A virginal Brit's Xperimental journey ... Grant Stoddard on a career built the hard way

When Grant Stoddard came to America in July 1998, all he wanted was to find a nice girl who would relieve him of his virginity and cuddle him afterwards. What he got instead was a job attending orgies, test-driving sex toys, and throwing yogurt and eggs on naked perverts. As the writer of Nerve.com's I Did It For Science column, Stoddard—who had no prior journalism experience before he moved to New York from Essex, England—was the reader's prurient proxy, sampling the fruits of the kinky underground and reporting back to the vanilla masses. His exploits, which also included appearing in a porn film and infiltrating an S&M retreat, are recounted in a new memoir, Working Stiff: The Misadventures of an Accidental Sexpert, and they may soon be coming to a theater near you, Paramount Vantage having recently optioned the rights to a film adaptation. While some of the most graphic details didn't make it into the book, Stoddard, 30, was more than happy to expand on them in an interview at a Manhattan diner.

The orgy is one I regret because I was way too hung up to be there and I took the wrong girl. But, I mean, who's the right girl to take to an orgy?RADAR: Working Stiff opens with a scene in which you get anally penetrated with a dildo cast from a mold of your own penis. [Here's the Nerve version.] Do you still have the dildo?
GRANT STODDARD: No. I don't think it was very flattering. Which was great, given where it had to go. But it was slightly more diminished than it really is, and I don't need it to be any smaller. If I had captured it at its proudest, I would probably have it as a paperweight in my home or hanging as a mobile above my bed, or something like that. But it's really difficult, that plaster of paris. It's cold, chilly, and you have to stick it in there for like two minutes. It's like at the dentist's when they take an impression. Imagine that, but on your own shaft.

You say you had a remarkably easy time finding accomplices for your sex-periments. Why do you think that was? Are people just more sexually adventurous than we give them credit for?
It's all about having an excuse. The tone I took with the column was that I was reluctantly going along with it, and for the most part that was true. There were a few things I actually really did want to do, and it gave me a perfect excuse. I saw a lot of that in girlfriends as well. There wasn't one instance when I asked somebody to do something or help me with something and they said no.

Not once?

Yeah. It's kind of funny. I think that everyone, given the excuse, will say, Oh, it's one for the books, or something to tell the grandkids. Or maybe something to keep from the grandkids. Everyone was very, very cooperative.

And some people were obviously more cooperative than others.
Way more. Usually, when I asked people to help me out, I was the bashful one. For example, the one where we went to the orgy. I was with this very proper girl, and I was just like, "Listen, you don't have to do anything. We can just hang out and watch." And by the end of the night, she's the center of the ... you know. Hogging the limelight, like crazy.

Which of your assignments did you enjoy the most? And which was the most traumatic?
The orgy is one I regret because I was way too hung up to be there and I took the wrong girl. But, I mean, who's the right girl to take to an orgy? But now I think I'd be totally cool with it.

Also, the sploshing one. [This is the episode in which Stoddard splattered a man with various foodstuffs and urinated on him while he performed oral sex on a third man.] That episode didn't get printed on Nerve because it got quite far away from actual sploshing; it was more of a kind of ritualized violence, with food. So I had to redo it with my girlfriend in the shower. I am a neat freak and I had, like, jam in my fucking hair. It was awful. I've never felt so uncomfortable in my whole life.

I also liked getting jacked off by this Korean lady. She was maybe 55. She was like, "Ah, you just a boy." I was 23 or 24And which did you enjoy the most?
There was one where I was shrink-wrapped in latex.
That was the weirdest experience I've ever had. I'd never done any sensory deprivation stuff before. I felt like Han Solo in carbonite, because you really are shrink-wrapped and you can't move. It's so tight it goes into all the crevices in your ears. Some people can stay in there for, like, eight hours at a time, at $300 an hour.

And to think, you got it for free.
I got it for free. I went in there, and by the time I came out I had no idea if I'd been in there ten minutes or five hours. It was really intense. Not sexual, just interesting.

I also liked getting jacked off by this Korean lady [at a massage parlor]. That was fun. I'd never paid for sex before, and there was this comical conversation she and I had. She was maybe 55, though she was still in great shape. She was cute. But she was like, "Ah, you just a boy." I was 23 or 24.

In the book, you worry a lot about what your parents would think of your job, but you never really say what they thought. So?

Well, they've both read it, though they skipped over all the—what they called the seedy bits, so I don't know how much of it they actually read. I don't especially want to have that conversation with them. I'm not trying to fucking expand their minds or anything like that.

This might just be my perception, but I think the world has changed a lot since I was at Nerve. With digital photography, it's kind of a prerequisite that you have some dodgy pictures hanging around of you doing something somewhere. Out of my group of friends, I used to be the one doing crazy shit like this, but now, all my friends blow me out the walls with their crazy sexual escapades. Of course, I've always had that opinion, that everyone else is having sex and I'm not.

Photos, from top: NickyDigital.com; supplied by publisher (2)

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