I‘ve been doing some traveling this summer, and every place I visit I pick up the local paper and read every word, down to each classified ad. Of course, there are plenty of local scandals to shake my head at, but what’s been steaming up my glasses this season are the endless sex-scare headlines — one wide-eyed, hand-wringing tract after another:
Herpes: There’s nothing you can do about it!
What you must tell your kids about sex before it’s too late!
You may have a sexually transmitted disease — even if you’ve never had sex!
You can read this stuff everywhere from the Hartford Courant to the Honolulu Advertiser. Why don’t they just bundle the headlines into one big package:
Sex makes you sick! Especially if you’ve never tried it!
As usual, young people are used to spur grown-up fears. We are exhorted to talk to our children about our sexual concerns, but not to have the same kind of serious chat with our adult peers. We’re advised to scare kids “straight” about fleshly temptation, following the model of those former junkies, with their stories and scars from prison, brought into classrooms to intimidate teenagers on the subject of drugs. In the end, we make them promise, preferably trembling, that they’ll never, ever do ____________.
I have serious doubts about using tactics like these to prevent substance abuse, but applying them to sex is absurd. Are we supposed to convince kids that they should never touch another human being? Is that the end goal? I’d rather share a birth experience with young people, or teach them how to care for a child, than have them witness some spectacle that shames unwed teenage moms. Or maybe, just for some feminist irony, I’d like to bring in a group of older men who’ve fathered babies by teenage girls and raised none of them. Let’s hear all about the stigma of their pain and embarrassment! Let me know when that appears in the L.A. Times.
Actually, I don’t want to put anyone else on the rack. What I’m really interested in is the possibility that one lover has sex with another and no one’s health is compromised in the least. Frankly, that’s the most common sexual experience. But do any of these fear-mongering “educators” have a plan for sexual maturity rather than eradication? Everyone knows sex between two people is a mixed bag — so what makes any of it worth the stumbling and disasters? How many of us would say that if we could take it all back, we’d rather have not been sexual at all?
Herpes hysteria is one of my special pet peeves, and I have some rebuttals to the recent media yipping. Let me provide some support for those who are still having sex — you few wild bandits out there.
Herpes: There’s something you CAN do about it — and even if you don’t, it’s not the end of the world.
Herpes is epidemic, and that’s not because several million people used the same soiled towel. Yes, theoretically you can get herpes without sexual contact, but you won’t! You will get it as a result of fucking and sucking — just like everyone else. The only way to drastically reduce your risk for herpes is to use condoms. Period. If you refuse to do that, then shut up and accept the inevitable. Herpes sores don’t shine out like neon lights, and an afflicted lover doesn’t even have to be showing a sore to be contagious. A barrier method that prevents skin-to-skin contact is the only thing that’s going to reduce your risk.
The herpes scare stories I read always make a big fuss about how condoms can “fail” — but if that’s true, how come Trojan hasn’t gone out of business? Condoms are a lot more reliable than tampons, napkins, coffee filters, Dixie cups and a lot of other everyday products I could mention, but you don’t hear people raving about those numbers, do you?
The big problem with condoms is that when the media refuses to talk about sex in plain language, it can be hard to figure out how to use them. The young and inexperienced are at a real disadvantage unless someone takes them in hand (of course that’s a nice way to learn, too). But I can tell any man in 10 seconds how to use condoms with ease: Buy a bunch of different kinds and masturbate with them until you find a kind you like. Great wankers make great condom artistes. There’s no performance pressure — just figure out your pleasure and stock up. For a delightful “insider” experience, put a drop of lube inside the reservoir tip before you slide it on. Carry rubbers on your person. Have plenty around, like candy.
I’ve had it with whiners who complain about condoms! They’re just mad they’re not getting laid more often. Guys who know what they’re doing with rubbers are a lover’s dream come true. When you aren’t worried about getting knocked up or sick, you can thoroughly enjoy being horny. End of story.
