The Ethical Slut (32 page)

One of the nice things about being an ethical slut is that your relationships don’t have to be either/or: you may have as many ways of relating to your friends and lovers as you have friends and lovers. Once you have survived a breakup, there’s not a lot worse that can go down. A relationship with an ex is real security, a friendship with someone who has seen you at your utter worst. When we know someone with their complete complement of flaws and failings—as we do our exes—we have the foundation of a truly intimate and important relationship that can continue to change, grow, and provide support for many years to come. As Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote:

SEX IS NICE and pleasure is good for you. We’ve said this before, and it bears repeating. In our present lives, your authors enjoy sex for its own sake, and it feels natural and comfortable, but we want you to know that it wasn’t always this easy for us. In a culture that teaches that sex is sleazy, nasty, dirty, and dangerous, a path to a free sexuality can be hard to find and fraught with perils while you walk it. If you choose to walk this path, we congratulate you and offer you support, encouragement, and—most important of all—information. Start with the knowledge that we, and just about everybody else who enjoys sex without strictures, learned how to be this way in spite of the society we grew up in—and that means you can learn too.

The word “sex” gets used as though everyone agrees on what it means, but if you ask people what they actually do when they have sex, you’ll hear about a huge range of behaviors and interactions.

We have talked before about sex being part of everything and about everything being part of sex. Now let’s talk about the parts that most people call sex—the parts that involve lips and nipples and clits and cocks and orgasms. Sex may
involve
these parts, but we don’t think
it’s
about
them; the genitals and other erogenous zones are the “how,” not the “what.”

The “what”—what sex actually is—is a journey into an extraordinary state of consciousness, where we tune out everything extraneous to our emotions and our senses in this very moment, travel into a realm of delicious sensation, and soak in the deep connection that we share in sex. This journey is a voyage of awakening, as if the nerves whose job it is to transmit feelings of delight had been lying asleep but have suddenly leaped to attention, aflame, in response to a nibble or a caress.

Perhaps what we call foreplay is a way of seeing just how awake we can get—all excited attention from our earlobes and ankles out to the ends of our hair—the prickling of the scalp, the tingling in the arch of the foot. The glorious miracle of sexual anatomy is that any of these awakenings can set off the swelling in the loins, lips, nipples, cocks, and cunts, which awakens lots more intense nervous networks buried inside us, till we are all lit up like fireworks.

Sex is anything you do or think or imagine that sets the train in motion: a scene in a movie, a person on the street you think is hot, swelling buds of wildflowers bursting in a meadow, a fragrance that opens your nose, the warm sun on the back of your head. Then, if you want to pursue these gorgeously sexy feelings, you can increase the swelling tension, and your sensual focus, with any kind of thinking or touching or talking that humans can devise: stroking, kissing, biting, pinching, licking, vibrating, not to mention erotic art and dance and hot music and silky stuff next to our skin.

So sex covers a much larger territory than genital stimulation leading to orgasm. Sex that’s limited to perfunctory foreplay and then a race down the express track to orgasm is an insult to the human capacity for pleasure.

Here’s a happy way to answer the question of what is sex: if you or your partner is wondering whether you’re having sex at any given moment, you probably are. We like to use an expanded definition of sex, including more than genitals, more than intercourse, more than penetration, and, while we definitely wouldn’t leave them out, much more than the stimulations that lead to orgasm. We like to think that
all sensual stimulation is sexual, from a shared emotion to a shared orgasm. One friend of ours, a professional sex worker, remembers:

When we expand our concept of what sex is, and let that be whatever pleases us today, we free ourselves from the tyranny of his hydraulics, the chore of getting her off, perhaps even birth control and barriers, if we decide that outercourse is perfectly good sex in and of itself.

Pleasure is good for you. So do what pleases you, and don’t let anybody else tell you what you ought to like, and you can’t go wrong.

Remember the clean love, in the moment and without expectations, that we talked about earlier in this book? It’s a skill you can bring to your sex life, and it’s based on getting present and accepting yourself.

Cast your mind back to your childhood, some time you remember being happy. Children are naturally adept at being in the moment. To recover that consciousness, take yourself to a park and investigate that interesting twig you’ve found in the interesting dirt. Go to a beach and take your shoes off. Wade at the water’s edge; how do your toes feel, in the grass, the sand, the surf? Dig a hole in the sand while the tide is coming in. Pay attention to your surroundings; pay attention to your experience.

Then pay that same rapt, joyous attention to your beloved; this will probably feel good. So do it some more—you are a nice person, so is your beloved, you both deserve to feel good.

Hands on skin is a great way to get into the present, into connection, and into love. Wash each other’s feet, find some lotion, and massage your lover’s feet. Take turns. Put aside future tripping: will this lead to sex? Who cares? The two of you are in the moment, feeling your feet.

