The Business of Sex

My first memory of doing business with sex was age fourteen. The villain in the story was a friend of my parents named Clark Edwins- a man I intensely hated. For years he'd been dropping by our house at all hours unannounced with a bottle of bourbon and a dozen KC sirloin steaks. My parents were always glad to see him. They'd sit in the kitchen drinking, talking, smoking cigarettes and singing Barbershop Harmony late into the night. The pay off was when we'd all have steak for dinner the following evening.

On this particular day, my girlfriend Erlene came home with me after school to do homework together. As we walked into the kitchen there was my mom, Aunt Ester, Jane the next-door neighbor, and Clark. They were drinking and laughing- feeling no pain. Seizing the moment I asked Mother if we could have a drink too. She made us two Presbyterians: mostly ginger ale with a splash of bourbon and lots of ice. As we were sipping our grown-up drinks, Clark came over to fix himself another one and spied Erlene's little titties. In a nonchalant manner, he cupped one in his hand and said, "There's nothing sweeter than a young girl's breast!" Erlene's face turned red as she froze in place. Furious, I gave Clark a shove and told him to keep his hands to himself. Then the-son-of-a-bitch reached over and nailed her other tit. That did it! I grabbed the butcher knife on the cutting board and threatened him.

"You better get out of here before I shove this knife in your stomach," I said in a surprisingly steady voice. The knife wasn't very sharp but I applied just enough pressure to make a dent in his fat gut. As Clark started backing away from me, he talked softly to calm me down. But I was calm. My fiery rage had morphed into cold determination. Mother and Jane were sitting in our breakfast alcove and missed the entire incident. Aunt Ester must have gone to the bathroom because she wasn't in the kitchen at the time. She was standing by the door that led into the dining room and had taken it all in. The minute Clark opened the screen door; he bolted down the back steps and headed for his car. As he drove off, I heard him strip the gears.

"Where's Clark going?" Mother asked, glancing out the window. At that point, Aunt Ester walked back into the kitchen laughing so hard she could barely speak.

"You're not going to believe this, but Betty Anne just backed Clark out the kitchen door at knife point." She began laughing even harder.

"Why, Betty Anne, what on earth is the matter with you?" Mother asked. Aunt Ester's laughter was
contagious and Mother could barely keep a straight face.

"He grabbed Erlene's boobs and embarrassed her half to death," I said filled with righteous indignation. "I hate that man. I'll kill him if he ever does that again."

That night over dinner, Mother said I couldn't go around stabbing every man who made a pass at a girl because it happened all the time and I'd end up in jail. But she reassured me that Clark would never do anything like that again. From that day on, old Clark was super polite whenever our paths crossed.

No one knew I had a secret reason for my rage that day. Earlier that year, I had a sexual encounter with Clark that I never mentioned to a soul because I'd been part of the conspiracy. He had a used car lot and my folks would drop in for a drink after grocery shopping some Saturday afternoons. This particular day as I roamed the lot, I spied a fire engine-red, Ford convertible with white sidewalls. Oh how I wanted to take this dream car for a spin. With all the open space in Kansas, I'd learned to drive at twelve and had a restricted driver's license at fourteen.

When I walked back into the office, I smiled sweetly and asked Clark if I could take the red convertible around the block a couple of times. He said sure, the keys were under the mat in the front seat. Zap! I was out the door filled with excitement. Inside the car, I felt all over the dirty floor looking for keys- nothing. I went back and told him the keys weren't there. He pushed his chair back from the desk and stood up to go look with me right on his heels.

We were standing alongside the car with the door open when Clark pulled me toward him as if to hug me when suddenly, one hand moved down to my crotch. I was wearing summer shorts with cotton panties, so it was easy to slide his grubby finger in-between my virginal labia. Well, nearly virginal. I'd played doctor with my little brother and girlfriend Mimi, but this was different. Besides the prickly heat of humiliation, I was struggling with the biggest dose of conflict I'd experienced to date. An unspoken deal was being made: if I let him cop a feel, he'd give me the keys. For a few seconds, I struggled between my desire to drive the car or defend my virtue. The car won! Swallowing my pride, I held my breath while he felt me up, and then I pushed him away.

