Full Exposure: Opening Up to Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression

T
here is no such thing as a person without an erotic story. I don’t mean a tall tale or a punch line or a story about the one who got away. I’m talking about a personal erotic identity, what you might call a sexual philosophy. It’s the big “What If?” of our sexual lives. Take a look at your own erotic story, and you’ll see that it’s a motion picture of everything about you that is creative: the risks you’d be willing to take, the weightless depth of your imagination, your attraction to the truth, and the things that would make you go blind. That’s a story all right. It doesn’t matter whether we tell it to a crowd of thousands, whisper it to our lover, or merely confess it

to ourselves. The power is in owning it.

In this book, I want to cut through all the labels and politics and reveal what I’ve learned about sex—what has been

transformative for me as a lover, a parent, a daughter, and an artist. I want to argue that sexuality is the soul of the creative process and that erotic expression of any kind is a personal revolution.

Let me propose my erotic manifesto to you—a message for lovers who want to express their minds and bodies without a border between the two—who sense that their erotic notions are more than just masturbation candy. I want to connect with people who live, make love, nurture, battle, dream, sing, and sacrifice with the sense that sex is more than just flesh, but hardly an ethereal affair.

Sex is known to everyone as the seed of our physical creation. But we don’t often recognize, or even admit, that it’s also the wellspring of our creativity. How many people are willing to name their erotic character as one of their most demanding or enlightening teachers? If you want to be a student of sexual life, or a teacher, plenty of questions need to be asked first:

Why is it so threatening to address sexual desire consciously in the first place?
What will everyone say about you when you do “come out of the closet” erotically?
How can parents ever be seen by their kids as real sexual people without violating the boundaries of their nurturing relationship?
What are the real—and fake—differences between men and wo-men’s sense of the erotic?
Is the best erotic expression soulful? Does it have a spiritual or philosophical embrace? Or is that just romantic drivel?
FULL EXPOSURE / 3
How do talking, reading, and writing about sex affect your actual sex life?
What’s the point in discussing something in public that’s so in-nately private?
For the last fucking time, is there a difference between erotica and pornography?
Why does our very language seem so inadequate for talking about our sexual feelings and behavior?
Is there such a thing as “sex jag”?
Who are the best lovers, anyway? Can one even make that kind of judgment?
What does erotic expression teach us about our bodies?
Is there a line to be drawn in erotic creativity? Can you go too far?
Finally, how can articulate erotic expression make us better lovers, or even better people?
Every time I’ve been changed by reading a book, it was because the authors asked me the right questions. The writer drew me the outline of a picture and left me to my own colorful revelations. Now, as I sit down to write this book, the picture I want to draw encom-passes my whole lifetime of sex, and for once, I’ll say it: I have an agenda. I’ve wiped the question mark off my face. I think it’s natural, in our current circumstances, to feel desperate or cynical about sex. Of course we don’t start out that way…but information is scarce, and prejudice is overabundant. In our efforts to be honest or realistic about sex, we often can’t even get past the naked basics.
But this book isn’t about the physical. There will be no diagrams—and zero about technique. This book is about the personal meaning of erotic expression: the creativity it demands, the challenges of sexual candor, and the rewards of coming clean about de-sire. It’s there, in that story of the lover’s mind and body, that I’ve set my lens to a full exposure.
CHAPTER TWO
‌
WHAT IS SEXUAL CREATIVITY?
Nothing really exists except examples.
Wittgenstein
I
f I had to judge my sex life by how many times I jump into bed and have an orgasm, I’d get a big fat
F.
Oh, I’m sure my notches are more than someone else’s notches, but I’ve had long, medium, and short stretches of time in my life where I haven’t buttered up to anybody else’s body, or even had my own private Jill-off.
Yet this is the last thing I think of when I consider my erotic life. I say “erotic life” instead of “sex life,” because when someone asks me about my
sex
life, it’s like code for, “Are you getting laid?” I need a code for replying, “Getting laid isn’t the half of it.” My dreams are filled with sex; my work is inspired with sexual energy; my family and friendships are influenced in so many ways by my sexual creativity that I couldn’t even pinpoint them all. Most sex experts tell people to search for a sex life, to make it happen by

