Dant'e Amore
by Michael Lane
November 30, 1999
Dante's World
Las Vegas, NV
he electro
stimulation penile ring sits on the
table like a tractor gasket fresh
from the box. A small silver nipple on the side of
the ring has a connector wire
that runs to a little black power box which is
plugged into the wall. A thin, black
rubber tube snakes in a small "S". And according
to instructions, I'm to put my penis through
the ring, wrap my balls with the tube, turn on the
power and let her fly.
Instinct says, "NO WAY!"
But with reports of orgasms triple their normal
length and a promise of genital stimulation
like the touch of erotic silk hands, it's an inviting
proposition.
Welcome to the world of erotic electro
stimulation. In contrast to those of us who
ordinarily shy from connecting our cock to a wall
socket, there are now legions of
sensualists who've discovered electricity is the
best sexual enhancer since the advent
of birth control. These people were inspired by
the work of one man, who, having endured
the dark ages of electro sex play--what with
brillo pads and faulty wires--was so
preoccupied with heightening orgasm that he
single-handedly shaped the future of
sex (thanks to Edison and the proverbial plug).
And though the idea of applying electricity
to one's genitals seemed utterly appalling, not to
mention dangerous, founder and
inventor Dant'e Amore has spent more than a
decade convincing folks that electro
stimulation is one of the last great pleasure
frontiers.
Entering the strip mall domain of Paradise
Electro Systems (P.E.S.) you have the impression
you're entering a doctor's waiting room, with few
clues of what awaits you inside.
The receptionist greets you, asks your name
and offers an ordinary seat opposite
a closed door. Outside parks a Fed-X truck.
Inside, in the small, bright room you
busy yourself with a magazine, glance around
the bland walls and catch an occasional
smile from the woman beyond the window. But
as soon as the door opens to "The
Studio,"
all normality fades. Jim Morrison cranks out of
the sound system. A thick violet fog
rolls off the ceiling, pumping out of vents. And
you are visually assaulted from
every corner by mirrored walls, explicit
mannequins, and racks upon racks of exotic
butt plugs, cock rings, dildos, whips, bondage gear
and leather fashion. If this were nothing
more than a sex shop, it would win hands
down.
But the commercial aspect of what you see is
but one thin layer of "The Studio." A
slow walk around the room brings you to long,
glass cases where even more cutting
edge sex toys are displayed. On a large riser is a
contraption labeled the Auto Erotic
Chair. Under the glass are such products as the
Juicer, the Little Big Man, the Scrotum
Electrode and the Testicle Tubular Electrode.
What you are looking at is ground-breaking
technology that relies upon erotic-electro
stimulation delivered through these
"Electro-Flex" devices.
Dant'e steps out from the shadows to greet you.
Wearing a pinstripe shirt, button
down vest, and studious glasses perched low on
his nose, he could easily pass for
a small town family doctor with a set of golf
clubs in the car. Except that his outstretched
hand, piercing eyes and open stride convey a
confidence that's immediately unsettling.
As you bend forward to hear him speak, a
certain low voltage charisma begins to win
over your natural skepticism. And as he boldly
pontificates about his goal to take
human sexuality into the twenty-first century,
you're suddenly hooked, taking a guided
tour through the inimitable Dant'e's World.
Monk: I see a lot of gadgetry that defies
description. To some extent it looks like
a highly technical S/M shop with a lot of props.
How is The Studio and what you do
that different from the other sex stores?
DA: Gadgetry?! We have to use something else.
Apparatus, maybe. Sexual device. Gadget
to me is an appliance. There are too many
gadgets. There are a lot of gadgets in
the White House. I don't like that.
Monk: O.K. Then what's the fundamental purpose
of these devices. They're obviously
sex toys to some degree, but what makes them
unique?
DA: What you have here is mood modification
without drugs. I didn't want to make an
"adult store." Sex is sacred and I
wanted to portray fetish, S/M, alternative sexual
lifestyles along with my electro-stimulation, and
create an environment that unconsciously
modifies mood, opens the mind and makes you
feel at home within yourself, to explore
your fetish and expand your fetish. What I have
here (pointing to a pedestal) is
the auto-erotic chair. That was a seven year
project. As a matter of fact, it took
me all the way to Taiwan because I had to have
special aluminum titanium tubing made.
