The Boudoir Bible (2 page)

PLATES

FOREWORD

DEEP SEXUAL SATISFACTION
is the foundation for enduring and meaningful intimate relationships. Whatever their sexual orientation, individuals who enjoy more liberated, informed, and gratifying sex lives are also known to live healthier, happier, and more satisfying lives in general. My mission is to empower women and men to enjoy and share greater pleasure.

We live in a sexually charged atmosphere in which the powers of sex and seduction are used by mass media to generate corporate profit for everything from pornography to an infinity of unrelated commodities. But nowhere within this incessant flux is the promotion of sexual well-being and satisfaction integral to a happy and harmonious existence.

In such a climate, sexual ignorance can only thrive. In fact, current statistics reveal that the needs and desires of sexually mature adults are being fulfilled merely on a primal level. Sexual dissatisfaction is the primary motivation that leads couples to separate and seek divorce. This frustrating and often debilitating condition also helps explain why so many individuals are unable to create enduring intimate bonds.

What ultimately keeps us from experiencing the satisfaction that we desire and merit?

Over the past twelve years I have worked as a consultant for couples and individuals on a quest to answer this vital question, which has as many answers as the number of men and women who ask it. I am not a doctor, and I don’t consider those who seek my assistance as “patients.” They are life-loving individuals who put their fears aside in order to seek out and attain the sexual understanding, satisfaction, and well-being that is rightfully theirs. Their trust in me and in my method, which evolves with them, gives me the rare opportunity to explore the sexual realm beyond the confines of my own personal experience. From this work I gleaned the insight that the primary culprit behind sexual disappointment is no longer the taboo against sex itself, but rather a taboo against pleasure.

Seeking pleasure is part of human nature: ultrasounds reveal that from the sixteenth week of gestation, fetuses caress their newly formed, fully differentiated genitals. Even before a child reaches the age of three, his or her sexual identity begins to take shape with the discovery of the anus and the genitals. Unfortunately, this innocent exploration does not last long—by the time we reach sexual maturity, most of us have learned to repress rather than embrace our sexuality.

The primary goal of
The Boudoir Bible
is to dismantle the pleasure taboo, helping lovers recognize pleasure-inhibiting myths, uproot misconceptions, reverse the negative consequences of social conditioning, and take full responsibility for their sexual
satisfaction. To this end,
The Boudoir Bible
was not conceived as a guide in the classic sense of the term, but rather as a catalyst for sexual growth. Yet it is also chock-full of tips and instructions to help lovers cultivate sexual health and happiness. As we develop and refine our sexual skills, we begin to expand our capacity for pleasure to greater, more mutually satisfying degrees. As we unlearn pleasure-inhibiting behavioral patterns, our sexual horizons expand, and the true essence of our sexual personae may finally be unveiled.

Being that our sexual health and satisfaction are not only the result
of
but also the foundation
for
more harmonious interrelations, sexual knowledge and understanding should be the birthright of every adult. No matter what race, religion, or socioeconomic status, we were all (ideally) conceived through pleasure, and that pleasure should accompany us throughout our entire lives.

I now invite you to celebrate your sexuality by embarking on a lifelong journey into the realm of enhanced pleasure.

May
The Boudoir Bible
accompany you and yours, every ecstatic step of the way!

BETONY VERNON
June 2012

I AM FREQUENTLY ASKED
by curious new acquaintances how I found myself working in the realm of sexual pleasure. It’s a good question, but one that is also guaranteed to monopolize a conversation. I have learned to swerve around the inevitable at dinners and parties by stating things such as “It’s too long a story to go into now,” then quickly changing the topic. But here I feel that it is not only appropriate but also essential to reveal a few landmarks of my journey into the sexual realm. My sexual journey commenced, just like yours did, during the innocence of my childhood—discovering my body, enjoying sensations, playing doctor, my first kiss—and it led, over the years that followed, to discovering new facets of myself and my sexual identity within relationships, to the fine arts and design world, and to the wide-open, still largely unexplored field of sexology.