Let’s say you do have herpes. Well, welcome to the club that includes almost every sexually active person on the planet. It’s not the end of the world, although it can be very annoying. The worst part is the dearth of public information and a prejudice that is particularly American. Those ads for the drug acyclovir (which relieves some herpes symptoms, but provides no cure) show preppy white people walking around in a platonic daze. The manufacturers are reassuring you that you, the herpes “sufferer,” are not a slut just because you have this disease. To that extent, they’re truthful. Herpes is absolutely banal, not reserved for any practice, lifestyle or ZIP code. Drugs or no drugs, and individual exceptions notwithstanding, this is not a “crippling disease.”
I got infected during the most sexually monogamous period of my life — in middle age, not my torrid youth. I’m sure I’d been exposed before, but the virus got me at a time in my life — while I was raising a baby — when my body was sorely run down. For me, herpes outbreaks don’t even include external manifestations: I just get flu-like symptoms of fatigue and achy limbs. Keeping the virus at bay, in my case, is more about nutrition, rest and other good health practices than it is about anything particularly sexual.
Here’s what I’m telling kids — or anyone who will listen — about sex this summer: Sexual pleasure, intimacy and self-preservation are a beautiful combination, and they are well within anyone’s reach. Don’t be freaked out by stories that paint death lurking behind every sexual curtain. That’s a cold lie. Our erotic lives are not only what our bodies are made for, they are also where our minds will inevitably take us. Sexual practice is indeed a sharing of the most tender parts of our bodies, and that’s always going to be a risky proposition.
Hailed by Utne Reader as “a visionary” and the San Francisco Chronicle as “the X-rated intellectual,” Susie Bright is indisputably the sexpert of our times. In “Full Exposure,”[Harper Audio] she delves into the most personal aspects of sex and shows us how our sexual passion can be a source of creativity and inspiration. By her own example and insight, she helps us to discover our own erotic story and sexual philosophy. Bright’s work celebrates the joy of sexual creativity–and the very uniqueness of each individual’s sense of the erotic.
Susie Bright is the author and editor of more than a dozen books, including The Best American Erotica series, the first three editions of Herotica, Sexwise, and The Sexual State of the Union. She has written for Nerve.com, Esquire, Playboy, Village Voice, New York Times Book Review, and is a regular columnist for the on-line magazine Salon. She lectures and performs at theaters and universities nationwide and currently lives in Northern California.
The Godfather by Mario Puzo
This was the first book I was ever handed by another person and told, “This is dirty.” A whole crew of little girls in my eighth-grade class in Edmonton, Alberta, were circulating it, and it wasn’t because of their interest in the Mafia — it was because of the book’s lurid description of the Godfather’s son’s huge cock and the woman he meets who has a cunt big enough to accept and enjoy it. It was the first time I had ever been exposed to the “big cock” meme. I was sheltered enough that I had no idea that bigger was supposed to be better, and I found this enormously titillating.
A Garden of Sand by Earl Thompson
Another book placed directly in my lap by a girlfriend who said, “I don’t like that prissy erotica stuff — this is something that actually gets you off.” While “The Godfather” was violent, it didn’t mix violence with sex. “Garden of Sand” had anger, guilt, violence and sex all mixed in one pot and sometimes in a few brutal paragraphs. Two characters really shocked me — a mother who has an incestuous relationship with her son and a furious dwarf who wreaks revenge on a prostitute — but I couldn’t get those scenes out of my head. This time, I didn’t like having my friend know that I was turned on by the same things she was. I refused to talk to her about the book afterward. I was ashamed of myself for enjoying it and pissed at her for knowing I would.
Notes of a Dirty Old Man by Charles Bukowski
Is this what men really think about women? I found this on my father’s bookshelf, at the height of Bukowski’s reign as the drunken bard of the L.A. Free Press. I’d never heard someone be such a bastard in print before, but he was so damn eloquent about it. Made me wonder how the women in his life would tell the same story.
Don Juan in the Village by Jane DeLynn
These were the notes of a dirty old dyke and one of the first unrepentant ones at that. Jane De Lynn wrote about what it’s like to love ugly, to love reckless, to be absolutely hateful and sopping wet all at the same time. I cheered because she’d broken the dreadful lesbian romance canon, and then later I realized that there just weren’t any women authors talking about sex hunger like this, and precious few men, either.
