Full Exposure: Opening Up to Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression (15 page)

fearsome and sinful became as wholesome as breakfast. Nudity, orgasms, fresh air and exercise, making love under the stars, pepper-mint tea. How could one find fault in sex when it was Heidi Land: well scrubbed, sweet, putting roses in your cheeks? My mind was at ease…except when I was very, very aroused. The things that went through my mind when my clit was on fire were not things that little Heidi could possibly understand.

I didn’t understand them, either. I never acknowledged my excesses, my masochism, my voyeurism, my fetishes, my sadism, because those, after all, are the clinicians’ descriptions—having to do with the psychos, the lunatics. In my childhood erotic fantasies, my wanderings were not diseased or criminal. My fantasies were the most innocent extension of make-believe stories I’d been telling myself my whole life. I always liked spies and pirates and princesses when I was little—and with that cast of characters, how could I ex-pect anything but eroticism of high drama and danger?

When I was about eight, there was a very popular show called
Get Smart,
and as an adult I can tell you that it was a Mel Brooks satire on Cold War spy politics. However, in my third-grade consciousness, the satire and historical context were all lost on me. I thought it was a funny but scary spy show with all sorts of risqué sexual small talk between the hero, Agent 86, and his girlfriend, Agent 99. Agent 99 was so beautiful to me. Even her name—the number 99—just seemed dripping with sex. I especially liked the opening credits, where the swinging horn music drove our man through a series of doors that kept slamming and opening, alternately claustrophobic and then—POW!—opening up one more escape.

So here’s my fantasy. I’m Agent 99—Agent 86 is such a dork, he’s out of the picture entirely—and I’m being pursued

through those steel doors. If whoever is chasing me catches me, something—POW!—is going to happen to me. Through the pursuer’s eyes, watching me, I can see the breathless doe-eyed 99 running, running; but I feel her feelings, that I am going to be trapped, and the unbearable feeling of what will be done to me.

One night the suspense and peril and intrigue of my “99” chase fantasies became
so
suspenseful and
so
intriguing that I came. The steel doors opened, and I fell down my very first rabbit hole. Of course I didn’t know I had just had “solo sex,” but I did know that I had shattered something, I had pissed all over something, and it was the first thing that had ever made my imaginary scenario stop dead in its tracks. Plus, it wasn’t the powerful explosion in my genitals that shocked me back to real-world consciousness, but rather the fact that it stopped. I had pushed that door open a million times in my dreams, and now the fall was as delicious as I had imagined. Only hitting the ground woke me up.

I don’t like most of the territory that we have in public for talking about our sexual imagination. Those labels and pro/con banalities make everything I ever dreamed about seem either abnormal or ill fitting. I’ve already rejected the debates about “normality,” with all their attendant pathological and religious bigotries. What’s left among the fun seekers and liberals is not all to my liking, either. People ask me, “Are you into S/M?” as if we were talking about a line of cards—my fetish as a consumer dish du jour. I don’t buy it—the ethos of “My sexual preference is my lifestyle is my politics is my record label.” I feel embarrassed when I’m asked for my label, and it’s not for shame about my erotic preferences; it’s the stupidity of having my most intuitive and creative moments crammed into sound bites.

Why am I not rejoicing that so many people feel free to joke and make hobbyist conversations about their sexual tastes? After all, they’re not tying a noose around their necks in the closet, or subject-ing their loved ones to insupportable antics of repression. If Calvin Klein wants to get behind the Kinky Krusade, if Nike wants to court erotic chic in athletic advertisements, who am I to wax nostalgic over the days when we whispered to ourselves like fugitives? But I don’t think I’m nostalgic for the bad old days; I’m finding the current liberal definitions insufficient. We’re still dealing with sex like it was an eight-crayon box.

What color am I, after all? I champion the rights of leatherhood or whatever-hood, but I’m crap as a poster child. I’m a poor example of an S/M vixen if the definition has to do with how many torture devices I have at my disposal (the average kitchen has more than enough) or how many knots I’ve learned to tie.