5
getting out of the house and into the right singles bar, but actually your sex life is rocking your boat every minute of every day. You never even have to leave the house or make a phone call.
I remember snooping in a neighbor’s bookshelves when I was a kid, discovering their garishly illustrated
Kama Sutra
technique manual with more than a hundred pages and a hundred pretzel shapes to screw your body into. It had all the appeal of a periodic table.
This
is what I had to learn to have sex? It was a strangely un-emotional examination. The book’s title invoked erotic and spiritual symbols—but the spirit behind the presentation was chopped liver. I had been so excited to think that one day I was going to have a sex life, a real adult sex life—and I imagined it would be as exciting and inspiring as the sexy music I heard on the radio, the romantic novels I read, or the passionate embraces I saw dissolve on the movie screens.
My childhood intuition was right. Those top-forty hits I heard on the radio were more sexy than a hundred nudist diagrams. Rock ’n’ roll
was
sex, and so were all those novels and movies I thrilled to—because those things actually possessed sexual creativity, and the people who composed them were probably as inspired as I was when they first came up with their ideas.
Erotic experience is a wake-up call; it’s the sign that you’re not only alive, you’re bursting. As my friend Michael once said, “It doesn’t matter whether you’re cooking a meal, or playing a game of basketball, or writing a chapter. Sometimes you get this rush of holistic energy, and you’d swear that you just got laid.”
“I know that,” I told him, “but how come more people won’t admit it? It’s not like I can line up a row of architects and rocket scientists to admit that, yes indeed, “they split that atom, they built that bridge,” and they owe it all to some serious erotic
inspiration. Everyone thinks that if they admit how much sexual energy fuels their everyday life and accomplishments, they won’t get any respect.”
“But it doesn’t matter what they say!” Michael is very good at overriding all naysayers. “Haven’t they ever heard of a little thing called sublimation? Dr. Freud, hello! You go to any museum, you look at the classic Renaissance paintings, where everyone is supposed to be praising God and fearing the devil, but what is it, after all? Naked bodies everywhere! You’re going to tell me these painters didn’t get off on that? Their faith, their painting, their sexual en-ergy—it’s all the same thing.”
People often don’t want to hear that their religious feeling is erotic; it’s an insult to them. They take the holier-than-thou attitude that any kind of scholarship, any kind of profession or art, needs to be unsullied by sex in order to be worthy.
But what is their worthiness all about? Michael started in describ-ing Dante’s
Divine Comedy.
“Here we have a hero who goes from hell to purgatory to paradise, and at the end of it all—after he has seen God—what does he say? He speaks out to the memory of one woman, a woman he saw for only an instant, and she is ‘the love that moves the sun and all the stars!’ Remember, this is
after
God!” “Yes, I think of that quote, ‘God is in the details,’ ” I said. “And
so is sex.”
Your erotic life is what you notice about yourself—what drives you and thrills you and even maroons you sometimes. It influences our every personal expression, our role models, and the picture of our generation. I can read poems I wrote as a teenager, look at the image of myself giving birth to my daughter ten years ago, or see myself on a stage today—and an erotic thread runs through all of it. My character shows how motivated
I’ve been by sexual creativity, long before I knew much at all about “having sex.”
I don’t have to visit a museum or look at the classics to see how sex and art intersect from the moment we pick up our pen or our brush. I used to visit my friend Kimi in her art studio, where she made huge abstract expressionist paintings, from floor to ceiling. She routinely had her vibrator plugged in, lying on the rug next to her latest canvas, along with her brushes, rags, and colors. She caught me looking at it one day, and she said, “I can’t help it, I get so excited sometimes! And other times I’m so tired, this is the only thing that gets me going again.”
People have long debated whether eroticism saps their energy or lets it fly. A physical orgasm can sometimes make you so weak in the knees that you feel closer to a nap than to creating a masterpiece. But that’s why it’s so important to see the difference between the release of an orgasm and the release of the creative sexual mind.
