didn’t have ten-plus employees working at a time. It was either just me, or just Sandy. At times when Sandy gets tired, she just closes the store and goes home. We truly didn’t operate like a “real” store with open and close hours. This was basically Sandy’s house, and if the door was unlocked and the lights were on you could come in. And jerk off. In any case, due to the lack of staff here, I would still have to ring people up for their purchases at the register, or give them keys to ROOMZ and run this workshop at the same time. I’d noticed the patterns of time of when it was busy and when it was slow in the store, so the ideal situation would be to have this event go on when it was slow. The only problem was, that was usually after midnight, which was not an ideal time to have any kind of event. Mothers who wear blazers certainly weren’t going to show up at that time. Who were we kidding here, though? That type never showed up at any time in this store.
Deciding to do this class was the first step. Asking/ telling Sandy was the second. Checking those two things off my list was rather simple. Then came a twofold, rather daunting issue, and that was that I had no experience teaching, very little experience masturbating, and I had no clue how to do any kind of promotion to get masturba-tors with less experience than me in here to learn more about masturbating. The one thing I did know here was that inside of Dreamz we had a unique advantage. Part of what scares people away is also what brings people in: While the Hustler store has fancy masturbating tools, hardcover, glossy text books about masturbation, and important masturbating lectures taught by PhDs, no one in that store was actually allowed to masturbate right then and there. That’s what my class would be—immer-sive and hands-on (pun most definitely intended). That’s what was going to make a Dreamz class a clear competitor with these fancy show-off stores.
First things first, though: I needed a lesson plan. Since I myself was newly acquainted with the world of self-pleasure, and thus what the young people would call a “noob” in this matter, I decided to skim through Dr. Erica’s book for inspiration. Where was I to begin? It was a very dense 350-page hardcover book written with the sole intention for women to have stronger orgasms. That was pretty cool! I never had an orgasm textbook before. Perhaps college would have been more enjoyable had I known these existed. There was a whole chapter on the clitoris, then another on the cervix one on female ejaculation, and another on G-spots, just to name a few. Every single centimeter of the vagina got its own special lecture in here. She really laid out the vagina as not just one erogenous zone, but a whole bunch of different compartments with their own unique ways of getting off if touched in the right way. Some of the book spoke to me, some of it got far too biological and felt like a textbook; I felt like that kind of dry language might make it harder for people to understand the sexy elements of masturbation. Writing that’s too clinical tends to scare people away, like my science books did to me in high school. Some of the material was also clearly meant for women much older than me, women with children, or husbands, who had been married for over ten years. It wasn’t a book meant for people who just graduated college and made minimum wage and lived in an apartment with a communal bathroom in the hallway.
The chapters of the book that affected me the most were titled “body positivity” and “body confidence.” Part of learning how to masturbate was wanting to masturbate and the desire to want to give yourself an orgasm comes from loving your own body. I never thought to love my body, I actually didn’t know my body so well. It was an unknown blob attached to my head I needed to get to know better.