That chair is massive. It breaks down to a
20" x 40" container and weighs
approximately
52 pounds. That's a bondage chair, so I had to
devise a way to anatomically lock
the body in without restraints and properly
support the pelvis, spinal cord and neck.
Those are the general basics. We have anal and
vaginal penetration devices with
electro-stimulation
attached to it. So I married electro-stimulation to
the auto-erotic chair.
Monk: Not that I want to hop on it, but what are
the effects of the auto-erotic chair?
Is this the ultimate orgasmatron or what?
DA: It's a mood enhancer. Everything about
what I do enhances sexuality. If you had
to sum up Dant'e Amore, that's what I do for a
living: I enhance sexuality. Electro-stimulation
is an amplification. Nobody's done the science I've
developed with electro-stimulation; that is,
amplifying sexual response in human beings. The
chair is a mood
modifier, it's an amplifier. It's a prop that is used
to
enhance our sexual preferences.
That's what's fascinating about S/M. I'm trying to
dispel the myths about S/M. I
guess that's another one of my quests in
sexuality. We're here in society, first off.
We're very prejudicial, even though we have the
first amendment and the Constitution.
I just wish we could do it [the first amendment]
verbatim. If we did, I think Washington would be
burned to the ground.
Monk: You have a point there! The reality is
we're free as long as it conforms to
societal constraints.
DA: You know, living in a Puritan society we say
we're free but we have a lot of baggage.
One of these bags is naturally our sex. A couple
years ago I kind of summed up what
it is to be a human being. That is,
pleasure-seeking, pain-avoidant, binary,
problem-solving, machinery that always wants to
be right, i.e., ego. And that last one
has killed a lot of people and really held back our
society. My God, we haven't put
a man on the moon in thirty fucking years but
we can build tons of casinos. We haven't
explored the human mind, the true, last
frontier----the brain----and what we can do to
make
our lives happier. We're pretty fucked up as a
human race, big time. That's why I
looked objectively at what it is to be a human
being. We want to pleasure ourselves
first. Why? The main thing is because nature
puts us this way. Pleasure and sexuality is
to reproduce the species. It only makes sense.
Now that's on a hierarchical level.
I don't know anybody outside of manic
depressives, people who have serious emotional
problems, who do not want to wake up in the
morning and say, "God I want to have fun.
I want to pleasure myself." And as we
mature in life our pleasuring situation is
sex. We can get really screwed up if we
suppress our sexuality. There are a lot of
people out there who want to use religion, they
want to use government, they want to use mom
and dad [to justify suppressing pleasure] but the
bottom line is we're all individuals
and we're all plugged into serving ourselves
before we can serve anybody. On one
level that's very selfish, but that's how we are. It's
called self-preservation. I don't
have a problem with being selfish or a
self-preservationist. When you pleasure yourself
you want to forget about the church and
society, you want to forget about mom and
dad. It's you.
What's the Law of Dant'e? One law: To have
two consenting adults who practice safe
and sane sex. And children are not involved. I
had the great honor of working for
a year-and-a-half with some forensic
psychiatrists during the movement to declassify
the DSM III. That's the diagnostic manual shrinks
use when you go to see them. They look
up your symptoms and say, "Oh, you are a
manic depressive." If you go back five
years
ago, sadomasochism was classified as a disease
along with other fetishes. I had the
privilege of working with these individuals that
literally changed that. This was only
four or five years ago. There was a whole area
of fetish that had to be reclassified.
To make it simple, you can have a shoe fetish,
the fetish of the high heel. Now,
getting back to the DSM, you can have that
fetish and you can get your libido risers off
that fetish, but if you have a beautiful woman
there and you start to have sex with
the high heel, not the woman, then you've got a
problem. They grouped this whole
thing together where they say it's not right to be
turned on by a high heel. Bullshit. You
can get turned on by a high heel as long as you
can switch over into the person.
You know, sexual intercourse can be a
celebration of love between two people or it
can be an animalistic urge. First you have to
define sexuality, then you have to complete
the circuit. How you complete the circuit doesn't
matter as long as you don't end
up killing someone by suffocating them and
children are not involved. The developmental
stages of adolescence are very raw and society
sets the standards. What the standard is
for the United States is definitely not the
standard in Sweden or in Iceland or in
certain Northern European countries. They're
more mature. We have to take each society
as a whole.
Monk: At what point did you start to explore
electro-stimulation as part of your own
sexual evolution?
DA: In 1979 I started to realize there was
something there in electro-stimulation.
