Why I Love Being Catalina (Most Of The Time)

Having friends outside of the sex industry circle is kind of odd.  Either you can’t be yourself or you can be yourself, but then that aspect of you consumes the entire friendship.  Case in point - many of my “friends” have no idea that I am Catalina - a professional sex writer with a PR firm for fetish professionals.  They just think I’m a stay-at-home Mom who goes to soccer games.  They are the wives of my clients.  That’s not real friendship though.  We can’t really share in the the intimacy that friendship requires for me.  We can discuss the children and that’s about it.  As though our existence as (sexual) women is gone.  That is until the alcohol comes out.  I’ve been with these same women after they’ve had a few bottles of wine and they are just as filthy and nasty as Catalina.  It’s just not proper and becoming of a good Southern Belle to talk about it under normal conditions.

I also have friends who aren’t in the industry, but know that I am Catalina.  They know me primarily as my mom, wife, teacher self, but also know that I have a secret side.  In general, they are more interested in hearing about what Mz. Berlin is really like, what it’s like to shoot porn, and how I managed to make friends with these people than how my life is going.  In other words, I feel that I’m just a conduit to a taboo world they aren’t a part of, but wish they were.  I don’t discuss much of my life as Catalina with them.  My standard answer when people ask me questions about what I’ve been up to is, “Stuff and Things” (that’s why you’ll see that as my default journal category on this site).

My truest friends are in the sex industry in some fashion.  Photographers, models, actresses, producers, webmasters, sex workers, graphic designers, submissives, and affiliate managers (like Mario at Stockroom - I love you, Mario!) Our conversations are often about sex and such, since that is our obvious common interest, but that’s not all we talk about.  There’s more to it.  We talk about real stuff.  Important things.  Relationships.  Ideas.  Politics.  Life.  Love.  Money.  Goals.  Racism.  Abuse.  Addiction.  Feminism.  Parenting.  …  These friends and I discuss the important stuff.  They are the only ones who truly know Catalina and her alter ego.

What’s the point of this post?  I’m on Valium still for my shoulder, but I think it’s that sometimes people have expectations on both sides of my friendship equation that are out of balance.  My soccer mom friends would think I’m a sinning whore unworthy of having children, while my friends who are hip to it think that my life is Sex in the City glamorous.  The reality lies somewhere in the middle.  After discussing her latest CBT scene with my friend, January Seraph, we then talked about the health status of her boyfriend’s lungfish and I sent her an extreme CBT image I had on my camera and she said, “LOL, Can I use that on …com?”

And That is why I love being Cataina (Most Of The Time).  That and the fact that I get to talk to people that I once dreamed of talking to on a peer-to-peer level.