Your authors are in no way opposed to the intense beauty of genital sex. But all of us need to work on paying attention to what we feel in the moment and to how that connects us to the people we love. We are not in the moment while we are planning the future. Too much wonderful sensual joy gets lost in projecting what will happen next. Learn to enjoy mystery, that little frisson up the spine when you realize that you’re on a path to something interesting. Follow that path and find out where it meanders; appreciate the miracle. Don’t miss the glories of the moment in your zeal to zoom up to the crotch like a superhighway, fast as ever you can. Efficiency is not what we’re looking for here and now.

The feet are relaxing, you hear a groan of ecstasy: should you slide your hand up that gorgeous leg? Oops! Let go of that and get back to those tender, sensitive feet. Nobody can relax and feel their feet if they’re worrying about what you are going to do next. When you bring your full attention to making those feet feel better than they have ever felt before, you’re in the moment and so is your partner, lost in the bliss of a tingling, creamy instep. And when you are through, reconnect in a lovely hug or a sweet cuddle, and
then
figure out what you two would like to do next.

Whatever that may be, vow to stay present with that too. Perfect presence and acceptance is an ideal, perhaps never to be perfectly achieved but transcendent even in the trying. It’s a joyous practice of letting go of what’s not needed right now, washing away all the grit and dust of your histories and expectations and opening yourself as completely as possible to meeting another person in the fullness of your open, waiting heart.

Good sex seems as though it ought to be easy—but often, in our experience, it is not. Everything from ignorance to distraction can get in the way of responsible, enjoyable sex. Here’s our A-list of fun-spoilers:

At the top of the list, many of us start out paralyzed by shame and embarrassment, even after we figure out that we don’t want to be embarrassed by sex. Shame, and the beliefs we were taught that our bodies, our desires, and sex are dirty and wrong, make it very hard to develop healthy sexual self-esteem. Many of us spent our adolescences consumed with guilt for our sexual desires, our fantasies, and our masturbation, long before we managed to pull anything off with another human. When we did connect with others, many of us spent those encounters obsessing about our performance, often so busy worrying if we were doing it wrong that we forgot to notice how good it felt.

When our desires and fantasies stretch further than a monogamous marriage with a member of the opposite sex, we suffer additional attacks on our self-acceptance—to some, we are sex-crazed perverts, deserving objects of scorn to others and, all too often, ourselves. According to some people, even God hates us. It’s hard to feel good about an expansive sexuality when you feel so bad about yourself that you just want to hide.

None of us look sexy enough. The advertising and fashion industries see fit to line their coffers by making us all feel bad about our bodies so that we will buy more clothes, makeup, cosmetic surgery, or whatever in a desperate attempt to feel okay about how we look to others. The perfume industry floods us with images designed to convince us that we smell bad (and if we smell worse than these highly synthesized scents, we must smell very bad indeed). Even those lucky souls who are young and thin and cute suffer from constant worry about how they look: why else do you think they throng to gyms and aerobic classes?

The more people you want to share sex with, the more people you are going to have to expose your naked body to, so there you are. To enjoy a free sexuality, you need to come to terms with the body you are living in, unless you want to wait till you lose twenty pounds, which could take forever, or until you look younger—don’t hold your breath. Do remember: your sexiness is about how you feel, not how you look.

It is foolish and rude to assume that people with physical disabilities don’t enjoy sex. Differently abled people may indeed engage in differently organized forms of sexuality, but that doesn’t mean no sex at all. People with spinal cord injuries who have lost all sensation below the neck report orgasms: there is a lesson here for all of us about how sensitive our ears and lips can actually get.

Sex for a person with physical disabilities is not that different from any other form of sex. Focus on what you can do, what you can feel, what feels good, and how to go about experiencing the most intense feelings that this particular body can feel. Learn about your body just as any other person does. What supports you in moving or reaching? How can you deal with any medical appliances? What safety precautions must you keep in mind?

Most important of all, what do you like? People who have lost physical abilities in accidents may spend a long time rediscovering what this new body can do and feel—finding what feels good is the joyful part of the journey. People disabled from birth or childhood often get treated as nonsexual beings; they may need to go to work when they grow up to discover what their sexuality can be.

Don’t forget the advantages of using tools—vibrators tap into the entire electrical grid for their strength and endurance and never get repetitive stress injuries. Implements can reach where arms may not, and pillows can prop up any limbs that need propping. Medications—hormones that keep vaginas flexible and moist, pills that help sustain erections—can help with some of the sexual changes that relate to aging or health issues.

Investigate possibilities. Whether disabilities are visible, or invisible like asthma or diabetes, you get to explore what works for you and get cooperation from your partners to work around anything your body can’t do.

If the prospect of being a lover to a physically challenged person seems utterly strange to you, don’t forget that one day
you
will be old—at what age do you plan to give up enjoying sex? Will you just give up at the first obstacle, the first bit of arthritis that interrupts a nice thrash with a painful twinge? We do hope this book supports you in grasping your sexuality in any way that works for you. Remember, whatever the physical possibilities of the body you or your friend inhabits, the most important sexual organ is always found between the ears.