Caged Heat: Confessions of a Prison Masturbator

When I awoke last night for an uncharacteristic 3 AM piss, the cellblock was quiet and the television on the tier was lit warm pink and orange. As my eyes adjusted, focusing on naked bodies, my groin warmed. I sat on my bed, watching through the cell bars a muted TV angled for viewing by the occupants of many cells.

It’s quite common for the fellas to watch soft-core porn late night. Light stuff: HBO’s “Real Sex,” Cinemax “After Dark,” Showtime. My preference is for the hard-core porn, the real deal, not a lick of plot, just bodies spastically slapping into each other, maybe throw in some gaudy soundtrack. But aside from the magazine pages of two-dimensional sex, I haven’t consumed hardcore porn since the late 1990s, when I came to prison. Some of my neighbors stay up into the small hours of the morning, glued to the TV, beating off like crazed chimps. Nothing wrong there, but I’m practically useless if I don’t get at least seven hours of sleep.

So I don’t stay up to watch Skinemax, but if, let’s say, I happen to awaken at 3 AM, it would be foolish to let a hard-on go to waste, would it not? The thing is, that’s not exactly how it went down. What prompted me to sit and watch was the characters were wearing orange jumpsuits. This quote unquote movie was set in a women’s prison.

An oily, reptilian-looking male guard showed up at the cell a blonde was sharing with a brunette. There was a smirking tête-à-tête (I didn’t have the benefit of audio, it mattered not), then he opened the gate, and the blond strutted out. No, I thought, no! That’s not how it’s done, an inmate would never just slink past a nonchalant guard. Immediately, I had become the insider who watches a movie, and annoyingly points out inaccuracies. Except, I had only myself to annoy.

Our girl was escorted to the office of the warden, a saucy brunette in a cheap business suit, who dismissed the guard and closed the door. There was a pretense of disciplining, which promptly turned lascivious, and then the warden undid the button of her charge’s orange jumper, exposed a tanned breast and fondled it.

Ah, prison fantasies. They have a name for that, and that name is rape. Before I go back to pretending that I was able to suspend disbelief, permit me a moment of being a wet blanket, or, more appropriately, a fly in the Vaseline. The Prison Rape Elimination Act, which Congress signed into law in 2003, explicitly states that there is no such thing as consensual sexual contact between staff and inmate. As inmates, we are wards of the state and don’t have the capacity to give consent. While there is certainly inmate-on-inmate rape, a good deal of sexual misconduct occurs between staff and inmate, and the bulk of that happens in youth prisons and women’s facilities. Every so often a guard is fired and it makes the evening news, but more often it goes undetected, or, if it is reported, no one believes the inmate. Depressing, right? OK, enough. Let’s toss off this wet blanket, sports fans, and get back to the action.

The warden and her charge got naked, fondled, sucked, and fucked, after a fashion. That fashion happened to be rubbing their pink parts together, scissor-legged. Apparently, that’s a thing.

In between scenes there were shots of prison exteriors: a tiara of razor wire, an outdated security camera perched high on a concrete block wall, brick facades and barred windows, an empty exercise yard encircled by a dirt track. These interstitials added up to the sum total of cinema vérité for this made-for-late-night TV movie. With an insider’s eye, I wondered whether all the shots were from the same prison, whether it was a maximum-security or a medium, and what region of the country it was in.

The actors were attractive enough, and they were certainly in better shape than I, but they didn’t meet the boner-inducing standard of hardcore porn. If soft-core is the farm team for the hard-core, this lot was destined to stay in the minors, and then eventually transition to selling real estate or working at TGIFridays. In this realm, there is a corollary to local news, where only the prettiest, most talented mouths make it to a national market.

I couldn’t get past the scissor-leg sex. Maybe it was the preferred method only because this production wasn’t allowed the penetration of fingers (“digiting”) or dildos. I felt like Jonah Hill’s character in Superbad, lamenting the absence of dick. You’ve got to have a money shot to end the scene. Where’s the money shot?

I was getting tired of fake blondes with fake tits, faking orgasms in a fake prison. What the fuck was I doing? Well, by that point, I was just trying to finish before a real guard made a real round, found me beating off, and wrote me a real misbehavior report for exposing myself. Because, if I imagined, for one iota, the hearing officer disciplining me by making me scissor with him and his hairy ham hocks, I’d never stop throwing up. And then the credits roll.