When Grant Stoddard arrived in Portsmouth, N.H., in 2003 to have sex with a columnist for Nerve.com as a prize for winning a contest, little did he know that he would also be joined by a Filipino porn star, a limousine driver and the woman's husband.
Stoddard was also unaware that within a pair of weeks, he would go from being a single, unemployed, wannabe rock star on the brink of deportation to an online sex columnist willing to "try anything."
"I didn't want to be a writer, and I hadn't had sex hardly ever, and two weeks later I was a sex writer," the 32-year-old told an audience in Sophia Gordon Hall last night during "After Hours with Grant Stoddard," a talk hosted by the Tufts Burlesque Troupe.
Stoddard's column, titled "I Did It for Science," quickly took flight when his try-anything reputation spread, and before long he had taken on challenges ranging from having sex in the subway to engaging in infantilization. During the latter, a woman dressed him in a bonnet, diaper and pacifier, burped him and fed him stewed carrots.
"I never really got to choose the assignments I did," Stoddard said. "There were very sadistic people in the office and they would try to do, I suspect, what would damage me the most."
Stoddard, now a self-proclaimed "accidental sexpert," later chronicled many of his endeavors in his book, "Working Stiff" (2006).
"It's about how the unlikeliest person in the world to do this job ended up doing it, and all the conflicts that go with it. It's an emotional book if you skip over the parts about jizzing — and there are a lot."
He explained that transitioning to the job was difficult at first, as he had come from a sexually conservative background.
"I had a sheltered childhood. It was like virgin, virgin, virgin — cigarettes being put out on cocks. There was nothing leading up to it — it was jarring," he said.
Still, according to Stoddard, the bigger challenge came in putting his experiences on paper. "The most difficult part is when you actually have to write about your sexual experiences. As difficult as it was to go through with some of this, it was writing that really tested my bravery," he said.
Stoddard explained that the people involved gave him permission to write about all of his experiences — with the exception of one undercover trip to a leather camp in West Virginia.
"The people I wrote about were promoting a service they got money for, and they wanted more people to expand their revenue. For the most part, everything was done completely consensually," he said.
Stoddard first came to the United States in 1998 looking for a music career and an escape from his life in England. "I was a bit different [from] anyone else because I had an accent. People listened to what I had to say. It just instilled me with a confidence that I wasn't the awful, wretched person I thought I was based on the reactions from the girls in England," he said.
He told the audience members, whom he encouraged to submit questions, that his work was well received by women in New York City and actually improved his relationship skills.
"Most of the girlfriends I'd met knew me through the column or through the book," Stoddard said. "Maybe it was just the crowd I ran in or that I had the advantage of living in New York in the East Village. Whether they are or not, nobody acts like they're shocked by anything.
"There were other girls that had been in regular relationships, and some of them were looking to do something different or explore," Stoddard continued. "I was happy to help them."
Stoddard concluded by recommending some of his tamer experiences to the audience, mentioning his first visit to a nude beach as a turning point in his personal life.
"I think that changed me a little bit," Stoddard said. "I think it was kind of a catalyst that gave me confidence and opened me up to doing other things, since it happened pretty early on.
"I do recommend some of the basic [things], feeling all right with yourself and being happy with who you are," he continued. "It doesn't mean a physical change; it's just being good with yourself."
