Dr. Chloe Burrell, Sex Researcher

Chloe Burrell, Ph.D., was acutely aware of the irony of her situation. At 34, single (divorced after two years of marriage to the guy she'd lived with for three years before that), and attractive enough to be dating frequently, she was without a boyfriend, dateless for six weeks running, AND she was a "sex researcher" at a large Midwestern university.

How unfair was that? Five-seven, sandy brown shoulder-length hair, pretty face with expressive brown eyes, good figure—and Chloe hadn't had sex in months. Making the situation even more ridiculous was the fact that the only make-time-for-myself activity she prioritized into her crammed-full professor/researcher life was her workouts. Taking to heart the findings about the benefits of exercise applying to the brain as well as the body, Chloe did not skip her regular workouts, and her trim figure in a bikini would turn any man's head if only she had time to go to the beach.

Or to a party. Or on a weekend out of town to relax.

Circumstances had conspired against her, she thought as she walked to her car after another day of doing several hours of research and working on a journal article she was co-authoring with a professor at a university in the next state. Getting ahead in the cutthroat world of academic ladder-climbing and peer-reviewed publishing meant long hours and a nose-to-the-grindstone approach to life. As a woman, she was suspect in the eyes of the reigning cadre of academe's gray-haired old boys' club who wondered when she would "take time off" to have a baby or three. Chloe faced the female equivalent of the "black tax" that her African-American colleagues faced: Work twice as hard to be considered just as good.

Tossing her satchel onto the passenger's seat and climbing behind the wheel, she turned down the volume on the radio before starting her car. The drive to the townhome she shared with her cat among the accumulated detritus of an academic career and a dissolved marriage was one more in the string of daily duties that sucked away opportunities to meet interesting men.

Time for dating? Yeah, right. Meeting eligible men in her field of research at conferences, professional organizations, and the like? Fat chance (with "fat" being the operative word, Chloe once thought, given the physical condition of many of the men who showed up at such gatherings). Dalliances with grad students? The double standard meant the male profs could probably ride out any repercussions, but that wouldn't be the case for the lone woman professor among the graduate neuroscience faculty at her university.

Exiting the faculty parking lot, Chloe drove around the edge of campus toward the interstate loop. Trees were shedding their red- and yellow-hued foliage under a coffin-lid sky as a cold breeze blew swirls of fallen leaves across the road in front of her. A couple of guys were stubbornly clinging to the last hint of the season before unremitting cold set in and were jogging in shorts and hooded pullovers on the sidewalk next to the road. She looked at the gray cotton fabric stretched snugly across their butts as they ran beside her car. The view made the slow crawl bearable as the traffic moved at a pace matching that of the joggers.

Both the guys had nice, firm glutes. The sight was hypnotic as Chloe daydreamed about how the curves of their strong asscheeks might feel against her cupped palms if she were standing behind them as they paused to catch their breath.

It had been way too long since she had curled up to doze or to talk, happy and content, with a pair of masculine arms wrapped around her. It had also been far too long since she had gripped a man's naked butt, pulling him deeper inside her pussy as he pumped his hard cock inside her.

She missed both things desperately.

An impatient honk behind her snapped her back to reality, and she noted that the two college men had rounded the corner and disappeared. She accelerated to rejoin the normal flow of traffic.

At least her job meant Chloe had learned about a couple of excellent female masturbation techniques and gadgets in the last few years. They had come in handy on multiple occasions (and for multiple orgasms) since she learned about them either because she had been charged with finding appropriate "exogenous female sexual arousal intensifiers" for the lab's major grant project two years ago, or because the research subjects whom she interviewed described their techniques, accouterments, and fantasies to her as part of the data gathering she had to do for some of the research studies.

And, as usual, that line of thought (and maybe the two muscular male backsides she had watched running on the sidewalk now two blocks behind her) prompted contemplation of a category of fantasy to which Chloe had recently been introduced in the course of her research: Fucking a man in the ass with a strap-on dildo.

