The Guide to Getting It On (156 page)

Bug Repellent:
Don’t forget the bug repellent if you are baring your all next to some humid bog or any place where the average mosquito would take one look at your naked butt cheeks and think it had died and gone to heaven.

Dress for Sex:
For sex in public places, it can be more than helpful if the woman wears one of those full 1950s-type dresses or sundresses. It’s the equivalent of wearing her own private dressing room. She won’t need to take a single thing off except for her underwear, unless she’s not wearing any. That way, if she leans over the rail at a vista point, her partner can stand behind her and indicate objects of interest with his private pointer.

Beach Blanket Bingo:
If you are doing it at the beach or on a sandy river bed, be sure to take two large blankets. There’s something about being on top of two blankets instead of one that helps keep sand from getting in your crack. Extra lube might help take the abrasive edge off any sand that makes its way inside a vagina or other places of intimate pleasure.

Wet Sex Sex:
in water provides its own set of challenges, given how water washes away natural lubrication. Try coating your genitals with a silicone-based lube ahead of time. Female condoms also work for sex in the water. According to Luann Colombo, author of
How To Have Sex in the Woods,
intercourse in the water tends to pump the vagina full of water, so women will save themselves embarrassment if they will squat to let their crotches drain as they are emerging from the deep.

Condoms & Wet Spots in Sleeping Bags:
Ms. Colombo recommends carrying your condoms in a thermal cooler bag to keep them from freezing or frying. Using condoms when having sex in a sleeping bag will help decrease the drip factor and will help keep your sleeping bag dryer. (There’s not a lot of room in a sleeping bag to avoid sleeping on the wet spot.) Consider packing a pet pee-pad or a disposable blue hospital pad for when you are doing the nasty in a sleeping bag. They are absorbent on one side, but waterproof on the other. Ms. Colombo says that for sex in a sleeping bag, more “in” and grinding results in a smaller wet spot than lots of in-out.

Public-Sex Caution

One reader comments, “A close friend of mine went to jail for having sex in public; it was her first arrest and very traumatic.” So please be aware that while it’s perfectly legal for a couple to have a really loud and nasty fight in public, having sex in public (or maybe even in your backyard) is likely to break local, state and federal statutes and might get you arrested. For some people, the risk is half the fun.

Highly Recommended Books:

Sex in a Tent: A Wild Couple’s Guide to Getting Naughty in Nature
by Michelle Waitzman, Wilderness Press. It’s difficult to imagine anyone who enjoys the great outdoors not enjoying this book. Covers even the uncomfortable parts of having sex while camping with class and humor.

How To Have Sex In The Woods,
by Luann Colombo, Three Rivers Press. In addition to being wise, practical and lots of fun, this book makes a great gift for friends who like to hike and pack. Some of Ms. Colombo’s other books include
Dead Guys and Gals of Science, Make Your Own Superballs, Sleepover Madness
and
Gross But True Germs.

CHAPTER

76

Kink in the Animal Kingdom

A
re humans the only animals who have sex for pleasure in addition to reproduction? Are the other animals limited to having sex for reproduction and dominance only? Is there no kink in the rest of the animal kingdom? Until recently, that’s what the biologists had told us. Fortunately, some biologists have been reconsidering the idea that humans are the only animals who have sex just for the heck of it. So let’s pretend you are a biology professor who wants to study sex in the jungle.

Sex in the Jungle (No, Not Manhattan)

After spending years of applying for grants, you have finally gotten your project funded. Your plane is about to set down in a third world country where you hope to observe bonobos in the wild.

Discovered in 1929, the bonobo is one of the Great Apes. The bonobo’s genes are closer to human genes than most other living creatures; closer than even savanna baboons and chimpanzees. It’s not that bonobos are identical to humans, but they are found swinging on 98% of the same limbs of the evolutionary tree. Girl bonobos don’t give birth until they are 13 or 14 years of age, reaching full maturity by age 15. When they do have babies, bonobos nurse and carry their young for up to five years. While they don’t ride skateboards or have iPhones, it can safely be said that bonobos are more like humans than white mice or cows.

Your Lab in the Bush

You are finally able to set up camp in an area where you can watch bonobos do what bonobos do. You write in your notebook that you have successfully paid off the local officials, and you feel relieved that insurgent rebels haven’t captured, killed or raped you.

And then it happens—your first sighting. Not only do you see bonobos having heterosexual sex, but you notice one big male has his hand on the erect penis of another male and he’s giving his bonobo buddy a handjob. Eventually you see two bonobo women rubbing their genitals together, like in porn. You also observe two males rubbing their penises together in a pleasurable way, and you then you see a male and female having face-to-face intercourse.

After your first year of observing bonobos, you decide that while they are certainly not sex maniacs, sex appears to be an essential part of their social interactions. After spending two years in the jungle watching bonobos, you find yourself desperate for sea air, so you apply for another grant that will allow you to watch dolphins and whales have sex.

After two years at sea, you long to go back to the jungle, only this time you apply for funding to watch giraffes have sex. By now, people at the foundations are saying, “We’ll be darned if we’re going to give more money for that pervert professor to watch another species have sex.” So instead of funding your project, they spend millions of dollars to teach sexual abstinence to students in inner-city high schools. Fortunately, your great aunt Clarice recently died and left you enough of an inheritance to return to the jungle to watch giraffes have sex.

You eventually sit down and try to make sense of all your findings. There’s no way around it—your years of research tell you that the sexual encounters you have witnessed were not limited to acts of sperm competition, aggression and dominance. The same animals who one day were having a homosexual tryst might be enjoying heterosexual sex the next. And in spite of years of being told this can’t possibly be, you get the sense that these animals were having sex for the mere pleasure of it, spilling sperm with a devil-may-care indifference to the theories of your fellow scientists. Good God, you say to yourself, I’ll never get tenure now. So in order to make your findings more palatable to your colleagues, you report that animals have sex in order to resolve conflict, for tension regulation, and as appeasement behavior. There, you didn’t use the words “fun” or “pleasure,” even if that’s what you’ve been watching for the past six years.

In spite of what’s in your report, you now know that animals enjoy a full range of sexual pleasure. Males can fool around with other males without it being a newsworthy event. Females can do whatever pleases them sexually. And you never once saw animals with bibles imploring their fellow animals to take virginity pledges. That kind of behavior is only found on the highest branch of the evolutionary tree.

CHAPTER

77

Orientation in Flux

R
esearch in sexual orientation is in a state of flux. Actually, it’s been topsy-turvy for the past 100 years. The latest state of flux is being fueled by new ways of looking inside the brain while people are being presented with images that turn them on. Until now, traditional research involved slapping sensors between the legs of college students when they look at dirty pictures or videos. Now we are using brain scans or neuroimaging in addition to penile strain gauges and vaginal plesthmographs.

It used to be that people thought of “straight male” and “straight female” as being opposite sides of the same coin. Not any more. Some of the top researchers in sexual orientation were kind enough to offer readers of
The Guide
their current thinking about sexual orientation. Consider what Richard Lippa from Cal State University at Fullerton has to say: