‘So you watch porn huh?’ his eyes starting to glaze over.

‘What? I guess. I mean it’s not like I light some candles, crack open a bottle of Chardonnay and pop ‘Debbie Does Dallas’ into the DVD player on a Sunday evening or something, but yeah sometimes.’

‘I mean do you like it?’ vague glint of saliva now shimmering from the side of his mouth.

‘Hmm,  I’m pretty indifferent to it really. Let’s just say that as men are visual creatures, I wouldn’t trust a guy who didn’t admit to having a stash of dirty magazines or an internet porn subscription, that’s all I’m saying’

‘So you, you watch it regularly then, huh? That’s hot. By the way your boobs look really big today’, eyes fixated on my chest.

‘For crying out loud already, snap out of it.’

This short exchange between me and a guy friend, lead me to amusingly ponder how just one word uttered from my heavily glossed lips, ‘Porn’,  turned a charming and handsome young man into a blathering, hot for teacher, entranced, salivating, cleavage gawking, shallow breathing, sweaty palmed pre-pubescent boy, within the blink of an eye.  It wasn’t like I was intentionally trying to turn the poor lad on, in some calculated siren-like seduction, but I truly am a bit indifferent to the whole she-bang (excuse the poor pun, or porn pun as the case may be).

Spending ¾ of my twenties selling the illusion of erotica and sex, I know how easy it is to get the male species all hot and bothered, skimping around as I did for years in a little pink dress and stockings. Before you start jumping to conclusions, let me reassure you I’m hardly  ‘Belle de Jour’ here.  For the record I had worked for a well known luxury lingerie brand, as well as writing erotic fiction for their many publications, ironically under a pseudonym, as my real last name is Fattal.

For years, most of my working life revolved around wrongfooting men (and sometimes women)  into buying into an erotic fantasy of their fancy.  My weapons of choice – my visible ample cleavage and painfully obvious innuendo.  After a while I became pretty apt at reading customers and could automatically cater to what I sensed men would respond to best, be it the innocent giggly clumsy naïve girl or the dominant severe woman who wouldn’t take shit.  What I’m saying is hardly an epiphany to anyone reading this. We all tune ourselves for whatever motivation, to a lesser or greater degree, chameleon-like, into other people desires.

This skill of being able to turn seduction on and off has been an advantage many times both professionally and personally; yet sometimes it has been a slight disadvantage, when you are genuinely interested in getting to know a guy.  Being a pretty normal, quirky, sweet, girl next door kinda type in reality,  men experience palpable disappointment when their fantasy shatters and they do not find chains and whips in my bedroom, nor me in crotch-less panties cooking them eggs in the morning, nor daily recreations of scenes from 9 1/2 weeks. Sorry guys.

I am by no means some seduction expert, far from it, in fact I think I don’t utilise my feminine wiles to their fullest potential actually, who knows what Mata Hari effect might take hold.  What is interesting to me is that when one partakes, to whatever extent, in catering to certain sexual and erotic fantasies, like any job, it  starts to takes on a day to day matter of factness that is anything but erotic/sexual.

Overexposure and desensitisation, has led me to objective indifference towards the erotic industries such as Porn. Straight forward spit roast, cum in her hair, nasty Annabel Chong pornography neither turns me on nor off, it’s just too clinical and graphic for my sensibility to find it anything other than dull.  Erotic literature is a different ball game, here I feel my imagination can run wild, but that’s another story. Perhaps my bored ‘Laissez Faire’ attitude was kind of a turn on to my friend.

An example of what I mean can be seen in the recently released documentary film ‘9to5 – Days in Porn’. This German 2008 production by Jens Hoffmann,  directs its attention towards the people behind the controversial multi-billion dollar Adult Entertainment Industry. It follows, without judgement or comment, the individual lives of those involved (from actors to health care practitioners) whose day to day job it is to keep the cogs oiled and the wheels rolling of an business that outsells the music industry.

As the title suggests, just like any conventional occupation, even porn can take on the grey hue of any routine nine to five job, in-spite of the glamourous or grotesque nature of the images being produced.  Like the creation of any illusion or fantasy marketed by entertainment industries such as film, fashion, music or in this case porn, if you don’t want burst the proverbial erotic bubble, whatever you do, don’t go backstage.

A few years back some girlfriends and I were invited to what I, in my naïve ambivalence, thought was a fancy dress evening at a fetish club in west Berlin. On entering the baby powder and latex scented club, we were greeted by a several gimps and a man dressed as a horse. Pretty standard fetish code; amusing but nothing out of the norm for us ladies. After the rudimentary tame fake S&M performances were over and we decided to head upstairs, I began to realise that we had in fact been invited to a gang bang party ,fashioned in a crude ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ style. In one corner some unlikely lady was being sandwiched between two men, and in the other I couldn’t tell whose legs and arms belonged to whom in the big body mountain that was a five-some taking place a few feet away.

After our initial startling realisation that we were sipping Gin and Tonics whilst a bacchanalian orgy was taking place around us, we pondered our options as we sat in the available gynaecology chairs. Being very English, I didn’t want to seem rude and impolite to our latex Gestapo and Russian Tsarina clad hosts who had kindly invited us to their do whop.  The plan was to stay for a bit. watch but not interact and kindly make our excuses and leave after an hour – we ended up staying for two.  As the whole surreal scene unfolded it just didn’t seem that interesting, shocking nor titillating.  We continued to sip away at our G&T’s, like any Saturday night with the girls at any old bar back in our neighbourhoods.

When I pose the question to a lot of male friends whether they would really ever want their pornographic or sexual fantasies to be re-enacted in real life, they boisterously respond with a testosterone driven YES! The truth is fantasy and illusion are by their very nature entities that can only exist in an abstract metaphysical realm, only accessed by the imagination or by remote control for late night German telly. Not that this is the case for everyone, but it certainly must be the case for most, otherwise the the adult entertainment industry wouldn’t thrive as it has been since time immemorial.

After discovering one former boyfriends bookmarked stocking fetish website, I thought I would do my girl-friendly duty and give him the red light special at home.  So I set the scene for him that evening with my finest lingerie, stockings and 10 cm killer peep toes, draped across the living room table awaiting his return home.  On returning he clocked me, smiled, entered the room, patted my bottom and proceeded to flip open his laptop to log into his Led Zepplin Fan forum to chat to fellow losers.  So much for Debbie does Dallas, that night Bassma did a book in bed, whilst boyfriend did the internet.