Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [114]
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.
SEX DISINFORMATION
Another obstacle on our course is inaccurate or just plain bad information we may have learned about sex. For many years, information about sexual behavior and basic functioning was censored, along with most other discussions of sexual pleasure. Depending on where you live in the culture now, you may or may not have access to good information. We need to politicize to protect our right to accurate and positive information about sex.
To acquire a basic knowledge of sexual functioning and how the sexual response cycle works in men and women, we recommend strongly that you read one or several good books. Books about sex provide a lot of information—more than we can give you in a chapter—about how sex works and what you can do about it when it isn’t working as well as you’d like. Self-help exercises are usually provided for concerns about erections or orgasms, timing, coming too soon or too slowly, and what to do when you can’t find your turn-on. You can learn more strategies for safer sex and birth control and more language so you can more easily talk with your partners about all of this good stuff. Some clever sluts read a chapter a week of a good book with a partner and perhaps talk about it on Friday over dinner—a nice way to prepare for the weekend.
These days there is also a lot of information and discussion on the Internet. We applaud this freedom of information, and we also want you to be careful, because much of the information you read and hear about sex will be inaccurate. Because sexology is such a new science, and because research into what people actually do in sex is difficult and often inconclusive, and because we as a culture have not talked explicitly about sex for a very long time, fairy tales abound, and reality can be hard to come by. Collect all the information you can, use what works for you, and take it all with a grain of salt. Fortunately, there’s lots of sex information available these days in books, magazines, podcasts, websites, and more—plenty to choose from. The best part of learning about sex is that you’ll love the homework.
SPEECHLESSNESS
If you can’t talk about sex, how can you think about it? The historical censorship of discussion about sex has left us with another disability: the act of talking about sex, of putting words to what we do in bed, has become difficult and embarrassing. Although most of us have had the experience of failed sexual functioning in one way or another, most of us never get the chance to get support from our friends and lovers about it—sexual dysfunction becomes our secret shame, a position from which it is virtually impossible to figure out a way to function better.
What little language we can use to talk about sex