Goin’ Down With Janis by Peggy Caserta
I love Janis Joplin and I love trashy celebrity biographies, but it’s rare to find a lesbian love affair that can tie the two together. This book was ghost-written to be grotesque, yet I was touched by the tenderness that escaped the editor’s cheese machine. Peggy and Janis loved each other, and that made me listen to Janis’ blues with a new understanding.
My recent book tour introduced me to a whole new group of erotic friends and teachers. One of my favorites was Adrian Ryan, a bellboy turned freelance writer who gave me a first class e-mail tutorial in the practice of creating your own personal hotel scandal.
I first heard from Adrian a month ago when I wrote a column about getting lonely/horny on the road and not always being sure what to do about it:
Susie Dahl-ink,
Just read one of your recent Salon pieces about your book tour. YOU CRACK MY ASS UP. Before I became a multimedia superstar, I was a graveyard shift bellman at the Benson Hotel in Portland.
Let me speak from experience — if it wasn’t for road-weary travelers (one or two of them authors!) staying at the hotel, I’d have had no sex life for most of my early 20s. As it was, I saw more action than a Bruce Willis flick. If you get frisky and can’t bear to face those terrifyingly sterile hotel sheets solo, call the concierge fer chrissake!
Adrian Ryan
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Dear Mr. Ryan,
Believe me, I’ve had my eye on the concierge before. What exactly do I say to them when they pick up the phone? I need to know the four-star etiquette!
Susie
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Silly! You don’t call and ask for sex … you call and ask for an IRON or a NEW REMOTE CONTROL or ROOM SERVICE. Then you answer the door in a towel. Voil`! That is, if you can find a female or heterosexual male hotel employee. That’ll be a challenge.
xo,
A.
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OK, you’re going to need to go gentle and slow with me. I have opened the door in my towel, and the staff person has behaved very modestly toward me. Of course they are not about to throw me on the bed, as they could be fired for that. Do I just give them eye contact and refuse to look away? Whisper “Open Sesame”? Something Mae West-ish? Please tell me exactly how this transpired in your experience.
S.
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Good heavens! This is quickly becoming “Adrian’s Online Correspondence College of the Art and Science of Schtupping the Housekeeping Staff.”
As well you know, EVERYONE is a horndog deep down, and there are few, if any, who would turn down a luscious and furtive shag with a willing babe. So, the trick lies in the fine, lost art of seduction. Hotel employees are very timid and will be painfully wary of diving in, dropping their britches and going to town without firm assurance that there will be no hysterical calls to the front desk should their southward parts be suddenly exposed. They must be coaxed! You need to make the fact that your pants are pounding crystal clear. This requires a bit of bravery and a momentary abandonment of one’s dignity. How bad are you jonesing anyway?
Wait until after 11 p.m. when the graveyard staff comes on shift. They always have time and freedom to play. First go downstairs and check out who’s working. The guy or gal parking your car will probably be the one to spirit any late night requests up to your room, so a little window shopping is a wise play. I mean, you don’t want to get all gussied up (or down) to discover Jabba the Hut in a bellman’s cap drooling in your doorway with the extra towels you just ordered, do you?
This is also a great time, if the goods are fresh, to make a little flirtatious small talk. You know, “Nice night, when do you get off, does your cock curve to the left or the right?”-type stuff. Discreetly reveal your room number (easy these days since most hotel keys are coded for security — you can feign a bad memory and have Mr. Bell-Stud decode it for you). Then when he/she gets the call to your room later, the soil will be tilled, as it were.
When he/she arrives, fake trouble with the television or getting the window open. Invite them in to “take a look” at the problem. (We are assuming at this point you are in a towel or other scanty, promising apparel.) Then keep him/her around with idle, mindless chit-chat, all the while — this is important! — staring at his/her crotch. A minute or two of polite conversation while your gaze is fixed, basilisk-style, upon their bulging nether regions, and voil`! You’re as good as laid!
If at first you don’t succeed, call them back up demanding menial things until they get fed up and put out for the sake of peace and quiet. Or you can get really bold and just have some of that cheesy softcore hotel porn playing when they arrive. Don’t be shy!
