The Ethical Slut (33 page)

Another obstacle on our course is inaccurate or just plain bad information we may have learned about sex. For many years, information about sexual behavior and basic functioning was censored, along with most other discussions of sexual pleasure. Depending on where you live in the culture now, you may or may not have access to good information. We need to politicize to protect our right to accurate and positive information about sex.

To acquire a basic knowledge of sexual functioning and how the sexual response cycle works in men and women, we recommend strongly that you read one or several good books. Books about sex provide a lot of information—more than we can give you in a chapter—about how sex works and what you can do about it when it isn’t working as well as you’d like. Self-help exercises are usually provided for concerns about erections or orgasms, timing, coming too soon or too slowly, and what to do when you can’t find your turn-on. You can learn more
strategies for safer sex and birth control and more language so you can more easily talk with your partners about all of this good stuff. Some clever sluts read a chapter a week of a good book with a partner and perhaps talk about it on Friday over dinner—a nice way to prepare for the weekend.

These days there is also a lot of information and discussion on the Internet. We applaud this freedom of information, and we also want you to be careful, because much of the information you read and hear about sex will be inaccurate. Because sexology is such a new science, and because research into what people actually do in sex is difficult and often inconclusive, and because we as a culture have not talked explicitly about sex for a very long time, fairy tales abound, and reality can be hard to come by. Collect all the information you can, use what works for you, and take it all with a grain of salt. Fortunately, there’s lots of sex information available these days in books, magazines, podcasts, websites, and more—plenty to choose from. The best part of learning about sex is that you’ll love the homework.

If you can’t talk about sex, how can you think about it? The historical censorship of discussion about sex has left us with another disability: the act of talking about sex, of putting words to what we do in bed, has become difficult and embarrassing. Although most of us have had the experience of failed sexual functioning in one way or another, most of us never get the chance to get support from our friends and lovers about it—sexual dysfunction becomes our secret shame, a position from which it is virtually impossible to figure out a way to function better.

What little language we can use to talk about sex is riddled with negative judgments. Either you speak in medical language of vulvas and penile intromission—which sounds like you need to be a doctor to talk about sex, so it must be a disease—or you have gutter language (fucking cunt, hard dick) that makes everything sound like an insult. What you can’t talk about, you can hardly think about—a crippling disability. People who can’t use words often resort to trying to communicate without words: pressing their partner’s head downward, moving their hips to try to get that tongue in just the right place, feigning ecstasy when a
hand strays in vaguely the right direction … while hoping desperately that the bewildered partner will figure out what they’re trying to ask for. Wouldn’t it be easier if we could just say, “I would really love it if you ran your finger around my clit in a circle instead of up and down” or “I need you to grab my dick much harder”?

The tyranny of hydraulics is a tremendous obstacle to terrific sex, and not in the way that the manufacturers of Viagra would have you believe. Many people believe that if there is no penis with an erection, nothing sexy is happening. (Lesbians, of course, disagree most vehemently.) Many men feel they can’t even engage in foreplay while they are soft, and many women are insulted if they discover a soft penis while they are getting aroused. And still more people are completely nonplussed if the penis in question decides to release at a time that is inconvenient for the rest of the activity, as if there were no sex after ejaculation. We want to encourage you to think beyond the hydraulics of erection and allow your playful explorations to go wherever they want to go, no matter where the participants may be in the sexual response cycle.

When sex becomes goal oriented, we may race to orgasm with such single-minded focus that we never even notice all the lovely sensations that come before (and, for that matter, after). When we concentrate our attention on genital sex to the exclusion of the rest of our bodies, we are excluding most of ourselves from the transaction. When we ignore most of the good parts, we increase our chance of developing sexual dysfunction, and we miss out on all the good feelings.

To be truly free to explore our sexual potential to the fullest, most of us need to examine how we have been taught that a man or a woman is supposed to enjoy sex. Many of us were taught that it is natural for men to be sexually aggressive and for women to be passive responders. Your authors like both of these roles and many others too. When it comes to what feels good, we are all highly individual human beings—and, despite what you may have heard, we all come from the same planet.

When men are forbidden to be receptive, then a man is not allowed foreplay or to ask for any sensory input at all. He’s not supposed to
need it, much less want it. So then if a man is not automatically turned on when his partner is, he may wind up thinking he’s impotent when all he needs is a little nibbling on the ears.

Women consigned to passivity can fall into the Sleeping Beauty trap—some day my prince will come, and so will I (because people in fairy tales always have simultaneous orgasms, right?). In the real world, however, a woman who is allowed to take her turn at being the active partner is well on the way toward figuring out for herself and her lover what works for her to get really, really hot.

Active and receptive are both great roles when they’re not dependent on gender. Think of oral sex—is sixty-nine the only way to enjoy it? Or is there a particular delight in taking turns? When we focus on the active role, we can all be great lovers and get off on our partner’s pleasure. When it’s our turn to receive, we can truly appreciate the gift we are being given, not to mention feeling free to thrash and shriek and otherwise express our appreciation.

We’d love to see a world where everybody knew how much lovely sex they have to give in the active role and how much they give their partner when they receive.

