Things I Learned About Love This Year

By Audacia Ray

Last summer and fall, I went through an epic heartbreak. The kind that had me crying randomly in public. The kind that made it impossible for me to get out of bed some days. The kind that often made me feel like there was something heavy sitting on my chest, making it impossible for me to breathe. The kind that made me see how cruel and unfair the world is when I knew the relationship had to end but our mutual love was still (and stretches on) alive. At the end of this powerful and defining relationship, as I let go and then dipped back in and let go again, I was stricken with the fear that I would never again know a love so big and understanding and accepting. I still feel heaviness in my chest as I write that.

I am not a person who has frequently been single, especially since I launched myself into the world of non-monogamy six years ago (wow, has it been that long?). I’ve probably only been unentangled sexually and romantically for a few collective months (added up altogether) since I was a teenager; the last five months have been more aloneness than I’ve ever had. I *like* being partnered, and in recent years it’s also become important to my sense of self and self-value. Essentially, I felt that if I could be an outlandish woman in oh so many ways, but also be loved, I had success and meaning. I needed to be loved by a partner (or partners) in order to prove to myself and the world that I have value, that I hadn’t fucked up all my chances by being an outspoken ex-ho, blogger, woman of the world. Typing that out now it seems kind of embarrassing, but still also very real to me.

With my last relationship, I thought I knew what I wanted. I fought really hard for it. And it crashed and burned and made me weep. I emerged feeling like I just have no idea what I want, what love should look like for me, just that I was missing it and felt a big hole in my heart and soul. I felt alone and panicky. I felt the skin-hunger something awful, felt like I just needed to be touched (in a non-sexual way, even) and that would help make me feel real and more whole. I felt pained thinking about our bodies, mine and my ex’s I mean, and how well we just fit in bed, in life - and how lying alone at night, my weight rolling on a big empty mattress, I felt like I was swimming in a big empty nothing. Since last fall, I’ve shared a bed overnight exactly twice, both in non-sexual contexts.

Read the rest of this piece on Audacia's fantastic blog: Waking Vixen

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Penis Passion

By bell hooks

bell hooks argues that our erotic lives are enhanced when men and women can celebrate the penis in ways that don't uphold macho stereotypes.

Working on a poem inspired by the joys of having sex in the world’s smallest study seated on an old-fashioned straight back chair painted red where I spend much of my time writing, I seek for words to describe the sensation of sitting in the lap of sweet lust moving my body back and forth against the deliciously hot moist penis of my off-and-on-again lover A. Among the penises I have looked upon and touched in this world, his gives me the greatest sense of delight. Yet finding words to describe the pleasure I feel, words that do not perpetuate conventional sexist thinking about the penis, are hard to come by.

Females finding and expressing delight in the male body was for such a long time utterly taboo. Before the contemporary feminist movement and sexual liberation, women did not say much in print about our feelings about the penis. No wonder, then, that when we finally gave ourselves permission to say whatever we wanted to say about the male body—about male sexuality—we were either silent or merely echoed narratives that were already in place.

In the late sixties and early seventies, heterosexual women active in the feminist movement often talked boldly and boastfully about the penis, using the same language of conquest sexist men used when talking about sexual pursuits. In those days in feminist consciousness-raising groups, we not only talked about how women had to become more comfortable with words like pussy and cunt. So that men could not terrify or shame us by wielding these words as weapons, we also had to be able to talk about cock and dick with the same ease. Sexual liberation had already told us that if we wanted to please a man we had to become comfortable with blow jobs, with going down, with the dick in our throat so far down it hurt. Surrendering our sexual agency, we had to swallow the pain and pretend it was really pleasure.

Feminist interventions on the issue of sexuality, along with sophisticated birth control, changed that; it said to women who wanted to be with men that we had a right to define the place of pleasure for us and the will to claim our sexual rights. It let us know we did not have to consent to force or pretend to like pain. It let us know that the penis was not "a one-eyed trouser snake" in the garden of sexual bliss, threatening to turn our bodies into a place where pain defines, penetrates and punishes. We did not need to see it as the enemy.

Read the rest of this essay on Shambhala Sun...

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Redefining What Counts as Sex...

And what's "normal" as far as number of partners goes.

What's your number? There seems to be an obsession in our society with the number of people we have slept with. Some of us keep a list of names, or just notches on a belt...others have long ago lost track. But actually counts as sex? There's a heterosexist standard that it counts when a penis enters a vagina, but luckily a lot of folks are working on redefining this definition.

In "Redefining What Counts as Sex" Jenny Paradise writes:

What makes sex count? It may seem like a silly question, but I’ve heard many answers ranging from oral sex to vaginal penetration to the ejaculation of the male specifically. Personally, I think that sex shouldn’t be counted until both partners orgasm. That way, guys would need to try harder than a few drunken pumps to earn their bragging rights, and I would practically be a virgin!

