Paula Becomes More Comfortable
Despite the fact we were engaging in what, we thought, were edgy and provocative sex practices during our first few years of marriage; on the whole Paula continued to struggle with bouts of guilt about enjoying sex. Her upbringing in a patently sex-negative environment continually pushed up against her powerful libido. However, by 1989, the year I finished graduate school, Paula started to get more comfortable with sexuality, mostly leaving the guilt of enjoying sex behind her. She had by our third anniversary become consistently multi-orgasmic, achieving regularly three to five orgasms each time we made love. She also had rediscovered the pleasure of masturbation and how it was not “bad” to please yourself as she had been told when she got “caught” doing it as a child.
The differences in our upbringing had become quite apparent, but her perpetually high libido helped her to overcome her resistance to me bringing things into our marriage that seemed normal and appropriate given the sex-positive home in which I grew up. By our fourth year of marriage we were regularly watching explicit sexual “how to” video tapes together and building quite a library of material on sexuality. The Better Sex Video series followed the old tradition of couching sexually explicit content in the guise of education. We bought all four volumes. The idea of watching others have sex on video was quite a leap from the conservative world of her parents; however, we were able to rationalize it because the couples in the video tapes were all presented as married couples. Since we were confident that we were on the path to a better and more relevant Christianity we began to share our tapes and our new outlook with our friends. Usually our efforts were well received, but when we loaned the tapes to some of our oldest friends, they were highly offended. They could not believe we were watching them, but we were sure they tapes represented a positive view of sexuality, and so we continued down that path.
One weekend in 1990, I was then in my first professional ministerial job and we decided to do something completely insane: make our own sex video. To younger readers a couple making a video of themselves having sex might not seem the least bit edgy; but in 1990 was very wild and indeed in some places illegal. Home video cameras were still quite new and few people owned one. We had to rent a video camera and a separate VHS recording unit (this was before the days of camcorders). We spent hours to set up and shoot 3 different scenarios. We were sure we were the most sexually liberated people in the world that day. Hence the oldest nude images of our very young selves’ were been preserved on that grainy video tape. (Damn were we hot!)
Our evolving sexual vision continued as I worked as a young minister. I did a series of intense studies to help clarify what I should believe about Christians and sexuality. My vision was still vague, but one thing was certain, my studies into the scriptures and the cultural norms of that world was most certainly at odds with the official evangelical Christian position. Significantly we could find no evidence to support the ban on public nudity. In fact, we found that the oldest images of Jesus are full frontal nudes of him at his baptism. Further my studies led me to believe that the complete ban on extra-marital sex was also suspect. The Bible's Song of Solomon was all about a young couple's love and sex life, before and after their marriage. That long poem clearly embraces premarital sex as beautiful and positive. Furthermore I found the concept of adultery seemed to be rooted in property rights, not morality. All in all, our views were moving from liberal to heretical.
In 1992 the birth of our daughter , Misty, only made us work harder to develop a comprehensive view of sexuality because we knew as her parents, it was our job to teach about sex, but to do that we had to know what we believed. But her arrival did put the brakes on our own activities. Wow what a change a child brings!
And if the arrival of a child wasn’t enough, due to financial needs we moved into her parents’ home at this time. Moving into her parent's house put our sexual life into deep freeze for a while. She just could not relax to have sex when her parents were in the house.
We did however have an opportunity to celebrate our anniversary at a cabin in the mountains while grandmother watched our infant daughter. Paula bought new lingerie and for the first time ever she posed for photos. In that she was not actually nude, she was able to relax and we got our first glamour photos of her. To say the least we screwed a lot and even got some fun videos. But overall our time with her parent's put our sexual development on hiatus.
We moved to Ohio to help a struggling ministry half a year later. By then we were older and more confident, and were bolder in our developing sexual morality. We shocked several couples when we openly discussed how we owned and enjoyed watching explicit sexual “how to” tapes. Once again, I must point out to younger readers how different the world was in the early 1990's with regard to access to explicit sexual images. Prior to the advent of home video tape, only a small percentage of Americans had ever actually seen movies of people having real sex. Yes, the 1970's saw the first popular explicit movies such as Deep Throat, but for typical middle-class Americans, particularly devout Christians, explicit sex on the screen was outside their life experience. Thus, when Paula and I unashamedly told people we enjoyed such things, as a couple, it was more shocking than us telling vanillas that we have an open marriage today. Further, we debated with our friends that nudity and sexuality is not something that must be hidden from peers or our children. It was during this time we began to see that teaching about positive sexuality would be a lifelong mission for us.