But, suppose you ask me: Have I ever become aroused by thoughts of pain, of unbearable endurance, of forced confessions and impossible cruelties? Have I found objects entertaining? Have I taken my impatience and turned it into a sensation-filled punishment? Have I broken every family and social taboo with obscene screams and lustful begging? I’ll nod my head like a not-so-dumb animal.

I have entertained the
un
-wholesome, the anti-Heidi. I am secure in my faith that others have had similar thoughts and that we walk among one another not knowing, oblivious. It’s only when I have time to reflect, like during commercial TV breaks or in a car at the red light, that I think about how closely guarded we keep our erotic identities. How many of my comrades-in-thought-crimes have acknowledged their imaginations or discussed their

fantasies with even one other person? I can only get depressed at what a tiny minority that might be.

As popular as analysis and self-transformation may be in our culture, as much as we drag every bit of wretched violence and neurosis out of our family and institutional closets, the fact that these things exist in our sexual world, in our erotic thoughts, is something most people think of as sad or dangerous. We think, even if we’re unafraid of it ourselves, that people will take our sexual thoughts
the wrong way.
They’ll think we’re tragic, we’re suffering from a lack of fiber or the absence of a mother’s love.

I’m not sad and I’m not brutal. I know that every shade of sexual emotion is what makes the juice of eroticism. There is no orgasm that is as lightweight as soapsuds, there is no erotic energy that isn’t heavy, that floats with no sting. I appreciate Muhammad Ali’s metaphor about the butterfly and the bee because it speaks so well about sex.

I don’t think actual “kinky” sex is as frightening to the public as the titillation of its discovery. We are led to expect a grisly result, the punishment and horror of the deviant thought. It doesn’t matter whether one person’s version of kinky is chains and candle wax, while another person is contemplating simple vanilla homosexuality—the fears are the same.

“Oh, Tom, I’m so frightened, I think Pat might be
that
way!” “Oh, no, Susan, you don’t mean
that
way, do you? We’ve got to

get Pat some
help
before it’s too
late!
”

Yes, Pat-the-Pervert is not an accurate description of anyone’s real life but is, rather, the medical and sometimes criminal label that leaves us no room to be anything but professional deviants. A label is a quick and sticky way to calm the concerns of the conforming womb. What lies outside Vanilla Land? “Pat”

knows, but we’re led to believe Pat won’t even make it out alive. Don’t we treat people like that with drugs or lock them up or in some effective way just take them out of circulation? We’re confident that the Pats of the world won’t tell on themselves if we deny their existence. We are warned away from pleasure and self-discovery like children being told not to look in a cupboard.

Yes, there are always do-gooders who seek to justify their fears of the sexually unfamiliar. They point to the scary incarcerated of-fenders, the serial whatevers, and say: How do we control people like
that,
who took their sick little fantasies and hurt someone?

Right then, we feel like we should be roused to action; we’ve got to
stop
the erotic fantasies because somebody somewhere might
do
something—and yet you can see where this kind of logic gets you. We don’t try to stop people from
thinking
about anything except sex, no matter how heinous their future crimes might be. Why do we think eroticism is the problem in crimes where the most compelling inhumanity is not the sex, but rather the complete lack of compassion? Instead of asking, “Why are you attracted to X?” we should be asking, “Why don’t you have any empathy? How come you don’t see where you
end
and someone else
begins?
”

But let’s put all that aside for a minute. No one writes a gourmet cookbook and spends most of its pages addressing food poisoning. No one edits a magazine about cars and fills its text with gory warnings about accidents. Why should I write a book about eroticism and devote myself to a vale of sex fears?

Behind every anxiety about sexual violence is a much deeper predation: fear of pleasure, fear of righteous pleasure, fear of powerful pleasure. Fear of hands that know their sexual body so

well that they grow hair. Fear of a lust that would make women demanding and men weak in the knees. What every citizen understands about kinky sex, if they don’t know a single other detail, is that this deviation, whatever it is, is somehow making sex more intense and more pleasurable. Someone is going to the moon on these sensations, someone is risking everything to feel it again. And it’s this extreme and sought-after rocket to ecstasy that offends us so—not fear at all, but suspicion and envy in spades.

