Full Exposure: Opening Up to Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression (9 page)

Whether you are married or celibate, there will be failings, feelings of loneliness, frustration, happiness, at-one-ness, and love. I think our media wrongly pushes the message to couple when not all are meant to or even want to. I wonder if all the consternation about finding a mate comes from too many people trying to pair off for the wrong reasons….

I agree. So many people think that a flush of erotic chemistry with another person is reason to forsake their friends and family, ignore their solo callings, go into escrow with a virtual stranger, and gener-ally make fools of themselves. Disillusionment is inevitable and real. The mythology of romance that we grew up with in childhood is a candy heart waiting to be broken.

However, the fault doesn’t lie with the erotic surge but with the role models we have for attending to our new relationships and feelings. It’s so special when we find a sexual bond with someone; we yearn for a mighty ritual, and society gives us the

old standbys of elopement, marriage, divorce. Some people feel that they’re saying good-bye to their individuality when they get married, or that they are undoing one monogamous knot and stringing up another one. Why can’t we celebrate and respect the bliss of a new partnership without thinking that something must die in the process? Why does feeling something transformative in our erotic life mean that we are “risking it all”? We need a space and a respect for our erotic inspirations, without the fear that can drive us to annihilate everything and everyone else from our intimate circle.

I can’t fashion a lover or a relationship that would “make me happy,” because other people can’t simply hand us a bowl of cher-ries. I’m genuinely happy when someone hands me an ice cream cone, I’m happy to hear my favorite song, I’m happy to feel the embrace of someone I adore. But those feelings come and go like butterflies; and if there weren’t something at my very core that’s filling me up and making me feel independent and alive, those fluttery sensations would be very fragile. I know this, not because I’ve refrained from sex, but because I’ve been so sexual. I took another ticket there, albeit a less pious one.

When I was sixteen and first started having sex with other people, I decided to keep a secret coded diary of lovers. I would put down my age, their age, whether I had an orgasm—very important to me at the time, and not something I could count on—and then, the most tricky code of all, whether I was in love with this particular sex partner. The thing was, almost every time I had a new steady partner, which in those days was a matter of weeks or months, I would decide that this particular affair was real love, and I had to change the code to show it was better than the old love. If the previous love had been four hearts, then this one had to be five, then six; then I got rid of hearts altogether

because they took up too much room on the page, and I made up some other Super Love Symbol.

I still have that yellow legal pad around somewhere, and I can’t even figure out what the love and orgasm notations mean anymore. Even the simple score I had for evaluating my sexual satisfaction became impossible. What if I had intense orgasms but didn’t care too much for the lover? Or the reverse, where I adored my partner even though we had the clumsiest, most pathetic physical encounters? Or how about people who turned me on so much that it seemed like they didn’t have to do much of anything to make me come? What if I only came by masturbating while thinking about them? Was that better than being with another?

Once I became more confident about touching myself while I was with someone else, the whole reliance on them “making” me come went out the window, and in retrospect looked sort of desperate. Relationships became memorable for other reasons, and the spaces between my affairs became as sexually relevant as the times when I was coupled. Sometimes I’d discover something about my fantasies or my body when I was alone that would amount to a minor revelation. Even the idea that I had explicit sexual fantasies took me about five years to admit to myself. Whoever was next in my erotic destiny, it almost seemed like they couldn’t have existed if I hadn’t changed so much on my own.

Only one time did I purposefully decide that I wasn’t going to have sex anymore; I was definitely a candidate for the roasted lambs at SLA. It was when I moved from Los Angeles to Detroit—to a much more conservative atmosphere, where bisexuality and sexual experimentation were still secretive. Women around me seemed to earn respect only through being

married. The unmarried ones suffered incessant gossip, were labeled as sluts, and constantly had their work and opinions undermined. I’m sure I’d been gossiped about by the Goody Two-Shoes back in my Los Angeles high school social scene, but I had been insulated by a pretty large group of other young people who were quite bo-hemian. I had moved from a community where I wore a “Kiss me, I’m a Commie Dyke” button to a neighborhood where people would diss you all year for wearing your jeans too tight.

