Full Exposure: Opening Up to Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression (4 page)

food?” “Is it the sort of food for men or the sort of food for women?” “Should it be eaten in public or hidden in the cupboard at home?” No, we would say, “Eat! This is what keeps you alive.”

I’m exhausted with the argument, and so is everyone else. I don’t want to discuss porn versus erotica anymore. I want to say, “Oh, dear, I’m sorry, we covered that last year. It was announced on a loudspeaker during a national air-raid drill last August, and if you were absent, you’ll have to look it up yourself at the library.” I inten-tionally want to stymie any further investigation into this hoax of a dispute because anyone who does dare to answer it with authority is thwarting any genuine progress in sexual expression. The very debate itself is reactionary, and it needs to have its pious little robes ripped off.

Here’s what people
want
to hear when they ask what the difference is between erotica and porn: “Yes, upon careful examination, experts have decided that
my
fantasies and
my
sexual identity are beautiful, healthy, and a real turn-on besides…but that person over there, sitting in the corner, now
their
sexual expression is total rot.”

Then, depending on whether you like the buzz of the word
porn
or the insinuations of
erotica,
you pin the beneficial label on yourself and the icky label on the other person. Voilà, another perfect discriminating pose is accomplished!

What’s really rotten is creating such a misleading discrimination to begin with. The truth of the matter is that your sexual speech is no better, more attractive, or healthier than anyone else’s. The smartest thing to say to yourself when you encounter a style of sexuality unknown to you—which may be frightening, offensive, or unimaginable—is to whisper a variation on this theme: “Let them who are without desire cast the first stone.”

The Chart PORN

boys hard illegal cheap

underwear drawer grabbing you by the balls visceral

pop culture baseball cap logos blatant gluttonous orgasmic

politically incorrect Gen X and raincoaters

EROTICA

girls soft

over the counter lavish

museum

tickling the finer sensibilities ethereal

Victorian

library shelf titles discreet

modest titillating defensible

boomers and dilettantes

I once had a student who joined an erotica class I was teaching in spite of her apprehension that I would demand her to embrace my radical sexual philosophy. She was particularly appalled by the idea of sexual sadomasochism, which she identified as pornographic. She felt like the only explanation for it would be an abusive and unloving childhood. The idea that it could simply be a matter of erotic taste seemed unbelievable, and rather callous to her.

We debated this a good deal in class, and I pointed out how this kind of judgment—the pathological explanation—has been used with other kinds of sexual preferences over the years, most notoriously with homosexuality. The kindest thing that was ever said about being queer, before the 1970s, was that homosexuals had faced tragic abuse and neglect in their families and that it had distorted them for life. It was impossible to believe that such sexual desire could be either healthy or sincere.

Nowadays I meet plenty of gay people who feel the similar prejudices about heterosexuals; they find the idea of true heterosexuality to be preposterous, and believe that “straightness” could only be the product of a damaged mind. It just goes to show that everyone, whatever their erotic taste, is quick to deny that someone else’s attractions could be legitimate.

That’s the other bogus quality to debates about porn or erotica—they are often settled by someone’s heightened and alarmed imagination about what people on the other side of the fence are doing. People who cringe at the idea of pornography have a much more inflamed and dangerous idea of it than the actual article could ever live up to. Then you have those who disdain erotica, and think it’s the weakest sort of slop for the chronically immature. They would be surprised to see how vivid and contentious things can get in the world of what gets labeled “erotica.” The

conflicting glossary of what porn and erotica are supposed to stand for illustrates what keeps them in such polarized positions.

Pornography is first and foremost associated with the male, and erotica with the female. It reminds me of those ridiculous deodorants that are advertised as one strong style for he-men and one delicate spray for the ladies. Look at the ingredients, and you’ll see they’re exactly the same stuff.

The gender clues slip very neatly into class differences. Pornography is supposed to be coarser, ruder, the sort of thing you acquire under at least vaguely sleazy circumstances. Erotica is so respectable that it can easily appear in a Christmas mail-order catalog. The word leaps from the lips of that art historian nun on public television, Sister Wendy, who critiques the Great Masters on public television, and lavishes her praise on Renaissance portraits that display luxuri-ous pubic hair.