She continues, relating this to the subject of one's "number" with a little advice:

Also, when your new sex partner casually asks you how many guys you’ve slept with, I strongly recommend not answering with “does it count if he doesn’t finish?” Apparently, that is some sort of insinuation that you’d drop your panties for every boy in IV and not count one as a legitimate sex partner if he is too drunk to finish. Unless you want to spend the rest of that night trying to convince your now standoffish boyfriend to still sleep with you, I would stay away from that conversation.

Of course, the best essay on this topic is "Are We Having Sex Now or What?" by Greta Christina which I highly recommend. Greta writes:

But for me, living in a question naturally leads to searching for an answer. I can't simply shrug, throw up my hands, and say, "Damned if I know." I have to explore the unknown frontiers, even if I don't bring back any secret treasure. So even if it's incomplete or provisional, I do want to find some sort of definition of what is and isn't sex.

I know when I'm feeling sexual. I'm feeling sexual if my pussy's wet, my nipples are hard, my palms are clammy, my brain is fogged, my skin is tingly and super-sensitive, my butt muscles clench, my heartbeat speeds up, I have an orgasm (that's the real giveaway), and so on. But feeling sexual with someone isn't the same as having sex with them. Good Lord, if I called it sex every time I was attracted to someone who returned the favor I'd be even more bewildered than I am now. Even being sexual with someone isn't the same as having sex with them. I've danced and flirted with too many people, given and received too many sexy would-be-seductive backrubs, to believe otherwise.

On the topic of number of sexual partners check out this post on Feminste debunking the attempt to collect statistics on the "average" number for men and women.

Let's keep this conversation evolving...

Why Atheists Have Great Sex

By Greta Christina

For some reason, the sex- positive community is also, very often, a spiritual community. (At least in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live.) It’s not often a conventionally religious community; but many varieties of Wicca, Goddess worship, shamanism, Tantra, astrology, chi, chakras, belief in a collective metaphysical consciousness, and other forms of New Age belief and magical thinking permeate it, both privately and publicly.

This troubles me. I am a hard- core atheist/ materialist/ naturalist/ humanist/ skeptic/ whatever you want to call someone who doesn’t believe in any supernatural entities or substances. And I’m just as unconvinced — and almost as troubled — by the ideas of the Goddess and chi energy and immortal consciousness and so on, as I am by the ideas of God and angels and Hell.

Now, I’m not writing this piece to argue against religion. I may yet write a piece criticizing spiritual beliefs and practices in the sex- positive community . . . but it’s not what I’m doing here. (If you want to see my reasons and arguments for my lack of spiritual belief, you can do so here, and here, and here and here and here.)

What I want to do here is offer an alternative.

I want to offer a positive way of looking at sexuality and sexual transcendence that doesn’t involve any sort of belief in the supernatural. I want to offer a sex- positive philosophy that is entirely materialist. The materialist view of life in general and sex in particular is often viewed as cold, bleak, narrow, mechanical, reductionist, and generally a downer. I don’t think it is. And I want to talk about why...

Read the rest of the essay on Alternet.

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Against Love: An Interview with author Laura Kipnis

There are a thousand books out there telling us what it means to be a woman today. Unfortunately, most of the books focus on what’s wrong with being a woman today: not enough eligible men, our necks look funny when we age, there’s still a lack of gender equity, husbands aren’t helping with the housework, we’re either smothering our children or we’re not devoting enough time to them, and, of course, we’re not eating enough like the French/Japanese/whomever. But if you buy this hardback book for $25.95, the author is happy enough to tell you how to overcome all of that.

Laura Kipnis, who examined the state of modern monogamy in her book Against Love: A Polemic, now focuses on the state of modern femininity in The Female Thing. The book is divided into four sections focusing on what Kipnis sees as being the four problem areas for women: dirt (housekeeping), sex (the “orgasm gap” and the failure of the sexual revolution), envy (the self-help industry) and vulnerability (the fear of rape and physical harm from men). She offers anecdotes such as a power struggle between a husband and wife over the cutting of the dessert at a dinner party and then deconstructs the observations with some serious theory, namedropping Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.

Which is not to say the book is impenetrable. At a little under 200 pages, Kipnis manages to be funny and irreverent, never afraid to position her more complicated ideas beside pithy and funny terms like the “feminine industrial complex.” She does not, however, sugarcoat the book with advice on how to overcome these issues. Her final sentence suggests she’ll leave it to the reader to figure out, stating, “A full accounting of the female situation at the moment would need to start roughly here.”

I sat down with Kipnis over a couple glasses of red wine to discuss her work.

Interview by Jessica Crispin

The last sentence I thought was very provocative. It seems like a challenge. Was it to other writers or to the individual reader?

