The Ethical Slut (35 page)

Excitement begins with a slow, sensual warmth, and when the warm-up has begun, the door is open for more intense excitement, exploring the sensitivities of ears, necks, wrists, and toes, or tongues in mouths. Breathing becomes deeper, and hips start to move of their own accord.

So does this excitement mean it’s time to leap on that express train to orgasmic release? Just because your body is physically ready to enjoy sex doesn’t mean you need to rush to fulfillment! Why don’t you take a little more time? This feels good, right? So what about feeling good a little more, getting a little more turned on: remember when you were in high school and you could kiss for hours?

Don’t we all want a lover with a slow hand? The most common mistake people make when they get nervous about sex is to rush things. Tension does tend to speed us up, and it is also true that both men and women develop a lot of muscle tension as they approach orgasm, which adds to the furor. Now when we are truly ready, there is nothing we like more than to grunt and gasp and heave and shout and make fists with our toes on the speeding express train to orgasm. But there is more to sex than orgasm, so let’s not leave out sensuality, seduction, the oh-so-gradual turn-on, the building of suspense, the exploration of every part of the body that can arouse the senses—we want to do it all. To explore the entire range of sensual and sexual intimacy, we need to learn techniques for slowing down.

The first technique for slowing down is very simple. Take a deep breath and hold it. Put your hand on your abdomen and feel the hardness of your muscles. Then breathe out, slowly, and you will feel the muscles in your torso relax. When we are tense, we tend to breathe in gasps, gulping air in and exhaling very little; that’s how we maintain tension in our muscles and in our minds. When we breathe out, we relax. So anytime you are tense, in any situation, you can relax a little by taking three long, slow, deep breaths, making sure to breathe out as thoroughly as you breathe in.

You can learn more about relaxation and slowing down by taking a class in any form of yoga, practicing sensual massage, trying tantric
techniques, or just slowing down long enough to discover what fun it is to focus on what you’re feeling when you’re feeling good.

You can reduce your nervousness when you talk about sex, and you can slow yourself down during sex, just by breathing. When you slow your breathing while you are turned on, let your awareness go down into your body. Scan your whole body with your mind, starting from your toes, and let yourself notice how each part of you feels. Chances are you will discover a lot of good feelings you haven’t even felt before. Sex therapists call this “sensate focus” and advocate it in particular for those who want to slow down their response and enjoy more sex before they come. You can slow down your physical sexual response by breathing, relaxing, and focusing your attention to reduce your physical tension, because, you see, not only do we all tense our muscles before we come, but most of us cannot come when our muscles are relaxed. So orgasmic control is not achieved by grunting and bearing down, but rather by relaxing and enjoying yourself.

Slowing down is also useful when you are trying out new activities or feeling nervous for any reason. Our friend Mandy relates one of her early learning experiences with condoms:

To sum up, and maybe catch our breath a little ourselves, a basic skill for good sex is knowing how to relax, and slow down, and then knowing how to tense and speed up. And once you know how, you can go round and round as many times as you can bear to hold off, enjoying every minute and building up excitement for the grand finale. Relaxing your breathing, and relaxing your body, can help you get centered, grounded in your body and in the pleasure you are feeling, and give you more choices about your sex life.

Sometimes we get so fixated on the challenges of successfully steering our course through the tortuous rapids of getting there that we forget to pay attention to where we have gotten. Afterglow, that dreamy, relaxed, exhausted, sweet state that follows the thrashing and shouting, is a delicious time. Enjoy it. Rest in it, curled up with your partner. Forget the mess, and drift in the profound relaxation. Feel the connection to your partner as you float together in a warm pool of your conjoined energy, swirling around in the comfort of satisfied love. Feel good.

DO YOU WANT to be an orgy slut? This is a choice. No matter what you might have heard, group sex is not obligatory for open relationships, and we know many fine outrageous sluts who don’t attend orgies or promote three-ways and four-ways in their homes. We also know monogamous couples who frequent public sex environments for the sheer pleasure of playing with each other in a special and sexy place, complete with an appreciative audience.

If you have ever had a fantasy of being made love to by five people, or having an extra pair of hands to make love with, or having lots of hot people to get impulsive with right now, or performing before an audience that will thrill to your thrashing and screaming in delight … in other words, if you are attracted to the idea of sex parties, this chapter is for you. Here we will tell you what you need to know to have a good time and deal with any difficulties that might come up.

