Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [124]
Why Public Sex?
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.
Party Spaces
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,