The wage slaves of the better hotels are used to being hit on, and the worst that could happen is they could say no. Or you could wind up with some skinny fairy (like me) and wind up braiding each other’s hair. What do you have to lose? Go, baby, go!
A.
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Dear Addy:
I arrived at the Cambridge Marriott at 1 a.m. last night, with all your instructions in mind. As you recommended, I scanned who was on the skeletal graveyard staff, and to my dismay, there was only one old coot who looked like he needed a walker just to get my hotel key for me. (Yes, I know, some old coots are fine stuff, but believe me, this one was close to nodding.) I offered to carry the bags myself, and he gratefully acquiesced.
Upon reaching my room, seventh floor in the back, with two heavy bags in hand, I realized I was too tired for hanky-panky anyway. It was just as well that there were no temptations on the night shift to distract me. I flipped on the room’s light switch as I considered whether it was really necessary to take my clothes off at all, since I was going to fall asleep right away and get a wake up call at 6. But there was just one little problem.
I picked up the phone and called downstairs. “I need a different room,” I said. “There’s no bed in here.”
“No bed?” Mr. Coot didn’t trust his hearing.
“Well, there is an unmade hospital gurney, but I’m not quite ready for that yet. Maybe next week.”
I lay down on the shag carpet and waited for my prince to arrive with a new key. I knew it would only take a half- hour or so.
So you see, Adrian, I’m ready for action, win or lose, but I need the right furniture, and I need my beauty rest!
Susie
The first woman I picked in the Portland, Ore., audience was straight up the middle, 20 rows back. Aside from shooting her hand in the air the moment I asked for questions, she tempted me with her huge, brown eyes.
“I’d like to know,” she stammered, “if it’s possible to love two people at the same time.” She seemed on the verge of tears, as everyone around her craned their necks to see who was asking such a personal question.
There was a murmur through the crowd that would have been outright laughter if the questioner hadn’t been so wetly earnest. I know the first questions that came to my mind were: How is it possible not to love more than one person in a lifetime? Who hasn’t been torn by conflicting feelings for more than one lover?
But I didn’t get the chance to answer her. Another woman, the same age and with the same dewy freshness as the first, popped up in the front row and recited a full-length public service message trumpeting the benefits and principles of polyamory. Then another voice interrupted hers, a middle-aged, self-described mom of three, who said she’d been in a polyamorous relationship for nine years. A couple in the back yelled, “We’ve been doing it for 15!” At which point the audience of 500 broke into wild applause.
Wow, what is up in Portland? “Is anyone here not in a polyamorous relationship?” I asked the crowd, and they laughed uproariously at the very thought. If you were wondering where the polyamory capital of North America might be, your search is over.
And that’s “polyAMORY,” not “polyGAMY,” for those jargon neophytes like me who may be feeling that the song sounds familiar, although the words have changed. The polyamory crowd has nothing to do with the Mormon Church — they don’t even mess around with marriage vows.
These folks are committed to relationships that aren’t defined by possession or jealousy. Such relationships could include threesomes, quads or a “V” (a triangle in which two of the lovers relate to the third, but not to each other). It also includes primary relationships in which secondary lovers play a long-distance or more occasional role. It doesn’t have anything to do with being married, although some poly folks do sport wedding bands. Some are suburban and some are the original urban outlaws. Sometimes they’re bisexual, but they’re not necessarily so. In fact, nothing is required in current poly-thought, except that you reject — even if it’s only in your mind — the idea that monogamy and couple-centrism are natural.
These beliefs used to be called, in early American sexual liberation movements, “free love.” Feminist/spiritualist Victoria Woodhull was a such an activist in the late-1800s, and so was anarchist Emma Goldman. I love to read their fiery declarations of erotic independence, and their term, “free love,” is still my favorite, with its unfettered focus on passion. Goldman said that it wasn’t a revolution in her book if she couldn’t dance, and I’ve always been sure in my heart that dancing was her euphemism for fucking.