A fantasy never leaves you exhausted, an erotic inspiration never tires you out. Erotic inspiration can be released through orgasms—but that’s just one way. More important is that sexual creativity stems from living life as if you were making something of it—instead of being made over. I’m not talking about denying physical release, or saving your jizz up like some precious reservoir. No, I mean the way we express the juice of our greatest joys, and some of the most righteous justice in our lives. Why don’t we recognize the erotic element in that passion?
We are burdened by assumptions that sex is the dirtiest thing you can do. People go miles out of their way to defend their artistic and intellectual intentions by saying, “This work is not about sex.” That’s how you’re supposed to be able to tell how grand and incredible it all is—that it’s
not
sexual. If it’s real love,
then it’s not about sex. If it’s real art, it’s not about sex. If it’s real politics…
When people put faith, scholarship, and science in front of their sexual creativity like a large, impenetrable screen, then look at what they’re hiding. They are trying to hide the power of sex, as if a lot of colorful denunciations could make it go away. They are chained to their superstitious fears about sexual power instead of embracing its potential—a place of enormous opportunity, yet incredible insecurities.
I don’t blame our ancestors for being as afraid of sex as they were. When I think of my own mother telling me that as a teenager in puberty she had no idea why she started bleeding—not even knowing the word
menstruation
—then I think about how much of our lives have been spent being terrified of our bodies. We are mystified by the origins of life and causes of death—sensing the sexual connection but feeling utterly helpless to control its consequences or causes.
Even though so much of our ignorance is in the past and our physical bodies are more revealed and understood every day, the odd thing is that the scientific revolution has not entirely made a sexual revolution. A true sexual revolution would bring about a change of consciousness, increasing our scientific knowledge a hundredfold. Nowadays, there’s probably not a single American woman my age who doesn’t understand what menstruation means—but are there women who nevertheless are utterly mystified about every other aspect of their genitals? Yes, I know hundreds. They know all about tampons, but they have no clue about their sexual nature. Men are hardly better off. Do most men feel like they understand the connection between their erotic mind and their body’s response? Hardly. When we do get a clue about what makes us tick, we’re more than likely to
get a shaming lecture from someone who claims we shouldn’t have been thinking about it in the first place.
I got a letter just the other day from some outraged citizen wagging his finger at me. This particular man wrote, “Susie, you don’t know what LOVE is. Love is not sex. It’s about trust, it’s about sacrifice, it’s about something that lasts.”
Well, I don’t know what awful experiences this man has had with his body and his desires. Maybe someday he’ll realize that sexual feeling is so lasting that you experience it from cradle to grave. Sex does demand a humility that comes only with the deepest sacrifices. Sex is one of the few honest places inside us; it doesn’t know how to lie, even if we change the story for the public.
Sex is not about whatever woman done him wrong or about some one-night stand he’ll always regret. It’s first and always about the capacity to create and feel, and express and connect. You can certainly love without fucking, but I don’t think anyone loves without an element of erotic tenderness, anxiety, and a sense of wonder. If erotic life is really something larger than a carnal life or sexual gymnastics, then it doesn’t really matter whether you’re a porn star or a virgin—your erotic comprehension is about being alive—and feeling something that makes you bigger than the sometimes ugly circumstances of our existence would ever let us believe.
It’s not an original idea that sex and creativity are connected or that sexual inspiration opens a path of consciousness and strength that otherwise may be elusive. It’s just that we don’t always find enlightenment at the end of all our sexual pursuits. At the end of the sexual seeker’s journey, there sometimes seems to be an erotic whoopee cushion, the indignity and humiliation of a lustful quest gone wrong. How many times have we shaken our heads at our folly? How often does a sexual high
come down like a bad acid hangover?—I thought I saw God, but it was really a pimple on my ass.