Ironically, with the aging of the baby boomers, the polarized ice caps of porn and erotica have simply melted into tedium or been compromised by religious fundamentalists. The only people getting beat over the head with the debate anymore are the weak and powerless. In other words, grad students are no longer agonizing over pornography as a precursor to rape, but grade school kids are given a whole list of politically incorrect subjects that they can’t express themselves about.

My lover, Jon, teaches art to twelve-year-old boys, and the list he was given by the program administrators of things the boys are forbidden to draw includes subjects as banal as “marijuana leaves” and “nudity,” and also the vague lunacy of “anything degrading to women.” Maybe someday they’ll be old enough to express the world the way they see it—marijuana, nudity, and all—rather than having to follow their protectors’ prescriptions for pious living.

I told Jon it was a good thing I wasn’t teaching his art class because I might just retaliate out of sheer sarcasm and make a whole install-ation of vagina-dentate octopi who would graphically display one degraded male figure after another. My gender reversal would technically fit within their censorship criteria!

What has been degraded, in the sense of an idea that has fallen apart because of continual disrespect, is the notion that erotic expression deserves a place in public life—a place that isn’t entirely commercial and driven toward the most formulaic common denominator. Thankfully, the younger generation does not consider porn either criminal or pathological. But they are, at the same time, cynical that porn can ever be anything but a “money shot.” There isn’t a booming alternative erotic industry, because no one is ponying up the big bucks to experiment, and public arts funding has driven sexuality out of the spectrum of public art.

I’ve interviewed a lot of first-generation porn stars, men and wo-men who are in their fifties now. I was talking to Georgina Spelvin, who made her 1970 debut as the wretched spinster in
The Devil in Miss Jones;
when I asked her how she got from food catering to starring in the picture, she said, “It wasn’t the money; that wasn’t remarkable. It’s hard to explain, but there was a feeling in the air that you could do whatever you wanted.”

Nowadays, no one auditions for a standard porn film without having a clear idea of exactly what kind of numbers the producers want to get out of it. What they will be asked to perform will be as stock as Campbell’s tomato soup. I think it comes as a shock to many of them that there is a unique personal consequence to what they’re doing for a paycheck. That consequence could be uplifting or it could be depressing, but you don’t per-

form for the public without being affected at all—ask any athlete or Hollywood professional. I find myself relieved that the porn business is no longer thought of as satanic, but I’m deeply disappointed by its new hell-is-money reputation, a sort of Marxist spoof on late-stage capitalism.

The first time I ever agreed to let someone shoot a movie of me making love, I did it because my director-friend Cecilia Dougherty was making a video, and she couldn’t find a single soul in her Hip-per-Than-Thou art school who would take their clothes off and do it.

I was publishing my own erotic ’zine at the time, and she had been very critical of every photograph we printed. “I will do this for you,” I told her, “if you will agree that any model who tries to do something erotic on their own terms should be given a medal, just for having the guts.” Of course she was so desperate she would have agreed to anything.

Cecilia was making an “art” film; it was never shown on the porn circuit. She didn’t give my lover or me any direction at all; she wanted to be a fly on the wall. We didn’t rush or pose or move into a well-lit position. When the film had its first showing, I sat in the dark and listened to some people behind me giggle. One woman wondered aloud, “Is she asleep?” just before my orgasm.

I was anonymous and unrecognizable to the other spectators. I went with my best friend, and I whispered to her, “I suppose this should be entirely humiliating, but it’s not. This really gets to me.” I had never seen myself come, I’d never seen the look on my face, never seen my eyes as I was touching my lover. I wondered if there were any other quiet appreciators in the crowd who weren’t so dismissive as the group behind me. I suppose my greatest achievement was that I honestly didn’t care if anyone

sympathized—I was too self-involved, in a good way. I had done something as a favor that turned out to mean a lot to me, and it’s a reflection I’ll always treasure. This is the medal you get.