I really caved in under the disapproving pressure. My political work was so important to me at the time, it just killed me to think that my ambitions and ideas would be dismissed because of a “bad reputation.” I remember lying in bed at night hearing my married, superficially monogamous roommates make love in the adjacent bedrooms; I would just cry out my loneliness and resentment into my pillow.

I knew there was a sexist double standard—I also knew I was lonely—but my knowledge of that didn’t help my own position. What was naive was my thinking that if I could be as chaste as Joan of Arc; that I would spare myself the hurt of my sexual maturity; and that I would be treated like a peer by the (male) leaders of our community. It didn’t occur to me that they would never take my gender and age seriously—that as long as I was a young woman, they projected their sexual feelings on me, regardless of what I did. I finally cracked; I found a kindred soul a few doors down the street from where I lived. He was young like me, recently heart-broken like me, and we were both living in inadequately heated apartments. His warmth for me felt so good—both his erotic desire and the piles of blankets that covered us on a very cold January

morning.

I don’t remember what the sex was like; I don’t remember much about his body at all, except our embrace under the covers, our arms around each other like a circle of gratitude. Life had seemed so grim when I appeared at his door; we were both red-eyed. And yet as soon as we started touching, things didn’t seem so bad anymore. My mind stopped recycling its list of self-loathing accusations. His dark brown eyes were so comforting to me, my own skin felt soft. I heard birds outside, and I was startled, as if I hadn’t heard a birdsong since I left the West Coast. I don’t think I had; I’d been songless, and I’d found no beauty anywhere.

My personal vow of no sex didn’t seem so noble or fearless anymore; it seemed like my own idea of punishment, a disavowal of my sensuality, and a coward’s idea of penance. I knew that I’d probably get my reputation kicked once this news got out. He knew it, too; I think we joked about it. “It’ll be worse for you than me,” he said, “except my ex, she’ll kill me.” We started laughing. God, it felt good to laugh at our tormentors, the social watch-dogs! What would they do without their bone to chew on? It felt so good to be alive again, to think something new, to welcome my body instead of hating it. I was so grateful for this reminder. There will always be those who will say they’ve achieved enlightenment and success by fucking no one. There will be even more who will make an altar out of their fear of sex. I’ll say, “I went to the mountaintop, too, and I fucked everyone all the way up the trail. The view is still the same at the peak.”

CHAPTER TWELVE
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SEX JAG

I
t used to be that when the call went out for sexual adventure, everyone who came running was curious, horny, and occasionally spoiling for a fight. But anyone who objected to the erotic inspiration of the times risked getting cornered by the sex-positive posse: Are you
still
hung up on sex? Do you think it’s a sin? or a nasty necessity of the species? Do you have low self-esteem? Are you phobic, intol-erant, superstitious, abused? If only the prudes could hang their sex-negative attitudes out to dry, the radicals thought, they could be frolicking on a higher plane with the rest of us.

Even the advent of AIDS did not dissuade hard-core sexual liber-ationists. If anything, it was a flight test we were proud to execute. Like those signs along the highway that announce, “No

Credit? No Problem!” we were determined to find a way to make sex meaningful and creative, bare skin or no.

But neither AIDS nor Jesse Helms prepared me for the biggest challenge of my twenty-year career as an erotic advocate: What do you do when the people you’ve always looked to for inspiration say they just don’t care anymore? I think of the women I met in my twenties when I was first getting involved in our newly birthed erotic renaissance. Several of them have defiantly dropped out. “Don’t tell anyone, but I get nauseous just thinking about watching one more porn video,” says my friend who made a reputation re-viewing porn.

Another friend left town when she quit her position as an erotic advocate. “I can’t wait to have a dinner table conversation where not a single person mentions sex,” she said to me while filling out her change-of-address forms.

These people aren’t ignorant, conservative, or shy; they’re just plain ol’ burned out. But they still have nothing intellectually in common with the sin obsessors; they don’t have religious or ethical objections to a full and imaginative sex life. To be publicly sex-pos- itive and yet be so turned off to sex personally makes them feel isolated, and more than a little strange.

