Full Exposure: Opening Up to Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression (3 page)

do with the pleasure of privacy, and everything to do with being painfully ignorant. No other aspect of public health, except perhaps the nature and ritual of death itself, is so shrouded. It seems that we can’t bear to look at the facts of making life, or leaving it. Privacy has been a pathetic excuse for a lot of people’s pain and exploitation. It’s not hard to win people over to the health benefits of learning about their bodies. I’ve got “Mr. Science” on my side. The tricky area of privacy is not the physiological but the psychological, where many adults feel that their romantic lives, fantasy lives, and erotic

tastes are not intended for public discussion.

The crux of that intent, unfortunately, is the criminalization of so many erotic discussions. You don’t have to actually perform a “homosexual act” to be fired from your job; it can happen simply because you confide your thoughts to the wrong busybody.

I once described an intricate and surreal fantasy of mine, about living in a traveling circus, to a talk show producer who was prepar-ing a program about women’s sexual fantasies. She wrote me up on her crib card: “Susie Bright: into bestiality.” Yes, that’s just how I want to be broadcast to all my friends and family; turn me into the freak of the day. If I had been able to tell my fantasies in my own words, I would not have felt that my privacy was invaded. But when my words were twisted into this producer’s tawdry pathology, I did feel like my privacy had been subverted. For me, the end of privacy comes when someone puts
their
words in
my
mouth, when my intimate ideas are twisted for someone else’s not-so-intimate agenda.

Privacy is also invoked as a way to keep a public silence about sleeping monsters. Certain topics, no matter how common,

become the
peur du jour,
the fear of the day. For example, writers looking for places to publish their erotic short stories nowadays are often warned by their publishers—who put out erotica magazines by the dozen—that no story will be printed that involves minors, including reminiscences of one’s own life as a horny teenager. It comes as quite a shock when people who have nostalgic memories of making out in the backseat learn that their memoirs are considered “child pornography” by some legal interpretations.

Where are the allies for sexual speech? The right to free speech, when you get right down to it, is the right to make someone else uncomfortable, to outrage the respectable, and to question everything held dear. Who, after all, needs protection to say they like Mom and apple pie? It’s the same with our legal rights to privacy; they allow us to be private about the very things that other people wouldn’t always understand or be partial to. We have idealized these concepts in our culture, but we haven’t always protected them in our justice system. We have persecuted people (from socialists to separatists, gay liberationists to pot smokers) who made unpopular statements or did unusual things, and the public has screamed when the accused have brought their civil rights attorneys into court. How
dare
they interpret the Constitution for their own philosophical ends!

Every day in the paper I read about another “scandal.” Sometimes I get hopeful, like when I read about the woman who successfully defended her right to mow her lawn topless if she felt like it, even though some of her neighbors (none of whom had an easy view of her yard) thought her behavior should be censored. Other times, of course, I despair. Once I helped make a documentary about women’s orgasm, and the broadcaster who

had commissioned the project was so appalled at one of the orgasms we depicted—I guess she likes her orgasms dry and tidy—that she put a giant purple banner over the woman’s vulva when the show reached her climax. When it comes to nude lawn mowing or sex education, the ignorant and fearful won’t hesitate to turn to their prejudices, and they won’t be easily silenced.

I don’t blame people for keeping so many things to themselves—when, in a more respectful atmosphere, they might have shared them. We want to protect our families, our reputations, from being turned into a sideshow or a crime profile. If any of us dares to go public, we have to go public in our own words, because the only protection we have after we come out is finding our allies.

“Well, the problem is with the ones who want to be blatant,” some say. My late lesbian aunt, of all people, had a huge chip on her shoulder about drag queens, gay parades, and any sort of “blatant sexual display,” as she would call it. But this was the very same aunt who would never wear a dress, even the time I saw my mother cry at the kitchen table and beg her. This is the aunt who thought she was passing for straight in a polyester pantsuit, with an application of lipstick that looked like it had been painstakingly etched on by a kindergartner. When I became aware of gay history, I fantasized that I would call up my Aunt Molly, and we would talk for hours about how things used to be in the forties and fifties when she first came out in the San Francisco gay community. Instead, I thought she was going to chop my head off.

“What is the
point
in talking about any of this?” she said. “You and your blatant carrying-on are going to be the death of us.” Well, I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with bright pink women’s symbols on it, but so were a thousand other women on the streets of Berkeley, where my aunt lived at the time. I still think

she looked more butch than any of us. I didn’t say that, though; I just said I felt that things that hurt would never change if we didn’t talk about them. I might as well have sung “Kumbaya” to the Marine Corps. Molly worked herself into such a lather that she left and called my mother—who was completely in the dark about her sister’s love life—to complain that I was sending “unwanted homosexual literature” to her home, and threatening her reputation.

