Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [111]
After all, my erstwhile dear,
My no longer cherished,
Need we say it wasn’t love
Just because it perished?
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Sex and Pleasure
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.
What Is Sex, Anyway?
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:
I’d had a regular session with this guy once before, but one day he showed up, put $400 on the table, and said that he just wanted to talk. So we lay down together on the futon