“I’m sick of it, I’m bored,” old friends say to me. One of my pals who’s been on the sex scene for three decades told a lecture audience that the most erotic thing she could think of doing today was sitting under the branches of a big tree, meditating. A few people laughed, some were disappointed or puzzled. But she wasn’t kidding.

It’s not just jaded porn stars and bathhouse veterans who are on the erotic skids. I see this weariness and cynicism everywhere. Yet when I ask people to be more specific—what exactly are they sick of and bored with?—it gets a little trickier. Are they

jaded from too much sexual intimacy? An overload of erotic honesty, a soulful moment that just won’t quit?

Of course not. They are hurting from the gross intolerance of our culture’s sexual illiteracy, an endless emphasis on material gain and status, and the sheer loneliness of our society’s sexual suspicions. It’s hard to be different, and hard to ask for more, when there doesn’t seem to be much of an alternative. Celibacy is one way to say, “I’m not joining, I’m quitting altogether.”

There’s chosen celibacy, and then there’s the de facto genre—that of the amused and exasperated retiree from the sexual demimonde. These people have no cause, no pledge. They say simply, I am tired of sex, and all things being equal, I’d rather take a nap. I am reminded of a favorite cartoon I saw once on the back cover of an un-derground comix: a spent couple in ripped nylons and cracked makeup are lying comatose on an unmade bed, surrounded by squeezed-up tubes of love gel, punctured inflatable dolls, rude pornography, and yellowing penis enlargement pumps. “Do you have SEX JAG?” the headline asks the reader, as sincerely as if it were asking about iron-poor blood.

I haven’t used all the broken toys and paraphernalia the illustration portrayed (where is my inflatable doll?), but I laughed in demented recognition. That question, “Are you tired of sex?” has been posed to me for as long as I have publicly confessed, debated, and performed erotic material.

The puritanical revenge fantasy is that after the sinners have exhausted every kinky wrinkle and gang-banged themselves into de-lirium, they will wake up one day, in their free-spinning world of choices, and feel utterly barren, numb as ice, and further from sensual delight than the chastest of virgins. Oh, the libertines will cry their hearts out then! If only they had been happy with the mission-ary position once a week. If only they had

kept their clothes on and their mouths shut, at least they’d now be able to have a modest, if unvolcanic, orgasm. The threat of terminal sex jag is that you will never enjoy an erotic feeling again. You will have used it all up.

As much as I enjoy the joke, I don’t agree with the punch line. Being tired of sex implies either fatigue or being fed up; and although those two sensations are no strangers to me, I can’t say that my sex life has been the area where I’ve most felt besieged by ennui or exhaustion. I could say, for example, that I am tired of working all the time. I work way too much, a thousand times more hours than I spend in any sexual or sensual pleasure. Everyone around me agrees that my health, my family, and my social life have suffered. Nobody asks me if I have “work jag,” but if they did, I would ask them if there will be a cure in my lifetime.

Well, what about the flesh tone toys, the pleasure-with-a-feather products, the disco ball of sexual consumerism? I’ve been cynical about the hype surrounding various sex products since
before
I first got a job working in a vibrator store. But I see the same absurd come-ons in every other part of my life, which is ritually assailed by advertising and ideological propaganda. I’m no more sympathetic to a “revolutionary” laundry detergent or a car “that will change your life” than I am to a “miraculous” set of Ben Wa balls. I don’t find McDonald’s commercials more classy than one for adult videos. I nevertheless love my favorite vibrator the same way I love my favorite books, my record albums, and my bicycle with the white tassels on the handlebars.

No, if you strip off all the capitalist excess and drama from the things everyone wants and needs—whether it be food, transporta-tion, clean clothes, or sex—you will find that sexual satisfaction is the only fundamental need that people fear you can reach the bottom of. Even with food, which is often treated as a middle-

class vice these days, or as an addiction, no prejudice suggests that if you eat too much you will one day never be able to enjoy another morsel. We have a genuine fear of erotic poverty, that there may be only so much sexual expression to go around. If we use it too much, we fear that our supply of satisfaction will run out—that sexual indulgence is a one-way ticket to sex famine.