I came of age in Southern California in the mid-’70s, a time when it was simply uncool to even think about “going steady” or to exact promises of monogamy from your boyfriends and girlfriends. I didn’t go on dates when I was a teenager, or exchange any vows other than to smash the state. Marriage and monogamy were for square, stale, old people — people who were afraid to live, to be themselves, to Be Here Now. “Why let the state be your pimp?” my friend Spain always said, and that pretty much summed up my peers’ attitude toward wedding vows and similar engagements. From the feminist point of view, women’s bodies had been the property of men for too long to even imagine putting your pussy under anyone’s lock and key, even if it was a girlfriend this time instead of a guy.
Fortunately for me, this brand of radicalism suited my character splendidly. I’m just not wired for one-on-one fidelity, and I never have been. I could easily love two, three and four people at once, and I honestly did not suffer from the reflexive jealous reactions that I witnessed in those among my friends who yearned to be cool but were eaten up inside by all this “love-the-one-you’re-with” bravado. Getting caught in such an emotional maelstrom made them anxious, too.
One year I lived in a commune where I loved and slept with two men, both Teamsters, one of whom worked the day shift while the other worked nights. I canoodled with Cary on the sofa for a couple hours in the afternoon, and with Marcus during the night. I loved them both, and I know they loved each other like brothers. But unlike the well-processed V’s that polyfolk talk about today, we barely spoke of our set-up together beyond working out the bare practicalities.
I knew that neither of them liked our triangle, much to my disappointment. Each one felt like he couldn’t pitch a fit over it because that would be so “bourgeois,” the reaction of a patriarchal, jealous fool. I, on the other hand, agreed with this rhetoric in spirit as well as word, and I confess I did use counterculture peer pressure to keep our trio going because, frankly, I did like it!
I liked everything about being with two men I was crazy about — everything except the tension between them. Each one feared that I liked the other more than him. I would linger with each one in bed (or on the sofa), telling him how much I loved him and how lucky I felt to be living with them both. But I could see the pain in their eyes, the suggestion that I was mouthing what, to them, seemed like just so much feel-good malarkey.
Once, I took the risk of suggesting that if we all went to bed together (during a swing shift) things might mellow out considerably. Cary surprised me by saying that he was up for it, but that Marcus would freak — and he was right. I was too naive to understand that there was another source for his tension beyond the competition over who was fucking me the best. Marcus was so uncomfortable at the idea of our creeping bisexuality that he started avoiding us both. One night he left his cigar burning in our communal 1964 Chevy Nova II, right in the middle of the UPS employee parking lot. A fire ensued, and after the car burned up our wobbly V was never the same.
I’m sure today’s polyamorous community, which extends way beyond Portland and is fueled by thriving Web sites, could have offered plenty of tips to our un-negotiated free-love-for-all. The poly scene today is very different from the scene during the first sexual revolution. As one woman wrote to me last week, “I’m sure you’re familiar with the poly motto, ‘Go as slow as the slowest person wants, and then a little bit slower than that.’” Man, I couldn’t have imagined doing anything that slow when I was a teenage revolutionary commune member! But I can see via hindsight how her philosophy might have kept a perfectly good relationship — or at least a perfectly good Chevy — from going up in flames.
For the next month, I’m on the road promoting my new book, “Full Exposure,” which is about creating your own sexual philosophy and erotic perspective. As I travel across the nation with a trunkful of erotic books and my Hitachi Magic Wand, people who come to my readings ask me a lot of questions, and some queries come up over and over again, so I’ve been answering them in my recent columns.
Those of you with burning questions who can’t make it to one of my appearances (but please do try, I’d love to meet you) can drop me an e-mail.
In your recent travels from sea to shining sea, what are the latest sex trends you see either in the underground or in the mainstream? Could there be anything new under the sun?
I detect that you share my exasperation when people talk about sex trends, as opposed to actual sex lives. Many of the wildest erotic controversies of the moment will doubtless seem rather shallow in several years. I’ve know more than a few sexual fashion victims who pierced themselves one month, took hormones the next and now they don’t know whether to invest in Depends (infantilism might just be the next big thing) or shake their Kabballah-maker.
A few years ago, S/M sex play was considered pathological at best, and yet today, for many, it’s simply a foxy maneuver in black leather. Have we approached the zenith of erotic acceptance, or is this the prelude to ennui?
