Dirty Stories

All my life I've hated the idea of finding love on websites because I was afraid of branding myself as being socially inept. When I thought of looking for a girl/boy using a dating service I was faced with two images in my mind: that of a unwashed geek who spent five hours wanking in his basement hiding behind a computer screen or those dumpy conservative couples on eHarmony. I didn't drag myself up from being a virginal high-school bookworm with no fashion sense just to be shoved right back into that closet, I vowed.

Then I discovered I had a fetish.

As feederism, Myspace porn, BBWs, BHMs, and the hidden uses of Mentos and Diet Coke all exploded into my consciousness I realized I was spending at least as much time on my computer in the dead of night as that stereotypical geek. I also realized two things simultaneously: (1) this wasn't going to "just go away" and (2) it's almost impossible to tell a stuffer boy by looking at him. Unless I found a bar where the patrons regularly competed by drinking gallons of beer or started frequenting the completive eating circuit my chances of meeting one would be few. With a sigh of relief I realized my time spent on the internet was a forced necessity, not an acknowledgment of my own insecurities, and I set about trying to find out if there even was such a thing even as my friends wondered why they never saw me any more after school.

As Violet Blue says in her podcast about fetishes, finding a fellow fetishist on the internet is "hit and miss". Once I got over the sweaty palms and chair-rubbing reactions of simply being on such websites (hey, for a virgin feeder girl it doesn't take much), I discovered their flaws: they are uniformly ugly and they all seem to be populated by men that are at least fifteen years older than I am, a native of India whose spelling and seduction techniques didn't get far beyond fifth grade. "Ah", said some of my college friends, "it's the same level of people you meet in real life."

Intellectual snobbery aside, it is sometimes quite difficult to find someone who shares your same tastes in bloating and stuffing as well as your level of vocabulary. As I tried to condense the essence of my desires into an easy to read paragraph that still allowed for those lovers I'd never imagined to slip through the loopholes, I reflected that this was why eHarmony's elaborate screening process had been invented, never mind their inherent homophobia. I was wandering in the back alleys of the internet where transactions were shady and boys sometimes threw bottles to get your attention.

At the same time I posted this story in the forums, simply because I liked the idea that the most-read stories ended up on the front page of the website after the readers had voted for their favorites.

Without even knowing it, I had done the right thing. Before I posted "Water Bottles" I was having to comb my way through the archives looking for someone who might be what I wanted; after it appeared on the front page boys started messaging me. Even after it had disappeared into the archives I received e-mails from boys that were intelligent, articulate, and grammatically correct, saying that they'd always wanted to do that, that they wanted me to help them start stuffing or they looked like Mister Six or knew people that were like Rufus. I had stumbled on one of the truths of writing that happened way back when things were still written on paper: good writing calls out to good writers, and they will respond.

So this is my advice to people who are just starting dating on the internet: if you have a specific thing you want to do, a life-long fantasy, or are even looking for a specific body type, lock the bedroom door, get out a little lube, and spin a bit of smut. My dirty story in which I'd written out my main fantasy had attracted more like-minded people than my short "personality profile" or even my photographs ever did. For whatever reason, a little tale with characters gets deeper to the heart of most people and crosses more barriers than filling out pages of "likes" and "dislikes". And, If you are at all good at writing (and most readers of sex blogs tend to be), people who also value the written word will be drawn to you: the creative geeky stuffer boys, in my case, who can make me melt with a well-written e-mail or whose wit can stand up to my own.

In this way, I realized, I was carrying out a fact of writing that was happening even when words were only written on paper. Anias Nin, who was sadly born too late for sex blogging and whose juicy private journals were published after her death, wrote to a friend that when one puts oneself out in wiritng, others will come bringing gifts. Among writers who are still alive, Jefferson is an excellent example of the power of smut to find you the kinky literate partner that you would never look twice at in real life. He meets women almost entirely through his blog, which details his exploits with sometimes dozens of men and women in a week. It would be easy to simply write him off as as a user, but the reason women seek him out is because his writing makes you trust him. He tells stories against himself as well as his experiences hosting the Bukakke Social Club, and his blog archives (going back three years) are so detailed that after reading them you feel you could walk through his apartment with your eyes shut. In being so explicit about so many things, from his relationship to his children to giving a woman her first orgasm, you forget you have never actually met him. You can fake a persona, of course, and there is always the danger that someone writing about him/herself will leave out their most glaring flaws, but I remain awed by the depth to which you can glimpse another human being's mental world in such simple things as a choice of word or how they construct a sentence.

It's so intimate talking to someone whose read my stuffer stories and really paid attention to them. If we haven't met in real life before this, I can have the exquisite feeing of a partner having read my mind, coming to me already filled with the knowledge of what turns me on. Writing honestly is making your mind naked to another. In the act of writing, you have already taken the first step towards intimacy, opening yourself to anyone who's listening.