Erotic hindsight is more than just one sorry individual’s humili-ations and regrets. Whole groups of seekers have felt that there had to be more to sexual and creative success than the pain of individual trial and error. Maybe there was a guru or a new kind of faith that could lead us out of the erotic wilderness! I’ve met the enlightenment escapees, who typically gather around one central figure, the fearless leader with a direct line to nirvana. He—and it’s always a he—is the quintessential phallocrat to whom every member must submit. Somehow the sexism of this tradition impresses me more than the sex. I’ve never heard of a cult where everyone had to worship the leader’s clitoris.
The problem is that most of the New Age has examined the sexual prejudices of its faith just as poorly as any traditional religion. When sects pursue doctrine at the expense of contradictions—when they turn insights into delusions of superiority, or inspirations into idols—they’re never going to get to the wellspring of sexual energy. Sexual honesty, let alone creativity, will never flourish among the conformists or the elitists. We need something bigger, much bigger, to accommodate the spectrum of our erotic imaginations.
When people feel sullied by their passion, they often try to take the sex out of it, as if sex were the root of corruption. They find it easier to talk about the greater glory of eros if they keep it cosmic, out of gender, ahistorical, bathed in fairy tales and pink lights. I like dancing in a fairy ring under a rosy spotlight as much as the next person, but I can’t accept the phoniness of a full-time, think-pink lifestyle. Eros
is
in the details, but those finer senses can bloom anywhere.
I’ve come to my own understanding of sexual creativity with plenty of hindsight. I’ve felt desire make a fool of me, I’ve followed various characters I had the hots for as if they held my soul in their hands, I’ve vowed to remove myself from the fleshly indignities that made me feel low—especially after my soul got handed back to me with a few holes in it.
I once loved a man who everyone, including the man himself, told me was bad news. He drove me crazy. Just recently, after years of little contact with him, he called me up to say he was splitting town, and he asked me to store a trunk of his personal belongings. He dropped off the trunk and told me I might get a kick out of what was inside. He didn’t give me any details, and now I know why. That trunk was filled with hundreds of letters from every woman he’s known in the past forty years, accusing him of ripping their hearts out and just plain ruining their lives. I’m awfully nosy, but reading even one of those letters was so painful that I just had to close the lid after a few minutes.
When I was in love with him, so many years ago, I tried to think up all sorts of “respectable” reasons for why he was worth loving, but I had to admit that my fever for him was 99.9 percent inspired by a sexual craving that seemed out of control. Even then, I could see that the experience of making love with him was not nearly as good as the yearning for it. It was like being hungry for food. My friends gave me the usual rap—you know, women who love as-sholes, loving what you can’t have, breaking the pattern, blah blah blah. But I didn’t have a pattern. I had never felt anything like this before. I enjoyed the love of many who were decent, kind, and faithful. But that didn’t make a dent in what I was feeling for this lover.
What seemed critical at the time was whether or not I saw him, whether or not I touched him. But I was missing the point.
Something about meeting him at the time I did was like a thunder-clap; it awakened a part of my erotic spirit that I was totally unac-quainted with.
In all the fracas about what a bastard he was and how I had played the hapless victim, I never took stock of how I’d gained access to sexual feelings I’d never had before. No matter what happened to him, I was never going to lose this knowledge. I had more empathy, more passion, more patience, and a whole new take on surrender. This power had always been inside me; the cork couldn’t have stayed in too much longer. His caress or the smell of his room or the way the light hit me the day we met—which catalyst would I make my offering to? I’m thankful that I woke up at all.
I don’t like to strike a redemptive pose—how you first have to crawl through my mud before you can sit smug at the top. I’m writing this book more to reach out to every person who ever thought, “There’s more to sex than anyone admits.” I want to tell them how much I agree and how much we could increase the richness of this realization if we didn’t try to excuse it or hide it or give it another name. It’s not just time for admission, it’s time for respect. We have no tradition in our culture for showing respect to anything sexual. We don’t promote erotic education. Our health care establishment barely has a clue about our sexual bodies. Our political system finds sex to be a fine whipping boy. The gossips and preachers are our typical sex advisers, and their tone is usually

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