I wish everyone had a picture of their face in ecstasy, in erotic contentment, in bliss, in desire. For themselves, not for an audience. Why don’t more people take that picture, or draw it, or write their erotic portrait? We don’t have that custom; we’ve been fearful of it. Even when we intellectually assert our liberal-sex credentials, we hold back because we wonder how our efforts will be labeled. Will we be called pornographers or erotic artists? What would be more dismissive or illustrious? The prizes of propriety and discrimination, of cynicism and apathy, don’t look so hot, despite the feverish competition.

CHAPTER SEVEN
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THE PRICE OF TITILLATION

Money creates taste.

Jenny Holzer

O
ur fascination with grading sex is an unfortunate puritan hangover. But we have another preoccupation that’s an even bigger headache, an antierotic migraine case. Need I count it out in small, unmarked bills? Our need to grade everything according to its price—its perceived value on the status marketplace—is, at bottom, our crippling bow to the greater god of all things material and moneyed. Our culture uses sex in the most cynical way to “sell” anything—even though we blanch when sex is presented simply, or sold for itself. The false promise of sex, the illusions we flatter when served on a silver platter, never ceases to boggle my mind. It also makes me want to resist, and that’s the first sign of recovery.

Ninety percent of what our media calls sexual entertainment is actually pure titillation—so yummy in the first sniffs and

mouthfuls, such a tummy ache later on.
Titillation,
the word, is de-rived from Latin
titillare,
“to tickle,” and there begins its exquisite torture. Titillation makes an art form out of teasing—and teasing is perfectly sweet, but it can never be called satisfying eroticism, because its very nature is to withhold what we dream of and place it permanently out of reach.

It’s not that titillation doesn’t belong in our path to arousal. On a person-to-person level, it’s exciting to dress provocatively, to seduce, to impress, to offer a promise. But the anticipation of actually connecting with someone is what keeps those promises alive, what makes that seduction so enticing.

In real life, we get through those ups and downs, sometimes landing in the embrace we hope for—and sometimes falling on our face. However, in the mainstream world of advertising and entertainment, sex is used strictly as titillation, and the viewer is left holding the bag. Almost everything we see on commercial media is powered by sexual titillation. It’s not designed to promote self-en- lightenment or human connection, it’s made to get you to do something else—buy something, yearn to buy something—which erotically leaves you nowhere. The new car, the new dress, the new breakfast cereal—these and images are what make up most of the titillating erotic illustrations around us.

It’s no wonder so many people accuse advertising and its related promotions with leaving a bad taste in their mouths. The most ex-cruciating examples are criticized for being phony: no awesome babe in an evening gown is going to be my lover if I buy this Cadillac. But in truth, even the more subtle insinuations are just as pathetic. By comparison, even the dopiest pornography delivers more on its sexual promise—the nude pictures that invite you to be aroused for their own sake.

Commercial titillation has the gimmicky personality that fits perfectly with our obsession with making real sexual pleasure either an enigma or a sham. Titillation is the American standard: first offer a peek, then slap the hand that seeks to touch. I’ll tease you, then reproach you; I’ll build up the big expectation and then laugh at your wish for more. It’s that big tit, that winky-blinky bulge in the pants, that substitutes a carnival act for an erotic performance. What, you actually thought we were going to deliver on this choice little thrill? Sucker!

It’s not just erotica that’s favored when it’s dipped in gold and made into a sales pitch—it’s every controversial sensation. The free-speech debate in the arts and media over violence and drugs is similar to the argument over sex. Each is a highly emotional issue that has become a tug-of-war over the power and privilege to decide who gets to see what—and how much they’ll pay for it.

The greatest censorship we see today doesn’t come from moral standard-bearers yearning for simpler times—rather, it’s the all-out competition for information, an elite display of privilege and access. The debate isn’t anymore about
what
will be banned. Rather, the contest now is about
who
will be allowed to “see all,” and who will be kept in the dark. Puritans used to be more old-fashioned, wishing to keep their minds pure and uncluttered. Now they’ve been replaced by political opportunists, just as greedy as anyone else to get their hands on the information first.

The business of titillation actually operates both high and low, on the one hand with big budgets and industry trophies, and on the other hand in the freak shows and unapologetic tabloids. What holds them together is their notion of the cachet of the forbidden and elusive.

No one actually wants to eliminate all appearances of eroticism.