What a battle. I felt like driving up in front of her house with a big lavender triangle bus and a bullhorn, yelling, “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

The year before Molly died, she did come out to my mother. My mom was seventy and my aunt was sixty-eight. My mom loved her so much, and Molly’s secret—whatever its point was—had been so painful. Yes, my aunt believed that her privacy, her security, was threatened because of the erotic blabbermouths, the gay rights militants, the militant sex-positive posse. I could never argue her into sympathy or support for all the flamboyant examples—however crass or cheesy—who made it easier for others to share a little of who they are sexually with their family or friends—let alone walk down the street in a parade. Molly was labelled by others “blatant” because of how she looked, and she hated that—she felt like she was just being herself, natural. I was blatant because of what I said out loud; and it’s true, I had a lot more control. Was the issue privacy, or was it stereotyping, having your identity defined by others?

As a nation, we’ve ignored the real carnage of privacy rights and indulged ourselves with the hasty and exploitative prejudices of intolerant voyeurs. By allowing ourselves to become the Tattletale Nation—we’re taping this, right?—we have become obsessed over the trivia of privacy, the mechanical details of

erotic disclosure. But where is our genuine regard for an individual’s own definition? Even sympathetic critics have asked me if it hasn’t ruined my sex life to have talked about myself so publicly. They picture me as a hollow shell, with all my sex life scooped out and baked for commercial consumption. But no, choosing to tell my own story to my own audience has never ruined anything for me. It’s only when my words have been usurped by others that I have felt the rub of my pants being pulled down.

CHAPTER FIVE
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TALKING ABOUT IT

S
o many people say they don’t like “talking” about sex. They find it clichéd, insulting, insensitive. I am sympathetic despite the fact that I have talked about sex loudly and often. There are two big problems with sex talk: the vocabulary is lousy, and the sex is often ambivalent.

So let’s start with our impoverished dictionary. We have a small pile of sex words that offend somebody or other, even though they’re as old as English itself and convey some really pertinent meanings. We have segregated sets of sex words—the ones you can say to children, the ones for ladies, the ones for old folks, the ones for the upper classes, the ones for criminals—God forbid you try to speak your mind to a mixed group. Our language for sex—the medicalized, the four lettered, and the romanticized wordage—is symptomatic of our apprehensions about sex.

Take a good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon word like
fuck,
for example. In our current movie ratings system, if you use
fuck
as a swear word, to express anger or outrage, you can still advertise the picture to minors. But if you use
fuck
to mean actually having sex, then the film isn’t fit for younger viewers and must be rated for more mature consideration. Middle-class values are, more than anything, concerned with appearances, and fucking isn’t an “appearance,” it’s the actual deed. We’re primed to use our sex words for hostility but squeamish to use them for warmth or sex.

Fuck
got a new lease on public life in the sixties, along with the rest of our underground language for the body.
Fuck
embraced free love and repudiated the war in Vietnam all at the same moment. We usually describe the modern sexual revolution of the era as a feat of birth control pills, but it was just as much a revolution in sexual speech. Baby boomer artists wanted to speak their minds with an entire public vocabulary at their disposal. Some were martyrs, like Lenny Bruce; others were censored and demoralized beyond recognition. But in the end, the state lost. The words were free, at least to adult men. Feminism—the wilder side of it anyway—also couldn’t wait to use all those unladylike words. “Reclaiming language” came into vogue, to take the richness and boldness of words like
dyke
and
pussy
and claim them as women’s turf, not as men’s epithets.

I remember arguing once with a lesbian who told me she couldn’t bring herself to say the word
dildo
(let alone try one out). She had thrown women out of her bed who thought otherwise.

“But it’s a lesbian word—where do you think it comes from?” I asked her. “Dildos are your Sapphic heritage!” Oh, forget sex
toys.
People are afraid to use sex words because they fear they

will be seen as sexual—and their fear is indeed justified. If we keep our lips sealed from sexual speech, the illusion stays intact.

Fuck
did become a word that hitherto well-bred women used; it also defined a generation gap. Rock ’n’ roll turned it into lyric. But saying the word still says more about your adherence to or rebellion against your social status than it says about your sexuality.

Think about other controversial or sometimes painful aspects of life, and you don’t see people so upset about the words we use to describe them. No one says, “I can’t abide the word
war,
” or rails that “the word
torture
is so cruel on the tongue,” or proclaims, “I don’t allow anyone to say
taxes
in my home.”

We manage to discuss all sorts of horrible, conflicted, and psychologically vexing issues in our public and private lives without choking up and confessing that we just can’t use “those words.” Even words that insult or stereotype, like
spic
or
nigger,
get more public debate and defense in their context than the “seven words you can’t say on television.” Sex is the only topic where we blame our language for holding us back. We’ve tied our tongues but good: almost every expression we come up with bothers someone either because it isn’t sensitive enough or because, at the opposite end, it’s pure treacle.

The first time I had to be particularly conscious about the sex words I used was when I began a retail sales job at the Good Vibra-tions store, an education-oriented sex toy shop. Most of my customers were women, or men with a pretty liberal point of view. Liberal or not, they still came into this shop a little worried about how they would be perceived. One couple told me, after they’d calmed down a little, “We sat in the car for an hour outside the store arguing about whether we were going to come in here or not.” I’m glad they weren’t there the day some snotty

little boy ran in the shop and screamed at everyone, “My daddy’s got a bigger dick than you!”