The mythology has it that once you start having sex, it will all come naturally—and if it doesn’t, then you must have some deep-seated psychological problem, right? We’re not sure why sex stands alone in this regard. If you want to get good at anything else, from cooking to tennis to astrophysics, you’re going to have to put some effort and time into learning how. If you want to enjoy sex and to make sure your partners enjoy it too, you’re going to have to do the same thing.

One friend of ours had her first orgasm at the age of thirty-four, after reading for the first time in one of the sex manuals that became popular in the early 1970s that it was okay for her to masturbate—she’d grown up in the generation that was told masturbation would make you sick or crazy. This is a horrible story—how many years of orgasms did this woman miss because of bad information?

Whatever you do now you learned somewhere, somehow, so you can learn new or different sexual skills and habits if you choose. Learning requires some effort, but the rewards are great, and we know n
you will be brave and persistent. Many of the books we recommend include exercises you can use to expand your sexual skills and your repertoire—try them.

Talk to people about sex. Ask them about their experience, and share yours. Janet remembers seeing her first porno movies and feeling confounded because the women in them all masturbated face-up, and she wasn’t sure if she’d been doing it wrong all those years. She started asking her women friends and found that she was far from alone—not only in her face-down preference but also in her sense of uncertainty. Talk to your intimates and any friends or people you respect who are accessible to you. Breaking the ice can be scary at first, but establishing discussion about sex with your friends and lovers will be a valuable resource for all of you, well worth risking a few minutes of embarrassment as you get started. A friend of ours used to believe that she was the only person in the whole world whose cheeks got sore from sucking a big cock. Talking to a few friends let her know that she was in the majority. If you find you can’t talk intimately and explicitly about sex with your lovers, then how can you deal with a problem or try something new?

We mean this quite literally. When Masters and Johnson began their research into sexual functioning in the late 1950s, they wanted to start by learning about good sex before researching sexual dysfunction—so they started by selecting 382 men and 312 women, including 276 heterosexual couples, all of whom had satisfactory sex lives. One surprising fact they uncovered was that virtually all these sexually satisfied people masturbated—regardless of whether or not they were also having partnered sex.

Write this on your mirror: sexually successful people masturbate. You are not jerking or buzzing off because you are a loser, because you can’t find anyone to play with you, or because you are desperate to get your rocks off. You’re making love to yourself because you deserve pleasure, and playing with yourself makes you feel good.

We have never met a person who suffers from low self-esteem at the moment of orgasm. Your relationship with yourself is what you bring to a relationship with another person: it is what you have to share, personally, emotionally, and sexually. The sexier you are to yourself, the sexier you will be to your lovers.

People who play with themselves are good lovers for two reasons. First is that sex with yourself is a really good time to explore new sources of stimulation, like touching yourself in different places, or vibrators, or new positions. Because you will never fail to notice what doesn’t feel good, you will always do it the way that feels best, and there will be no one to get embarrassed in front of. So masturbation offers you an opportunity to practice all sorts of interesting things: for instance,
if one of your goals is to be able to enjoy more sex before you come, you can practice relaxation exercises with yourself and learn to slow down and speed up your response however you like. If your concern is that sometimes you are not able to come when you would like to, you can pay attention to what works for you when you have sex with yourself and teach your partner your particular preferences in sexual stimulation. Try different rhythms and stimulations so that you don’t get into a rut of being able to get off on only one sensation. Practice makes perfect, so masturbate a lot.

Start by putting some energy into supporting your own self-esteem and developing a positive feeling about your body—no, not the body you plan to have next year after you work out every day and live on lettuce. What have you done recently that helps you feel good about the body you are inhabiting today? It’s hard to have a good relationship with your body when all you do is yell at it. Try giving your body treats: a bubble bath, a trip to the hot tubs, a massage, silk underwear, anything that feels good. Be nice to your body, and then go find somebody else’s body to be nice to, and somebody will be nice to your body too.

Love yourself as you would your lover. Masturbation is a good way to nourish and develop our relationships with ourselves. We can improve our self-esteem by the simple act of pleasuring our bodies.

Don’t forget: grown-ups play with toys. A huge variety of excellent sex toys is available. While these can be purchased online if you’re shy, we strongly recommend a visit to one of the hundreds of excellent erotic boutiques—modeled on San Francisco’s classic Good Vibrations—that have sprung up in large and small cities all over the United States. Such stores allow you to shop in a welcoming, safe, and remarkably unsleazy environment, with helpful staff who are knowledgeable about the mysterious devices on the shelves. Dossie used to sell toys at pleasure parties, which are Tupperware parties for sex toys, usually run by a sex educator invited in for the occasion—a great idea for a bachelorette party.

If you’ve never tried a vibrator, it’s never too late. Battery-operated vibrators are less powerful than the plug-in and rechargeable kinds, so
try to find an opportunity to check out all kinds—they work through clothes, so it’s not really that hard to find a way to experiment. (They’re not just for women, either—many a man has had his life changed by a vibrator against the perineum.) You will find insertables in a huge variety of sizes and shapes to meet every need, texture toys in fake fur or spiky gels, satin blindfolds and velvet restraints—and usually a thoughtful selection of good books and erotica. There is no reason why a sex store has to be hidden in a basement.