Driving to her townhome through the cold sprinkle which had just started and which presaged the coming winter, Chloe thought yet again about Georgia, the subject who had come in for her screening interview on Monday a week ago as the first step in the two days' worth of time she would be paid by the lab for the research study. Georgia was a tall brunette who had been recruited to the study from an ad run in the university's student newspaper: "College-aged women wanted for sexuality research. Two days required. No major illnesses within the last six months. Sexually active. Pay for participants."

Chloe was the researcher who interviewed the women about their sex habits.

"Yeah, I masturbate pretty frequently," Georgia had told her that Monday as Chloe collected baseline data. "I seem to need it pretty regularly, you know?"

Chloe hadn't looked up from her clipboard but murmured a noncommital, "Uh-huh." Georgia could have said, "Frig my clit," or "Play with my pussy," or any other description that meant "masturbate," and Chloe's reaction would not have changed. Part of her job meant listening to research subjects talk in the most natural way when they answered the researcher's questions. In fact, the subjects were encouraged to do this because it lessened the chances of any reticence in sharing information.

This research subject didn't seem to have any trouble communicating in the vernacular about her activities and fantasies.

"Don't get me wrong," Georgia continued, "I love a good, hard dick on a buffed guy, and I like the emotional connection even more—when you can actually find a guy who will connect with you between your ears and not just between the sheets. But you've got a better chance of finding a five-carat diamond in a bag of M&Ms than you have of finding a guy like that—at least at this university. So I make do between one-night stands and a casual boyfriend every now and then."

Nothing Chloe hadn't heard many times before from the women who participated in these studies.

"Are you as satisfied from your masturbation as from sexual intercourse?" Chloe asked, moving to the next question on the form.

"Emotionally? Of course not. Physically? I haven't found a guy yet who could hold a candle to what I can do to myself."

Chloe shifted in her chair.

Georgia continued as she reached behind her head to readjust the elastic band at the base of her pony tail. "Part of it is that only you know how to do to yourself exactly what feels the best, but I'd be willing to train a guy to do it, if he was interested." Georgia laughed, then sighed. "But college guys willing to learn? With the female-to-male ratio here at 60/40?" She made a "pffft" sound that needed no elaboration. "The guys know the competition favors their wants, and that usually means just getting their rocks off, not spending time making the girl happy. They don't have to do it because there's always another girl who won't ask for it."

Chloe knew the statistics and the consequences. There had been an article and several editorials about it in the student newspaper with headings like, "Why guys can afford to be jerks," and "Where are the decent men?"

"So the guys here figure it's not worth the investment to learn how to do a girl really well orally," Georgia concluded, shrugging. "No, give me my favorite vibrator for my pussy, the little pocket rocket vibe I rub across my clit at the same time, and turn me loose to come like no guy ever makes happen."

"So I can put down that you are 'moreso' physically satisfied from masturbation than from intercourse with a male?"

"So far," Georgia answered simply.

"When you return tomorrow, can you bring your favorite toys?" Chloe asked in a purely clinical manner. "This study attempts neurological calibration of female sexual response. You'll be lying down underneath a scanning machine when you masturbate and climax so we can get readings on your brain activity during orgasm."

"Cool!" said Georgia enthusiastically.

The following day Georgia showed up carrying a backpack which held her laptop, her chemistry text, and her vibrators. Chloe had Georgia lie down (toys in hand) on the altar-like platform extending from underneath the massive scanning machinery, then explained why the research was such a challenge. "Excess motion of your head is bad for the readings," she said as she drew a white blanket on top of Georgia, who was wearing one of the lab's garments designed for comfort in the cool environment required by the scanning machinery. The garment was drawn up so that she was nude from the waist down except for heavy white cotton socks. "I know it's tough to think about not moving your head when you're about to come, but that's what we're stuck with because of this machine."

"I'll see what I can do," Georgia said with a smile as she thumbed on the pocket rocket vibe to make sure the battery she'd put in before crawling up onto the platform padding was ready to go. "I've given myself some orgasms in places and at times when I had to be quiet and not draw the attention of the people around me, so maybe I'll be a good test subject for you, Dr. Burrell."