Especially in the early days, customers came to Good Vibes because they’d been sent by a shrink or felt they were at the end of their rope about sex. They were so grim. I needed them to trust my judgment and empathy rather quickly.

If I said “penis” in front of them, would they feel like I was a respectable person, someone they could talk with easily? Or would they think they had to be as cautious and veiled with me as with a medical doctor? If, on the other hand I said “cock” or “dick,” if I said “hard-on” instead of “erection,” would they let down their guard? Or would they think, “Oh, no, it’s trailer park trash!” I could win or lose it all because of my vocabulary.

I think I succeeded in my vibrator sales talk right off the bat because I had great word-intuition. If customers started using even the tiniest bit of medical terminology, I’d follow their lead. Some people are so timid they blush at the word
orgasm,
and so I’d say “climax,” feeling a bit like one of those racy women’s novelists I’d read in junior high. Other people just beamed when I’d say, “Put this vibrator on your clit and you’re ready to go”; they wanted sex toys to sound casual, like buying sports equipment.

Despite my frequent success at guessing right, I wish there were a whole lot more words to describe sex, from the bawdy to the subtle. Hawaiians have a whole dictionary of names for how a rainbow appears in the sky. Our English language is not as poetic with the weather, and it’s a total failure at sex. Our words are stunted because we are stunted.

Some linguistic pioneers have wanted to forge ahead with new made-up words, but this erotic jabberwocky hasn’t really caught on. Language thrives on trends that capture the mainstream of imagination, not just the fringes. Sometimes a popular

song or movie will make a funky sex euphemism popular, and you can see how happy everyone is to have this wonderful hot word that captures the essence of something we all want to say. People who learn or speak other languages are always adding foreign sex words to their English lexicon.

A couple years back I read aloud, to a bookstore audience, an erotic story from
Best American Erotica 1997.
It’s a story written jointly by lovers, Rose White and Eric Albert. The heroine of the tale enjoys intercourse, but that’s not the kind of language she uses:

“She’s on her hands and knees now, butt tilted up to get the best of his cock, to get his cock against the sweet spot in her ass. She puts a hand between her legs and starts to play with her pussy. She fingers her clit and he moans, he tells her how tight that makes her ass. She puts her finger in her cunt and feels his cock through the wall of her cunt. She presses against his cock and makes him moan again….”

The story, as you can see, is earthy and frank, and the audience laughed and sweated as I read the whole piece.

At the end, when I opened up for discussion, a man raised his hand, and he was blushing from forehead to collar.

“How come you can say a word like…”—he couldn’t even utter it—“a word like the word you just used a minute ago, and everyone is fine with it? If I said that to my girlfriend, she’d never forgive me. There’s just no way a man can say it.”

For a minute, I considered what he might be talking about. “Do you mean
cunt
?”

He nodded, cringing.

“I love saying
cunt,
” I said. “It’s a woman’s place to have one, after all. It’s feminist spin control. The reason so many women use it today is because it’s one of those great words that all the

radical women grabbed and said, ‘We’re not going to let this word be a curse. It’s our body, and we’re going to control it.’ ”

I couldn’t help daring him. “Why don’t you try it here? Because everyone is so sympathetic, just go ahead and say, ‘Susie, you have a beautiful cunt!’ ”

He couldn’t do it. I wonder if he craved the embarrassment. I guess I should have led a chant, a cunt wave.

We do need more words. But we don’t even use the ones we have with the kind of style and equal-mindedness of which we’re capable. We’re afraid that if we let the dangerous words out, sex will be more dangerous, life will be uglier, we won’t know what to expect. I personally believe we need the surprise; there’s nothing uglier than our present silence and denial. We’re choking on our sex names, hiding behind the fine discriminations between this one and that one. If I can say “intercourse” with one breath and “fucking” with another, I have just relieved a small moment of vocabulary bondage. I have a cunt, I also have a clitoris, a pussy, a vagina, a fertile mind—and sometimes I have a rainbow of a feeling that begs for as many names as you can give her.

CHAPTER SIX
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GRADING

The difference between pornography and erotica is packaging.

John Preston

A
s long as I have been talking about sex, there has been a persist-ent question in every gathering I have attended: “What is the difference between pornography and erotica?” It’s an eternal hot coal that will not be extinguished no matter how much sand I shovel on it—and that’s my first impulse with this “non-question.” It is, in truth, an anxiety-driven plea for benediction rather than a genuine inquiry.

The erotic versus pornographic debate will limp along as long as sexual speech is suspect, and only an elite disclaimer (like the ones used by many museums nowadays) can open any of it to public discussion. If we thought of sex as a matter of taste and individuality, as we do with the foods that we eat, we wouldn’t ask stupid questions like, “Is it erotic food or is it pornographic