Personally, I will always be a serious erotic trend-watcher — I don’t dismiss any of it easily. I don’t believe you can call yourself a cultural maven unless you’re thinking about how people feel about such issues, publicly and privately.
I’ve encountered two big, and fairly new, topics in my current travels. Everywhere I went, people asked me about the sexual aspect of raising kids, and they also asked me my thoughts on polyamory. I’ll discuss the kid part in this column, and poly-sex in the next.
The most affecting image of my entire tour this year was seeing parents bring their children, or the young people in their lives, to hear me speak. One teenage girl said to me, “My mom gave me all your books when I was 15, and she said, ‘This is your sexual survival kit.’ At first, I was, like, ‘Ma, I don’t think I need to read all this right now,’ but a year later, I’m all, ‘thanks, Mom!’”
I didn’t ask exactly which story of mine inspired her (“Story of O Birthday Party”? “Pregnancy Sex Tips”?), but I do remember that one year might as well have been a century in my sexual development when I was 15.
I was a little puzzled at this parental endorsement because, after all, my accumulated writings are not technique manuals, and they’re not illustrated. If I had to categorize them, I’d say they espouse an open, thoughtful and joyful attitude about sex, and it ‘s true that joy is a sentiment that is completely absent in today’s public policies regarding sex.
I have recently been very pessimistic about the vilification of young people’s sexuality. I was overcome to see that there are, indeed, lots of parents who don’t want their kids growing up to think that sex is sick or stupid. Not everyone is buying the public service messages that tell young people that sex is an impediment to a successful career or a fatal blow to any future marital happiness. I discovered that there are families other than mine who are terrified of the “abstinence” agenda, and the constant adult use of teenagers’ images as sex objects we must either regulate or fetishize. I’m not the only one who wonders what the plan is for coping with the next generation of adults who have been “scared straight” about sexual desire. I don’t want to meet those nut cases in a dark alley — or the state legislature.
Everyone on the road asked me, “So are you going to write a book about sex for parents or young people?” The answer is yes. It’s obvious that there’s a passionate audience seeking support, advice and inspiration on how to raise a family that isn’t sexually dysfunctional. Yes, we’ve all heard the joke about putting the fun back into dysfunctionality, but the truth is that the real fun and pleasure of sexual health only comes when you aren’t lying your head off, keeping secrets or brutalizing your sexual feelings. If I hear one more story about kids who are beaten for masturbating, or electric-shocked every time they wet the bed, or humiliated for hiding an erotic fantasy image under a mattress … I’ll want to do something more than just cry again, and that’s where writing a sex-positive book for families begins for me.
The number of people who have been physically abused, and/or mentally destroyed because their families couldn’t cope with sexual feelings is just incredible. Then, you have those who feel that becoming the parental unit has made having an adult sex life impossible. Last but not least, there are the young people who, on one hand, want some sexual privacy, but on the other would also like to have some basic sex-positive information and nonhypocritical advice. There is no such book at present that addresses their feelings, and there is no public advocacy for young people’s sexual rights or support for families who don’t want to kowtow to sexual ignorance.
I intend to write a book to take this on, and now all I have to do is organize it. Should it be addressed to parents, or to kids? Should it start with pregnancy and end at adolescence, a sort of “What to Expect When You’re Horny”? Or should it be more direct, hitting the basic, natural issues of sexual desire — the erotic parallel of “Everybody Poops”? What questions would you like to see addressed in such a book? I’m so glad there are plenty of people who aren’t buying the sex-is-bad dogma. (Thank you, “South Park,” for calling this trend early!) Maybe the reverse slogan ought to be my new title: “Sex Is Good: A Guide to Growing Up.” That’s an idea that will never go out of style.
I have a new book and audiotape out — “Full Exposure: Opening Up to Your Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression” — and I’ll be touring all over the U.S. through November. I hope I get to meet some of you in person, and connect with old friends. “Full Exposure” includes my stories about what I think it takes to make, admit and live out your own sexual philosophy. Interested? You can read the first chapter here. And when you do read my new book, write and tell me what you think of it.