Clark lifted the floor mat and looked inside the glove compartment. Then he said the keys must be in the office. Back inside, he pulled open a drawer then shook his head and claimed his partner must have taken the keys. I knew he was lying. After tolerating his five-second grope, I still didn't get what I wanted. In spite of that incident, I would bargain with sex again and again and each time I never got what I wanted.

Throughout my twenties, I unwittingly turned romantic love into an unspoken proposition. Although I wasn't selling my body outright, I presented a sexy image with makeup, clothes and high heels along with the promise of sex once my boyfriend agreed to go steady. Meanwhile, I went back and forth between wanting to become an important artist or getting married and settling down. In those days, women had to make a choice. My ongoing stream of serial monogamies lasted one or two years with periods of casual sex in-between while I searched for the next Mr. Right. At twenty-nine, I finally married Mr. Wrong who promised to be my art patron. I thought I had found the best of both worlds: the security of marriage with the freedom to paint.

Getting married was the first business contract I ever signed, but there were no agreements to define our partnership. Instead of negotiating how we wanted to live together, handle money, or raise a family, we simply said, "I do." There were no children and we didn't own property so our divorce was very civilized. After seven years of minimal sex, I was so glad at the prospect of being single again that I asked for nothing. At that point my idea was to find a man who was a good lover and get married again. Fortunately I was saved by America's sexual revolution. After a year of hot orgasmic sex with my first post marital lover, in 1966, I set out to become a sexually and financially independent Playgirl at the age of thirty-six.

The standard image of a single woman having casual sex is usually seen as dangerous. Yet I believe more violence occurs between couples living together than relative strangers having sex. The first year I explored casual sex, I had a few unpleasant experiences but nothing I would qualify as "date rape." One time I'd made a date for sex and then changed my mind after he showed up. Rather than risk a physical confrontation with a muscle man, I had fast sex to defuse his anger. When I lied and said my husband would be home soon, he flew out the door. Putting out as a form of self defense would never occur to a sexually repressed woman who either freezes or screams until she's forcibly silenced. Many a clever woman has outsmarted a rapist but we rarely hear about them. Society and Hollywood still get off on the idea of women as sexual victims.

As I continued to worry about surviving financially, I had my first proposition to be a mistress to a married man. Marvin Levy's offer was tempting. He was the millionaire Mother always wanted me to marry. Besides having money, he was also very tall, very dark, and very handsome. After our first date at the Four Seasons Restaurant, we walked home that evening down Madison Avenue. At one point, I casually admired an old silver coffee urn in the window of an antique store. The next day it arrived gift wrapped with a sweet note and I nearly swooned with delight. I'd grown up on movies of the forties where the struggling working girl finds true love with a millionaire who her gives her all the luxuries enjoyed only by the rich.

On our next date, I discovered Marvin had a giant cock that needed a lot more stimulation than most. The ridge of his glans looked like a serrated knife that he explained was from a botched circumcision. My insides actually felt sore after we'd fucked, and there had been no orgasm for me. Just before he left, he wanted me to promise I'd be faithful to him, and in return, he'd take care of me. Like a carrot on a string, romance and financial support dangled before me. As he was leaving, he handed me an elaborate set of magic markers- a thoughtful gift for a struggling artist. We agreed to talk about his proposal the following week.

Later when I opened his gift, there sat two crisp, one hundred dollar bills. What a shock to see myself in terms of cold hard cash. At first, I felt compromised and profoundly embarrassed from the ancient taboo that no decent woman would ever accept money for sex. Then suddenly I was overcome with good old American greed. If I was going to be paid for sex, I was worth a lot more than a measly two hundred dollars! I said farewell to Marvin and re-dedicated myself to art.

Following my first one woman show of erotic art in 1968, family, friends and even casual acquaintances warned me against focusing my art too exclusively on sex. They all said it would limit my career, ruin my reputation and I'd be socially ostracized. In my early forties, I left easel painting behind to be a feminist sex teacher and activist. I designed and began running women's nude masturbation groups. The decade of the seventies was devoted to teaching, writing articles and publishing a book about how masturbation related to women's sexual liberation. I was so far out of the sexual closet that some people ran in the opposite direction to avoid me.