Chloe didn't let Georgia see the little smile that played itself across her lips as she adjusted settings on the instrument panel.

Co-eds in the twenty-first century were WAY more comfortable talking about, and engaging in, all manner of sexual activity than were college women during Chloe's undergraduate years way back in the stodgy old 90s (at least today's college women seemed to be like that compared to the very small number of studious females with whom Chloe studied in her pre-med courses).

"I hate to ask this, Georgia," Chloe said, reappearing into the co-ed's line of sight after stepping away from the instrument panel, "but can you show me what you're going to do with your hands and arms when you masturbate? If there's excess shoulder motion, we'll have to figure a way around that."

"No problem," Georgia answered.

Chloe was past being surprised at the ease with which today's college women handled sex. She rolled the blanked up over Georgia's tummy and watched as the girl eased the vibrator, glistening with a coating of lube, inside her vagina.

"I move this around to get the rounded vibrating part up against my G-spot," Georgia said, squirming her legs open a bit and seating the vibrator to her satisfaction. "But once it's in place, it doesn't take a lot of motion—I just hold it up against the right spot on the front wall of my pussy, and I let the hum of the vibrations do the work."

"Okay," Chloe answered, truly happy from a researcher-clinician-check-this-off-the-experimental-protocols viewpoint. Georgia's technique would minimize motion underneath the scanner.

"Then, I don't have to do a lot with this little vibe, either," Georgia said, holding the lipstick tube-sized toy almost like a pencil and directing the tip against her clit, which Chloe noticed had already distended. The girl's clitoris also glistened with a coating of lube, something readily apparent given Georgia's denuded pudendum.

("For the guys who will go down on you," Georgia had told Chloe, "I've found that a smooth, hair-free pussy does seem to encourage them to spend a bit more 'quality time' there." The co-ed had, in answering the questions Chloe asked as part of the screening determinations, shared in explicit detail her blow-job techniques and why she liked giving head as part of her own arousal. But Georgia was quick to say that she fully expected to receive as well as to give oral sex. "I better not have to ask for it," was Georgia's no-nonsense addendum to her explanation about why cunnilingus was such a big part of a satisfying sexual encounter. "If I give a blow job and then they don't take a dive, well, things don't go nearly as well from that point on.")

Georgia positioned the two vibrators to her satisfaction, and Chloe rolled the blanket back down in place. "Hold that thought, Georgia," she laughed as she exited the scanner area in order to control things from a protected space nearby. Quickly checking that all arrangements were still go, she started the process that would result in the functional magnetic resonance images of Georgia's brain during arousal, climax, and post-orgasmic return to Planet Earth.

"Okay, Georgia," Chloe said into the microphone, "do your thing."

"It's about time," answered the college student. "I wasn't going to last much longer like this if I couldn't turn on my toys and start to enjoy myself."

An eye on the array of read-outs, Chloe monitored things, noting neurophysiological indicators and how they changed as Georgia began her climb up the excitatory curve of female sexual arousal. In a surprisingly short time, the co-ed was already on the pre-orgasmic precipice.

This was always a fascinating part for Chloe—watching the signs that linked with arousal and climax. Each subject was different. For some, it took forever to plunge over the edge, and some never made it. ("Just like 'shy bladder' among men at a row of urinals," Chloe once told a grad class, explaining that the clinical aspects of an experiment prevented some women from reaching orgasm in the laboratory.) Georgia, though, was blasting through each stage faster than any woman who had ever been in the lab. She may be in the category of subjects defined in sexual research literature as aroused by the thought of having sex (with oneself or a partner) in public and/or under the watchful eyes of clinicians, Chloe thought.

"Remember to keep your head still," Chloe cautioned into the mic.

Then, there it was. The incontrovertible evidence of the female orgasm as displayed in real-time fashion for a few brief seconds (or, in Georgia's case, an amazingly long series of seconds). The near shut-down of cognitive activity in specific regions of the brain was neurological proof of a climax.

Georgia had experienced probably the most intense orgasm Chloe had ever witnessed. The data would be incredibly valuable simply because there was so much of it, so much evidence of brain function cessation in multiple areas for so long.