In 1983 I started researching it and in '85 I started
offering it to the general
public. In '86 I opened the company.
Monk: Most people would probably feel that
applying electrical currents to the genitals
is the last thing they'd want to do. Yet you say
this can be a highly pleasurable
experience. What is the fundamental
physiological effect these devices have on the
body?
DA: Amplification of sexual response. In order to
complete erotic electro-stimulation
properly you must have three principles. Just like
in order to have combustion you
must have fuel, oxygen, ignition, you must have
three elements worked out in this
area: a proper generating source which means
the P.E.S. box. The P.E.S. box is a
pulse-generating
device. There are many low frequency
pulse-generating devices. They are all devised
to exhaust the nerve so that the impulses do not
relay pain and the muscle will automatically
contract without the brain saying "do
this." Nobody in the history
of this young science of electromyography has
done the research that I have done.
It's literally woken up the research community. I
must clarify: The biggest sex organ
is the brain, so the libido must be there before
we wire yourself in. If the libido's there
we can amplify that. So, principle two is a proper
delivery source. This is literally
delivering the generating source to the genitalia
through electrodes. You don't just go down to
the local hardware store and wrap Brillo pads
around your penis and put
alligator clips on it. I focus in on certain aspects
of what we call the superior
dorsal nerve, the penis, and I have to configure
that properly. The penis is a very
complicated piece of machinery -- how blood
flows in, how it engorges the penis for erection,
how it closes off -- there are a lot of things that
go on physiologically when you
have an erection. So the electrode itself has to
go through these changes in order
to deliver the generating source properly.
There's a whole barrage of delivery systems
that I designed and patented. Again, it has to be
properly done to properly deliver
the generating source. The third principle, which
makes everything come together,
is called focusing. How we focus the
electro-stimulation is either via the box which has
amplitude, frequency and pulse or the electro
device itself. The Electro-Flex Penile
Rings have a handle so when it goes on the
base of the penis you can move the electro
partially around to just hit the superior dorsal. So
you're positioning, or focusing.
Monk: Several of your devices are for anal
stimulation, which once again is an area
most people would rather avoid. Can you explain
how that works?
DA: Yeah, this is an anal plug. There are certain
things you can stimulate only through
the anal canal to heighten sexual response.
Monk: In both men and women?
DA: Yes, absolutely. Eliminate the prostate and
you still have certain things in women
that you stimulate anally that can increase their
sensitivity to orgasm. On this
model there's a short end and a long band that
concentrates on the prostate or the
inner and interior sphincter muscle which is tied
into the low-sacral area of our anatomy.
That goes into the spinal area which is the
highway up to the brain which is going,
Oh that feels good
.
Monk: There seems to be an underlying
philosophy that drives your work. How would
you describe your point of view toward
sexuality?
DA: One word: freedom.
Hours later, with a care package from The
Studio unpacked in my room, curtains drawn
and surge protector plugged in the wall I stare
down at my penis, which doesn't look
all that happy with a rubber ring around its base
and wires swirling around. Likewise, stuffing my
balls through the tubular loops sends them
recoiling in trepidation.
"Hold on," I say to myself, as I slowly
amp up the control knob. I reach six and there's
nothing. Seven, a little tingling. Eight and YIKES!,
get that thing off of me!! The
little spike up my penis has me hitting the panic
button and nearly climbing a wall.
I stare down at the box and feel like a total idiot,
wired up in my room like a red
hot flare. But then curiosity takes over. I crank
her up again, level off at 7.5
and begin playing with the pulse knob. A certain
electrical rhythm begins traveling
up the length of my penis sending an erotic
shiver to the tip. My balls begin to tingle,
like from a light feathery touch. A bit lower on
the frequency, a tad higher on the
pulse, and a slight nudge on the fine frequency
wheel and BINGO! We're talking a
tight, silk gloved fist steadily working the bishop,
from top to bottom with a live sparkle
at the crown. Look Ma, no hands.
I sit back and ride the micro-electro surf, a
constant glittery pull throbbing up
the shaft until she comes crashing to shore on a
really big wave.
Whew! Holy shit!
Was it the orgasm of a lifetime? Triple the
length? Double the load? Well, pretty
darn close. An electrifying experience to say the
least. Yet, as stimulating as it
is, I don't think it'll ever come close to a good roll
in the hay. But when there's
no hay, there'll always be the plug.
P.E.S. may be found at
www.peselectro.com.