The arguments that rage on are over their aesthetics, the

message and the accessibility of the subject to the audience. Those debates aren’t stupid to consider, but their meaning has been degraded. Is aesthetics just a matter of how much satin and sheen you put on your product? The packaging may be gilt, but the insides can still be a big bag of hair.

If we were honest with ourselves about our desire to touch and be touched by our most sensitive emotions, we’d put away the high-status perfume, and we’d concentrate on the most basic merits of what’s in front of us. I used to have quite earnest debates with people about what they thought was excessive sex in popular culture. I’d try in vain to solicit their artistic alternatives; I’d argue for the opportunities and insist that we need to express our most passionate emotions. But now I hesitate before I ask people if they’re willing to discuss erotic possibilities. Sometimes I just feel like reaching for my wallet instead. How much would I have to fork over before the choice of our own bodies and imaginations would seem more appealing than extravagance, phoniness, and exclusivity? People’s aesthetics are quickly turned by the color of money. How green is
your
bouquet?

I suppose I’m bitter because I, too, was snookered. I’ve made the same discriminations, held the same prejudices, and wasted so much time. I was nearly thirty years old before I discovered a world of erotica that I had been afraid of and had felt excluded from without really knowing why. I just obeyed the “No Girls Allowed” sign without reading the fine print. I was afraid to look at anything sexual unless it got a four-star review and was produced by a highly credentialed cast. I never thought about how watching cinema verité and low-budget representations of sex made me feel squeamish; the realness or coarseness of it seemed to make my emotions feel too full, exposed, without any

relief. I would read tons of fashion magazines without blinking an eye at the high-toned advertising, but I would be embarrassed by a soft-core men’s magazine whose models did not enjoy the buff and polish of haute couture.

I scorned those nudie models for their imperfect complexions and shopping mall outfits not because I was a moral conservative, but because I found them “tasteless.” It never occurred to me that my taste was in large part influenced by the most consumer-predatory display. I try to imagine what the world would be like if I’d had the opposite reaction. What if I were red in the face and nauseated by ads for jeans and perfume, and sought comfort instead by admiring pictures of people having sex?

A year ago, a friend of mine who’s an editor at a men’s porn magazine asked me if I would review a dozen of the year’s most popular amateur videos. Jared wrote, “I’m
very
interested in your reaction,” with such a mysterious edge that I wondered if some dead body was going to float up on the screen.

“Oh, no, it’s nothing like that,” Jared said. “It’s just that so many of these new videos are expressly antititillation. The actors don’t tease to get things going. It’s like reality sex. A director like Seymour Butts will film himself as he goes to the fridge to get a Diet Coke, as he answers the phone to argue with his mom, and then in the meantime someone rings the doorbell—and there’s the talent, saying, ‘Hello! I’m here for sex.’ ”

Jared’s evaluation was correct, and I enjoyed the novelty of amateur porn’s nonchalance. The famous Mr. Butts started out with one star, his lover Shane, but then she broke up with him and started her own line of videos,
Shane’s World.
Shane’s character is a jock who seems happy whether she’s careening around in her go-cart or going to a sex toy shop to find enough vibrators to keep a whole slumber party entertained. At the end of her

video, she edits in a piece of homemade tape that some fan made of their own Shane-inspired fantasies.

If it weren’t for the porn taboo that threatens the high gloss of mainstream culture, Shane and Seymour could be effectively exploited by advertisers right now. Would Seymour be willing to hold his Diet Coke even closer to the camera? Could Shane make sure the logo on her snowboard gets as much attention as the come shot? The true capitalist would find a way.

From the viewpoint of Madison Avenue, it’s ironic that the porn nickname for the male on-screen ejaculation is the “money shot.” In the nonporn world, the money shot is not one close-up of vicarious satisfaction, but rather the relationship between the object of desire and the object the advertiser wants you to buy. We yearn for completion instead of experiencing completion. We have to pay, pay, pay if we want to join the party, and there’s no guarantee that the stakes will ever let up. Do we have the right accessories and brand names to be a sexual success? That is where the present-day sex anxiety lives. It’s not about whether we’re ready to leave our sex guilt behind but whether we’ve brought enough cash.