We believe that it is a fundamentally radical political act to deprivatize sex. So much oppression in our culture is based on shame about sex: the oppression of women, cultural minorities, and sexual minorities. All these kinds of oppression are instituted in the name of the (presumably asexual) family. We are all oppressed. We have all been taught,
one way or another, that our desires, our bodies, our sexualities are shameful. What better way to defeat oppression than to get together in communities and celebrate the wonders of sex?

Going to a sex party presents an exciting challenge. It’s an opportunity to stretch and grow as you deal with stage fright, performance anxiety, and the wonderful and scary tension of planning and getting ready for elaborate sex in an intensely sexual environment. Everyone is nervous, and the shared vulnerability adds to the arousal. We love the giddy feeling of conquest when we succeed in overcoming all these obstacles and creating a hot sexual encounter. There’s not a lot of room for prudery and shame at an orgy, and when we play in a group of people, we get powerful reinforcement that sex is good and beautiful and that we are hot and sexy people.

Your authors both enjoy public sex and regularly attend what we call play parties, environments in which people gather to enjoy a wide variety of sex with each other. In a highly charged sexual atmosphere we feel a synergistic kind of arousal when everybody else’s excitement feeds our own, and we feel connected to and turned on by all this happy sex that is going on around us.

Group sex offers the chance to try out new partners in a safe environment, surrounded by our friends—we even get the opportunity to check out a person we might be turned on to while they make love with someone else (an audition or advertising, depending on your point of view). Group sex offers the opportunity to challenge ourselves, move our sexuality out into the open, banners flying, with lots of support in getting past the fears and bashfulness and lots of friendly people to applaud your ecstasies.

In a group sex environment we can learn new sex acts with lots of support: we can watch someone else actually doing a form of sex that we had previously only seen in our fantasies, and we can ask them, when they’re through, how they do that. We learned many of our safer-sex skills at orgies, where rubber barriers are de rigueur and there is plenty of support for dealing with awkward bits of latex and maintaining everybody’s safety and well-being. Most public sex spaces
provide condoms, rubber gloves, and whatever else you may need to play safe.

Play parties can help you get over bad body image. As we have pointed out before, people enjoy sex at all ages and in all kinds of bodies, and at any orgy you will see them doing it. One good way to prepare for your first adventure at an orgy is to visit a nude beach or hot spring, if you never have before, to see what real people look like without clothes and to experience being naked in public yourself. You’ll start to see beauty in a lot of bodies that don’t look anything like the ones in
Playboy
or
Playgirl
—this may be a good time to repeat the “Airport Game” exercise you learned in
chapter 17
, “Making Connection”—and there’s a lot of sensual delight to the feeling of warm sun and gentle breezes on all the parts of your body.

It is amazing to us to think, after many years of practicing sex in public, that most people in our culture have never had a chance to watch another person enjoy sex. We worry about them—it seems like a terrible deprivation. We remember what it was like when we wondered and worried about whether we looked foolish with our legs up in the air and our faces screwed up in an ecstatic scream. Group sex is a great antidote to bad body image. You will feel much better about how you look, how you perform, and who you are when you have a chance to see real people having real sex. Look around you—every single person is gorgeous when they come. Which is why the orgy can be a perfect stage for the consensual exhibitionist: at the sex party, we all get to be stars and shine our brightest.

Sex clubs are very special environments. San Francisco, where we live, has a delightfully wide choice of orgiastic environments to choose from. There are party spaces for women only, men only, couples, S/M enthusiasts, and lovers of drag and costumery, and parties that specialize in just about every sexual practice you can think of—and some that have to be seen to be believed. You may want to check out the website for Cuddle Parties (see our Resource Guide) for some new ideas about getting together and perhaps a safer introduction to connecting in groups: at Cuddle Parties, everyone wears pajamas and snuggles to explore intense closeness, without taking it on into actual sex.

Parties may be openly advertised to the public, advertised only in newsletters or at support groups, or private and by invitation only. There are public clubs, like the gay men’s baths, that are open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and smaller spaces, perhaps an adapted basement recreation room, whose owners host parties once or twice a month. Other congenial groups sponsor small private gatherings in their members’ living rooms.