She must be completely blissed out, Chloe thought. That kind of orgasm would be powerfully addicting.

When the signs appeared that the refractory period had finally tailed off, Chloe stepped into the scanner room and approached the platform cautiously.

"Georgia?"

The girl stirred slightly.

"That was a good one, huh?"

"Mmmm," was the only response as Chloe manipulated the instrument panel so that the platform slid silently out from under the casing which housed that part of the university's fMRI machine.

Georgia opened her eyes dreamily and looked at Chloe. "It was good, but it wasn't one of my best."

Chloe found this hard to believe, but she didn't say anything as she helped Georgia off the platform. Carefully holding open the plastic bag into which the co-ed dropped her toys so she could take them back home with her, Chloe said, "The readings I got told me clearly that you just had one heck of an orgasm, Georgia. And you're saying that you've had some that have been even MORE intense?"

Georgia answered from behind the screen which had been set up for subjects to dress and undress. A touch of female pride in her voice, the co-ed said, "Oh, yeah. This place doesn't really allow me to get comfortable, to dive into a favorite fantasy or watch a hot video, you know?" Georgia emerged from behind the screen and sat down on a straight-backed chair up against the wall to lace up her tennis shoes. "But when I'm really ready to focus, well, it's somethin' else."

Intrigued, Chloe sat on the edge of the platform where Georgia had a few minutes earlier been lying, and laid her clip board and notes next to her. An even more intense orgasm would produce even more data, maybe something worthy of a journal article. "So what's different when you do that?"

Georgia fidgeted on the chair for a second before answering. "Well, it's not really that different in terms of what I do."

Could that possibly be a blush of embarrassment creeping up onto Georgia's face? This girl who had no hesitancies about describing in exhaustive detail her fellatio technique, why she liked cunnilingus, how she had surreptitiously masturbated in public places? Chloe was now even more intrigued.

"Then there's something else that's different? I mean, are you saying that you can have these even more spectacular orgasms by doing the same things you did just then, but that you'd be thinking of something different?"

Yes, those pretty cheeks were reddening on Georgia's face. "Yeah. A different fantasy or watching a video of that fantasy."

Georgia made no move to get up and leave. Chloe knew the girl was aware that the day's experiment was over, that the only thing left was to collect her pay on the way out of the psychology complex's research building.

Taking in a breath and stiff-arming the platform in order to slide back a little—and thereby sending the message that she was ready to listen if Georgia was ready to talk—Chloe didn't say anything. But she did look at Georgia, raise her eyebrows and cock her head slightly. "Well?" didn't have to come out of her mouth for the girl to know which of the two of them would make the next comment on the topic of better orgasms based on a private fantasy.

Leaning against the chair back and crossing her feet at the ankles as she stretched her long legs out to full length, Georgia placed her hands in her lap and spoke without making eye contact.

"I don't know why this is, Dr. Burrell, but what gets me hotter than anything is thinking about a certain way a woman has sex with a man, or seeing it happen on a video."

Silence hung in the air. Chloe realized this co-ed who had during all the previous exchanges in the experimental interviews and protocols been such a nothing-shocks-me libertine was now embarrassed about admitting to something that turned her on. "It's okay, Georgia. I'm a researcher, and I have to tell you that I am interested in how you achieve such orgasms. This research is all about discovering things that we can use to eventually help patients or even just normal people looking for ways to work out problems in their sex lives."

"Okay," the girl answered, drawing in a big breath. Poised for a second with lungs full of air, and heightening Chloe's curiosity even more during that brief pause, Georgia finally blurted out the private fantasy that launched such powerful orgasms. "What makes me come more intensely than anything is when I masturbate and think about fucking some hot guy in his asshole with a strapon dildo while he's bent over nude in front of me with his hard cock hanging down between his legs and he's moaning in pleasure as I really ride him good to bring myself off."

In spite of all her training about experimental subject interactions, about not registering surprise or revulsion or even positive attitudes in reaction to what subjects said or did, Dr. Chloe Burrell's jaw dropped open.