My critics were right about being ostracized. I could never be a Sunday school teacher or run for political office, but that was no big loss. I was popular among people who were friends of sex and they were the folks I liked best anyway. Although there were many lean years, I'm happy to say I've had a successful career as an erotic artist, a best selling author with three sex books, a producer of Erotic Sex Ed Videos, an active website devoted to the subject of sex and in 1994, I became a PhD sexologist with a private practice. So what if I broke-even every year. My life was full of exciting sex, adventures and creative challenges that made being rich pale by comparison.

I grew up in a family that had no idea how money worked other than earning a salary. When I first arrived in New York in 1950 at the age of twenty, I was offered space in an ad agency to work freelance. At the time I had no idea what freelance even meant. I was financially repressed which is like being sexually repressed where women rarely have orgasms because we don't know what we want and therefore can't ask for it. When it came to negotiating a fee for each job, I always got ripped off because I never knew what to charge. My ignorance about money and business was frustrating, but as long as I made enough to pay rent, buy food, get art supplies and continue schooling, I didn't mind the struggle.

Scholarships gave me five years of art schooling while I freelanced as a fashion illustrator along with other commercial art jobs to support my fine art habit. Looking back I can see it was a luxury to focus on creative projects where ideas excited me more than owning things. Eventually my art career segued into teaching and writing about liberating women's orgasms though the practice of masturbation skills that continues to this day. Some things I set out to accomplish took years while other projects happened over night. I'm grateful to have stayed on the creative path. I visualized what I wanted and then created the image I saw in my mind's eye. Some ideas were the result of sexual fantasies like the Bodysex Groups, but I never dreamed of producing videos until I found myself doing it. The idea of having a website that allowed me to leave censorship behind was the stuff of science fiction and still is as technology races ahead of me. I remember back in the sixties I resisted the answering machine because it was too complicated.

Once a year during my fifties, I was an anonymous postmenopausal prostitute doing a double with some of my girlfriends in New York and San Francisco. I was the masturbating voyeur who did hot talk while she serviced her client. I learned a lot about the buying and selling of sex in America during that decade. My friends didn't fit the stereotype of the fallen woman who was a drug-addicted victim. The part I loved best about a man paying for sex was how it balanced out the fact that women didn't get equal pay for equal work. Men wanted sex and women needed money. That made prostitution a fair and honest business deal. The sexual exchange was negotiated, the fee agreed upon, and everyone walked away satisfied. When men paid for sex, most of them were extremely polite and very appreciative of the attention they received. In many ways, the several dozen or so clients I'd met had better manners than many men I'd dated.

The next time someone warns you about the dangers of getting involved in the business of sex, tell them that those of us in the field agree it's exceptionally rewarding. I for one have no regrets. Now as I approach eighty, I look forward to the next ten years that promise to be the most dynamic decade of communicating sex information online. The Erotic Sex Skills Series coming up will be ten minute clips that can be downloaded from dodsonandross.com for a modest fee. We will show viewers how to use a condom, do an anal douche, stimulate a clitoris, penetrate an anus, stroke a penis, fondle a breast, penetrate a vagina, locate the g-spot and prostate gland, and that's naming only a few. No faces, no faked orgasms, just close-ups of sex organs in action filmed with a high level of aesthetics. I call this "The New Porn."

Today, thanks to my financially savvy business partner Carlin, the idea of expanding sex information to reach a global audience thrills me. This time, I will welcome the financial reward that will naturally follow. Part of the money earned will support the Betty A. Dodson Foundation: Dedicated to Women and Girls Sexual Pleasure and Health. I said this back in the seventies and it remains true today: "Sex is like any other art form: it must be learned and then practiced." It's time for the world to honor our sex educators, teachers, hands-on sex coaches, sex workers, surrogate partners, prostitutes, therapists, performance artists and everyone in the sexual entertainment business. Not long ago I was ltold that it takes at least ten years to master an art form. When it comes to the fine art of sex, why be in a hurry?