I was born in 1968 in Tazewell, Virginia, a four-square-mile patch of civilization on the Appalachian Trail nestled among thick forests, rolling farmlands, and coal-rich mountaintops. Inhabited at the time by fewer than 250 coal miners, loggers, and farmers, it was the kind of place where people went to bed and rose with the sun and where everyone knew one another—and everything about one another, too.

Two years before, my father, a helicopter pilot specializing in seeding strip mines, had decided to buy the big wooden Victorian house that would become the bastion of my childhood. Once my parents had restored and settled into their new home with what were then two daughters, my father took to the skies, and he stayed up there until it was too cold to either fly or seed. My mother essentially bore the responsibility of bringing us up on her own, but in my father’s long absences, the foundations of their relationship cracked and crumbled, and by 1972 my parents were divorced.

A conservative Virginia judge granted my father full custody, a decision that was a quasi-miracle for the time and influenced by my mother’s history as a civil rights activist. In February of 1960, she had been temporarily expelled from college and risked being deported back to her native Great Britain for supporting the Greensboro Four, four African-American men whose demand for equal rights at the famous sit-in at the “Whites Only” lunch counter at the Woolworth store in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina, defied racial segregation. The sit-in signaled the beginning of America’s civil rights revolution, and ten years later it sparked a revolution in the Vernon family, too.

The day my mother had to leave home, I was four years old, and my sisters were two, six, and eleven. During the frigid winter months, my father raised us, but, as soon as the snow and ice started to melt and return to the rivers in the valleys, he took to the skies again. My eldest sister and a hired nanny, for a time, became our surrogate parents, but we essentially ended up raising one another. In retrospect,
I am certain that this lack of parental guidance and prohibition made a deep impact on the formation of my sexual persona.

My first recollection of deriving pleasure from genital stimulation dates back to when I was very young. The inanimate object of my innocent delight dwelt in my father’s study—a footstool in the shape of a miniature bull. I was told time and again that, as cute as the stool was, it was not a toy. I was allowed to sit on it, but I mustn’t ride it. So only when I was certain that I would not be caught and reprimanded would I dare express the real extent of my appreciation for that leather bull, by mounting it and rocking away to my heart and body’s content!

Unlike most little girls, I did not have dolls. My father was convinced that they served little more than to train girls to be mothers. (He might be right, as only one of his four daughters chose to have children.) While I did not have dolls of my own, I had a playmate who possessed a throng of Barbies, as well as Barbie’s friend Skipper, her boyfriend, Ken, and an infantry of minuscule plastic babies. We spent hours in her bedroom after school, dressing and undressing Barbie and her friends. We inevitably discovered that the most exciting thing to do with Barbie and Ken was to make them have sex (and of course, make babies!). Just as it is for any healthy kid, from a very early age, emulation of adult activities was an integrated part of my playtime.

Body exploration and seeking new and different sensations of all sorts are part of everyone’s childhood. I must have been about six when I finally discovered just how very different boys and girls are. A long low table in the sunroom served as the theater for our doctor-patient games. The examination consisted of first taking a look at the patient’s eyes and ears, and then, with a big
ahhhhh
, the tonsils were examined. We moved down our playmate’s body and listened to his or her heartbeat. Finally it was time to get a good, long look at the more intimate bits. Once “the doctor” had poked and
prodded his or her “patient” to their mutual satisfaction, the roles would be reversed.

A
Playboy
magazine nicked from the driver of my father’s helicopter’s fuel truck satisfied my growing curiosity at first, but soon I decided to go to the local library and research my newfound topic of enthrallment by looking up the subject of sex. (I’m quite sure that most of you living in the age before the Internet did the same thing.) My heart started to race as soon as I touched the brass handle on the
S
file. I pulled the long wooden drawer out, ever so slowly, and quickly shuffled through the cards … 
S
 … 
S-A
 … 
S-E
 … 
S-E-X
! I slipped down the
S
aisle, scanning the bindings of the books until my eye caught the code and title that matched my search:
The Joy of Sex
, by Alex Comfort.