After the birth of our daughter Paula’s mother, wanting to see video of her first granddaughter, bought us a camcorder. We shot many, many hours of the baby, but also made several videos of us making love.
The best of these videos was taken one spring day when we left our little girl with a sitter and took a picnic along a creek in public land not a mile from our house. We waded up the creek into the woods and set up on an island in the large creek. I had set the 8mm camcorder on a tri-pod before we had our lunch in the buff, and it kept running while we made love for almost an hour. I know I annoyed Paula several times when I stopped to move the camera, but the end result was worth the hassle.
We finished with her standing in the middle of the creek holding a tree while I pumped her from behind (she loves that position). All the while we neither heard nor saw anyone; yet, we had no sooner put on our clothes than a group of teenage boys appeared just behind us, and proceeded up the creek. Were they watching the whole time? We didn’t know for sure, but from the timing and the looks they gave us, we were pretty sure we’d made that group of boy’s whole summer. It was good we took that day, not longer after that we found out she was pregnant again.
I must relate a funny story from this time. With Paula pregnant with our second child, my mother flew out from Texas to see us - well to see her granddaughter and we were just part of the bargain. As a treat for her we rented a two bed room cabin in the mountains for a couple of nights before she left. By this time Paula was five or six months pregnant and was visibly showing, which of course altered (not ended) our sex life. On the second day we had taken a little hike and come back to the cabin. Misty who was now almost two needed a nap, so we put her in our bed and my mother went to her room to lay down as well. Paula and I sat on the couch and snuggled. Then kissed, then we got naked. It was a turn-on for both of us that we were in the main room of this cabin making love while my mother was just the other side of the door and could come out at any time. We had fun giving one another oral sex for a good while. When she couldn’t wait any longer, she slid to the floor and leaned over onto the couch. Of course I knew what she wanted, so I saddled up behind her and began stroking gently but with vigor. It was one of those beautiful moments of unplanned love making when she and I feel so close and the mutual love filled us. I kept up a steady rhythm and she just laid her head on the couch and relaxed, enjoying the sensations. With all the activities planned for my mother, it had been several days since we’d had sex. So for all my enjoyment of the moment, I couldn't keep that up forever. I began to feel the tension in my thighs that heralded and impending orgasm.
At that very second the door to our left was flung open. Paula and I both looked up to see my mother bounding out of her room talking a mile a minute. “I was reading this article and I thought………..” She stopped dead in her tracks not two feet from us. “ooops”
She looked down at us. From her vantage point she was looking right at my pelvis pushed between Paula’s spread buns. For a moment we all froze, but my orgasm was already on its way and there was no stopping it. My mom took one step backward toward her room saying “I guess I’ll tell you later”. However, she did not take her eyes away from us. Paula burst out laughing. Not knowing what to do with my mom looking at me with my dick in Paula, I instinctively pulled out. That was even worse. What I didn’t think about was what would happen after I pulled out. I began laughing as my penis sprung upward over her buns, just as I began to ejaculate. So with my naked pregnant wife bent over the couch laughing, my mother just getting back to the doorway of her room (still watching), I was on my knees laughing as shot after shot of white cream arched onto Paula’s back and buns. Not having sex for four days just guaranteed a lot of semen. When it did stop I flopped down on Paula’s back. We laughed and talked for a little while before we got dressed and knocked on Mom’s door to tell her it was safe to come out.
My mother came back to see us when our was when our son, Lamar, was about a year old. Paula surprised me when she asked me if she could ask my mother to photograph her in the nude outside. Though I'd shot a few dozen nude photos of Paula by then, she was always tense. She knew my mother had been posing for nudes since the late 1950's and was a good photographer in her own right. So my wife and mother planned a photo outing.
The next day my mother, our two children, Paula and myself all took off. We went to a large open area not far from our home that had been logged a year or two before. There were at least a thousand acres of open and clear land.
Though we'd had sex in some public places, this was different. She removed her clothes and hour and half she was in the nude under the warm sun. Paula had never been naked in such an open and conspicuous spot before, but she had great time. Most of the time I was just keeping the kids entertained, while Mom and Paula composed photo after photo. Once they'd shot up the last of the film, Paula seemed reluctant to get dressed.
The photos came out great and those photos began our portfolio of 8X10 photos of Paula. Within a decade, it had many fine photographs, some professionally taken, but most shot by me. It was very amusing a few years after this, when a college student who had been in the youth group of my prior ministry, first came by to see us and saw an 8X10 nude of Paula, in a frame, right in the open. The look on her face was priceless.