To women more than to writers, I guess. I thought of the whole book as a challenge or intervention or course correction. I don’t mean to be grandiose about it. I have a hard time with conclusions because I don’t want to advise people on things. I don’t want to be overly conclusive. I think in both the last two books I tried to end on a questioning note.

Although that’s a common complaint about your books, that you don’t instruct people on what to do now that they’re questioning this large thing in their life.

That was the hilarious thing with Against Love. It turns out if you write a book with “love” in the title everybody wants to read it as an advice book. I was endlessly asked for advice. It was kind of hilarious. The thing I’d want to say to them is, and I’m supposed to solve the problem? There’s this problem with femininity, there’s this problem with love, and I’m supposed to? Any answer would be sort of glib. People ask for these things...

Read the rest of this interview on Bookslut.com

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Living Openly at PolyCamp

Written by Mandy Van Deven on Bitch's blog

I feel like everywhere I turn someone else is saying something about polyamory. Perhaps the recent upset over Proposition 8 in California provided somewhat of a platform for poly communities to openly speak about the legitimation of alternative family structures—not just beyond that of one man and one woman, but beyond gay and lesbian couples as well. Open relationships have emerged as a hot topic on television shows like Tyra, WEtv’s Secret Lives of Women, and of course, Big Love, and multiple feminist-oriented books have been published in the past year that explore open relationships. So it didn’t surprise me to stumble upon PolyCamp Ontario.

Pretty much as its name implies, PolyCamp Ontario is a weekend-long summer camp for poly families. It was founded in 2007 by science and technology journalist Danaeris to provide "an affordable event to serve the needs of members of the polyamorous communities." This year’s camp will be held August 14th–16th at the Mansfield Outdoor Centre in Toronto. Polyamory Weekly host Cunning Minx will be the Guest of Honour, and the weekend will be full of workshops and activities that will be both fun and educational. Though the program for 2009 isn’t available just yet, last year’s guests had the chance to learn "10 Rules for Happy Non-Monogamy" and "Jealousy 101" during the daytime workshops and then partake in a clothing-optional (but PG-13) hot tub or watch poly films at night. Fun times for the whole extended and multiplicitous fam!

Oh, and for those of you in the US Pacific Northwest, there’s a similar camp in Washington State.

** Spice! comic by Julie Jacob

Sex Addiction or Demonization of Pleasure?

The term "sex addiction" seems to have entered the popular lexicon in only recent years. Sex Addict Anonymous groups can be found all over the country and psychologists study addiction to sex in serious way.

But what if this is a social construction? A myth? Perhaps it is just an extension of puritan morality. Dr. Susan Block asks these questions in her new article, exerpted below. She believes that "sex addiction has emerged as the 21st century version of sin -- the latest way to guilt people about sex..."

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The newly revised Seven Deadly Sins, the deadliest, most demonized and glamorized sin of the pack: Sex Addiction.

Just about every horny person who calls me for sex therapy these days -- male or female -- asks me if I think they’re a “sex addict.” Often they come up with the notion they suffer from “sex addiction” while researching their favorite fetish online. All roads lead to Rome, and almost all sexual or fetishistic search words eventually take the seeker to articles deploring an interest in that fetish as a form of sex addiction. Then again, perhaps someone they know has called them a “sex addict” in a fit of righteous exasperation. Or maybe they identify with certain sexy but star-crossed superstars like David Duchovny, Charlie Sheen, Amy Winehouse or Kanye West, or powerful former Presidents like Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy, all of whom have been branded by the media and various “experts” with this most exciting, perverse, shame-riddled and downright sinful of labels. Then again, they might just be intoxicated by the idea of being utterly out of control, ruled by their libidinous desires, or by a seductress who takes advantage of their vulnerable, addictive sensibilities. Yes, the modern Scarlet Letter doesn’t stand for simple Adultery anymore, but for Addiction -- Sex Addiction.

But what exactly is sex addiction? Is it even possible to come up with a definition that all the so-called experts can agree on? Probably not. According to some sex addiction specialists, an interest in any type of sex other than married-monogamous-missionary-position-sex-with-the-lights-off could qualify you. So, if you masturbate regularly, enjoy pornography, have an affair, go to swing parties, dance in strip clubs, like phone sex, see a dominatrix, work as a dominatrix, wear panties under your clothes (if you're a guy) or over your clothes (if you're a gal), own more than three pairs of stiletto heels (if you're a guy or a gal) or if you fantasize about anyone or anything other than your beloved, you are at risk of being branded a sex addict. I guess if you host a show about sex in a bed wearing lingerie surrounded by dildos under a giant photo of a bonobo chimpanzee, you might as well have "Sex Addict" tattooed across your cleavage.

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Read the entire article on Alternet.org

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