CHAPTER NINETEEN
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ELECTRICITY

L
ast summer, through a series of lucky accidents, I hosted an old-school bluegrass band overnight at my house, following its local debut. They were from South Carolina, had never been to California before, and had only a dim idea of what I do for a living. The drummer was particularly interested in what I had in my library, and before he left I gave him a suitcase of all my books on sexual politics, covering everything from anal intercourse to the Supreme Court. I didn’t know if I’d hear from the band again, but he wrote me a month later when they landed back home. “I really liked reading your books on the road,” he said, “and there’s so many things I’d like to talk about. But let me just ask you this for now: Have you ever experienced electricity during sex?”

For a moment I flashed on the sensory memory of a burning smell between my sheets the time my vibrator shorted out under

my bedcovers. But I knew that he wasn’t talking about that, a truly rarefied experience. No, I think he meant something that happened while making love, a current between him and his lover.

I was curious that my new friend didn’t define what he meant by “electricity.” He didn’t say, “Have you ever been really in love? Have you ever felt another presence?” When people feel an unexpected or extrasensory jolt during sex, they typically chalk it up to true love or a sign from their god. It is usually interpreted as a romantic signal that you are with the “right” person doing just the “right” thing—although a few people who have been around the block will admit that sparks are capable of flying even with people they know they couldn’t spend eight hours with, let alone the rest of their lives.

The other curiosity about sexual “electricity” is that it makes such a powerful impression that many people who report the sensation will describe with awe that they weren’t even touching genitals, stoking the conventional orgasm.

I first became interested in this sort of electricity when I was learning about the sexual reeducation of lovers who had spinal cord injuries or paralysis that made their genital area numb. One of the most erotic films I have ever seen was a documentary for couples where one lover has a spinal cord disability. On camera, these couples had undeniably powerful and expressive sex. The last thing I expected to feel, watching a documentary about sex for the disabled, was envy, but that’s exactly what I was left with. The camera didn’t show any white lightning, the screen didn’t crackle, but with one couple in particular, I felt like their every touch was completely off the ground.

I know people seek this kinetic experience, avidly, by studying books and applying themselves to meditation, prayer, or

exhaustive searches for the complete and perfect partner. However, some of the most impressive stories I’ve heard about electricity were in situations that were anything but high-minded or spiritually considered. Why do some people get their first jolt at a billiard parlor, when others are in a temple? If you feel it once with someone, why not forever, why not every time?

I cannot describe for you the chemistry of sexual electricity, though I have certainly had open ears to all scientific, paranormal, and spiritual explanations. The one thing I am convinced of is that these bolts of body thunder are neither romantic halos nor fortune-telling advisories. They do, however, convey a sense of possibility and invention where there was nothing before, a seamless cloth. This electricity is not something you only feel when looking into the eyes of a lover; it’s a catalyst that can happen when you are alone—maybe a song that deeply moves you or even a spell of strong weather that brings out something in you that you can’t explain. It can touch you in a crowd—in chaos, for that matter.

I read a recent newspaper editorial against teenage sexuality, in which a pregnancy prevention counselor explained with great gravity that the reason sexual activity is so seductive to young people, the reason it is so hard to break them from that desire, is that sex gives them such “high self-esteem.” She delivered this ver-dict grimly.

Yes, sexual success does give you high self-esteem. It’s so electric that it could probably make your hair stand on end if you found enough people feeling it simultaneously. In a world where self-es- teem has become such a cheap cliché, sex is one place where people feel, if only for a short while, that they are powerful, that they are desired and desiring. No wonder it’s such an emboldment to teen-agers, who typically feel their power thwarted

at every turn. A different consciousness rules the air when you feel sexually confident—and it feels like magic.