Sasha Grey - The Juliette Society

This path I’m on, you can’t see it. It’s not a yellow brick road, the lost highway or a two-lane blacktop. And I don’t even know that it’s a road I’ve been traveling along until I reach my destination, look back at how far I’ve come, and realize that all this time the choices I made, the roads I took, were leading me to this place.

So here’s the deal. In order to explain how I ended up at the Juliette Society, I have to start at the beginning.

Not right at the very beginning. We’ll save all the embarrassing baby pictures for another day. And all those apocryphal childhood memories that locate the origins of traumas that have stayed with me ever since. Like the time I pissed my panties at Sunday school while Sister Rosetta was telling us about Noah and his ark.

So, no, not right at the beginning, but close to it.

And I need to tell you something about myself, my character, my Achilles heel. I have to start with Marcus, my teacher, on whom I have a secret crush.

Doesn’t every girl have a secret crush? An insignificant other who they can project their wildest sexual fantasies onto. Mine was Marcus who, unknown to him, became my fetish object the very first time I walked into his class.

Marcus: brilliant, rumpled, handsome, shy – shy to the point of seeming aloof – and intense. Marcus, who fascinated me the moment I first set eyes upon him. Nothing inspires the curiosity of a woman more than a man who’s emotionally distant and hard to read, especially sexually. And I just couldn’t get a peg on Marcus.

In film theory there’s a term, ‘frenzy of the visible’. It’s something to do with pleasure. The intense pleasure we feel at looking, seeing, comprehending, evident truths of the existence of the physical body and its workings, writ large up on the screen.

That’s how Marcus makes me feel. When I’m sitting in the front row of the lecture hall, where I can get the best view of him, projected against the whiteboard, illuminated by fluorescents that seem as bright as an arc light on a movie set. I sit in the same spot every class, in the front row of this huge hall that stretches back maybe forty rows, right in the middle of the row, directly in front of his desk, where he can’t fail to notice me. Yet Marcus rarely ever catches my eye. Or even looks in my direction, but addresses the room – the entire room – except me, and makes me feel like I’m not there, that I don’t even exist.

He’s there, I’m not, and it’s driving me nuts – a frenzy of the visible.

And I wonder if he’s just playing hard to get because I’m making it pretty damn obvious.

On the days that I have class – Monday, Tuesday, Friday – I find myself dressing for him. Today is no different. Today, I picked out figure-hugging jeans that show off my ass, an underwired balconette bra to lift and separate, a blue and white striped tank top that accentuates my curves and a navy blue cardigan that frames and directs attention towards them.

I want him to catch sight of my breasts and think Brigitte Bardot in Contempt , Kim Novak in Vertigo , Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct .

Is that obvious enough?

I hope so.

So today, as always, I’m sitting in class, pretending to take notes, and undressing Marcus with my eyes. Marcus is talking about Freud, Kinsey and Foucault, about the spectacle of cinema and the feminine gaze, and I’m trying to trace the curve of his cock in brown suit pants that are just a little too tight around the groin not to be revealing.

He’s half-standing, half-sitting against his desk with one leg splayed out along the edge, forming an almost perfect right angle with the other, which is firmly anchored on the ground. And I’m chewing on a pencil, counting a span of inches from the seam of his pants along his inside leg, taking guesstimates of girth and width and length.

I jot down the numbers neatly in the top right hand corner of my yellow legal pad, which, twenty minutes into class, contains nothing but scribbles, scrawls and doodles. And when I tot them all up in my head, I’m impressed. Because Marcus clearly has a cock that’s more than a match for the size of his brain.

I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s not as if I haven’t done this close to a hundred times before. Every class, the same routine. And, miraculously, the same three numbers come up every time. Like I’ve hit the jackpot over and over and over. And I get that same little thrill shooting through my body every time.

Marcus, as I said, is oblivious. For all he knows, I’m absorbed in his lecture. It’s not that I don’t care about the subject or I’m not listening. I’m following his every single word and being distracted at the same time. I’m multi-tasking.

Marcus is talking about Kinsey and the conclusion reached in his landmark sex study that women don’t respond to visual stimuli in the same way as men, and sometimes not at all. I beg to differ. And if Marcus only knew what he was doing to me, he would too.

He elides neatly from Kinsey into Freud – another old pervert with strange ideas about female sexuality – and now he’s got all my gears churning.

He writes CASTRATION on the white board. And PENIS ENVY. Then underlines each twice as he repeats them aloud for added effect. And you’d think that’d be one gigantic buzzkill for my scholastic masturbation fantasy, right?

Wrong.

See, Marcus has a voice like brown sugar – soft, dark, rich. Just to hear him say anything makes me all gooey inside. But the words he says that really turn me on are the least sexy of all. Words that sound clipped and cold and technical, but when Marcus says them it sounds like he’s talking dirty – in an intellectual way.

These words especially:

Abjection.

Catharsis.

Semiotics.

Sublimation.

Triangulation.

Rhetoric.

Urtext.

And last, but certainly not least, my absolute favorite, the one word to rule them all:

Hegemony.

When Marcus speaks, it’s with such quiet authority that he has me in his grip and I feel like I would do just about anything he asked.

So when he says, ‘penis envy’, I hear him plead, order and command, ‘Please fuck me’.

And even though he’s not looking at me, I know he’s speaking to me, and only to me.

Only to me.

This has nothing to do with Jack, my infatuation with Marcus. I love Jack and only Jack. This is just an amusement, a little romantic episode I’ve dreamt up to amuse myself in class. A pedagogical daddy fantasy that’s got me hot for teacher and flies from my mind the second the bell goes.

This time it doesn’t even get that far.

I’m looking at Marcus’ sinewy arms and long muscular legs and imagining what it would be like to have them wrapped around my body, my entire body, the way a spider holds a fly in place as it prepares to consume it. I want to be held by Marcus, consumed by Marcus, in that way. And I wonder if Marcus can fuck as expertly as he talks about psychoanalysis and semiotics and the auteur theory.

I let the question hang in the air.

The answer comes unexpectedly from behind, in a conspiratorial whisper.

‘He’s a freak.’

I turn around and look directly into a pair of bright, clear, almost luminous, green eyes and full, sensuous lips arched into a coquettish smile. And that’s how I meet Anna. Leaning over me from the row behind, whispering into my ear, in full view of Marcus.

I know her, of course. She’s in my class. Anna is blonde, petite and voluptuous; the super-hot girl at school who turns everybody’s head. She’s the girl everyone wants to be friends with; the girl all the guys want to fuck.

I was brought up Catholic and taught that sex was something you weren’t supposed to seek or experience pleasure in. It wasn’t until I started going out with Jack, long after I’d lost my virginity, that I stopped feeling so conflicted and started to enjoy it.