My own work has been antititillation, not by design, but apparently from intuitive rebellion. Even when I worked as a more conventional sex educator, I didn’t promote my information and advice as some sort of “hush-hush, on the q.t.” sort of spectacle. I didn’t want to charge for it. I wanted adult sex education to be available to everyone. I wanted people to be as familiar with the workings of their reproductive and sexual bodies as they would be with washing their hair. “This is your clitoris, not a mystery novel.”

I also wanted my audience to appreciate that once they got the basic facts of life out of the way, their erotic lives above the

neck would never be banal or formulaic. Sexual creativity is a mystery that will never be solved by commercialism. Our fantasy lives don’t know what a status quo is, if we’re honest about it. Anyone who subjects their erotic identity to preening for the crowd and to commercial comparisons is going to be turned off faster than they can smooth their hair back.

I look at the people in my life who electrified me sexually, or the situations I found myself in that turned me on, and there’s little conformity—just some very splendid chaos. If you made a lineup of all the lovers in my sex history, their looks and their status would tell you nothing about whether they had anything in common or the quality of our romance.

It’s not just that I’m without a “type” that I’m always attracted to, it’s that I myself am not a type. I’m more than a cashier’s total of my various visual symbols. The clothes I choose to wear are pure theater, and superficial glances between each act could peg me as anything from waitress mom to carnal goddess. I am more than the sum of my hairdo. I know, in fact I love, the fact that my sexuality can be inspired by beauty, but I insist that that inspiration fulfills me, rather than suspending me in some insecure notion of my worth. When I see classic sexpot pictures today, whether it’s a
Playboy
playmate or a Parisian supermodel, I see kitsch, and it’s almost like looking at a naughty Victorian postcard. I can smile at it because it is a fleeting moment in the time machine of often-contradictory erotic status symbols. The days when I could react to those pictures with genuine envy or yearning are fortunately over. Of course it hurts when I see people who’ve bought the franchise, who think that great sex is about the right accessories and perfect lighting. These folks have already been pitied or criticized as victims of sexism, racism, looks-ism, and so forth,

but that’s not what they’re really victims of. They are the captive audience of the commercial titillation way of life. If we expressed ourselves, in all our variety, revealing what in our lives truly turns us on, it would make the advertising empire look like one gigantic marshmallow.

A lot of people don’t question titillation and the Brand-Name Erotic Blues because they’ve barely seen anything else. Erotic censorship has become an American fetish, an institution, and a superstition—a faith in material success and excess. I once read a beginner’s introduction to the stock market in which the rather philosophical editor said, “A price is nothing but an opinion.” I remember agreeing with him in my head and then thinking, “I don’t like any of those opinions.” I’m sick of opinions that make “dollars and sense” but little else. I’d be depressed about sex, too, if I felt that my erotic future depended on plastic surgery or owning the biggest sport utility vehicle.

How else do we appreciate life? Lovers are famous for repeating that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I side with their amor-ous approach to value: What is meaningful to us is unique to our own desire and cannot be bought or sold by anyone. We may be disillusioned by titillation and depressed by the contest of commercial success, but our erotic senses will never leave us, or be recruited by false gods. The temptation to believe in the pornography of titillation, the smut of advertising, is always going to attract attention, but it’s also going to leave us horny and hungry. My greatest ally in my erotic judgment is my constant observation that the aphrodis-iac of a price, of a dazzlingly crafted come-on, is a genuine disappointment.

CHAPTER EIGHT
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UGLY

Pretty is as pretty does.

Old Saying

E
very summer I look forward to going on a camping trip; I want to live the whole summer on a riverbank. Just the smell of getting my gear out of the garage puts me in a good mood. This past June, I rummaged around in a sticky cardboard box filled with half-used and abandoned camping supplies until I found the bug-spray bottle labeled “Extra Deep Woods.” This is apparently a euphemism for the average backyard in suburbia, where mosquitoes feast in a blood orgy that rivals that of any cool green forest. I dutifully sprayed everything I was wearing, even the top of my head.

“What are you doing?” my eight-year-old daughter asked, peeking around the corner, her face knotted at the strong smell.

“I am now ‘invisible to bugs’!” I announced, quoting the copy on the back of the can, with as-advertised belief in my product.