The Boudoir Bible (4 page)

Some of them told me, with disconcerted expressions, that I was brave; some, however affectionately, let me know that they thought I was crazy. Others wrinkled up their noses with a hint of disgust, regretfully expressing the hope that my next season would be different, because as much as they found the collection “interesting,” they could not sell objects “of this nature” in their shops. One client whispered in my ear that she was surprised that I was so “kinky.”

As the days passed without any sales, I tried editing my sales pitch. I used terms such as “empowerment,” “holistic,” and “awareness” in an attempt to get my point across and to avoid having my creative initiatives pigeonholed as S&M. I placed particular emphasis on the fact that most of the jewel-tools could be worn discreetly as jewelry for any occasion, because their function to provide pleasure was disguised
within their sleek silver and gold forms. But by the end of the week, I managed to place only one order with my favorite client in Japan.

I had naively presumed that my retailers, widely considered to be on the cutting edge of fashion, would grasp my concept and embrace the collection. But it turned out that I was terribly wrong. The outcome of the week was a disconcerting realization that not everyone viewed—at least not openly—the sexual experience as I did.

It was thanks to this utter failure that I realized I had some very serious work to do, and I understood it could not be done at my drawing table or jeweler’s bench alone. If I wanted to render my Paradise Found Fine Erotic Jewelry collection accessible to a wider public, this would require that I integrate the foundations of my sexual knowledge and experience into the totality of my life and assume the role of educator in order to expand people’s limited viewpoints on sex.

I began to examine sexual perspectives and identities in all cultures. I studied psychology and explored sexual history in the hopes of better understanding why humans categorize and pigeonhole themselves and one another. I delved into my own sexual etiology (something I encourage you to do as well) in an attempt to discover how the sexual experiences of my childhood and my adolescence had shaped my sex life as an adult. Then, departing from my personal experiences, I accumulated research material while consulting for the individuals and couples who collected my jewel-tools, which in turn came to represent the bridge to my mission to enhance humanity’s sexual understanding and thereby well-being, just as my vision had promised.

I developed a series of classes, and in November 2002 I initiated my first group salon, “Bettering Your Sexual Skills,” in London. My host was Samantha Roddick, the founder of the world’s first female-friendly, luxury erotic boutique, Coco de Mer, and the first retailer of my Paradise Found Fine Erotic Jewelry collection. Her approach to sex was holistic. She understood the relevance of honoring our sexuality with materials that are as body safe as they are beautifully
crafted, as poetic as they are functional. We hit it off instantly.

Thirty participants had settled into the leather-covered conference room of Soho House by the time I took my place on the stage. I had butterflies in my stomach because, up until then, I had only initiated private collectors, on a one-on-one basis, into the techniques and tools of what I called “The Paradise Found Sexual Ceremony.”

My eyes scanned the room. I had been informed that the group was composed of lovers from all walks of life, including a journalist, who, perching on the edge of her seat in the middle of the front row, steadied a bright red notepad on her knees. With a pang of disappointment, I realized that there was only one man in the group, although I had not limited attendance to women, as I believe that women and men—of all sexual orientations—must progress together toward sexual enlightenment. This lone, nervous man had chosen a chair in the farthest corner of the room. When our eyes met, he sank down lower into its soft leather embrace. I tried to comfort him with a smile but only provoked a flush of embarrassment that did not fade until I began to speak:

“Welcome, and thank you all for coming today,” I began. “I have to admit that I am moved. I consider this occasion as much a privilege as it is an exciting sign that our sexual horizons are expanding again …”

Only fifty years ago, attendees of my Sexual Skills salons would have been putting their private and professional lives at risk. Things have changed since the 1950s; I have much to thank for this, including the revolutionary research of many brave people, such as the American scientist Dr. Alfred Kinsey.

Dr. Kinsey’s mission was to demonstrate and thus convince people that sex was good, natural, and wholesome, and that sexual satisfaction was essential to their happiness. By disseminating sexual
knowledge and understanding, he publicly contradicted the Judeo-Christian association of sexual pleasure with the transgression of divine law and damnation. Without being fully aware of it, Dr. Kinsey dropped a sociocultural “sex bomb,” and his commitment to his cause contributed to the sexual liberation movement of the 1960s. His stalwart convictions led him to be repeatedly arrested, the persecution bringing him to nervous exhaustion, but by 1970, many sexual taboos had been kicked aside.

In 1971, America’s president Richard Nixon had repealed the most sexually repressive elements of the Comstock laws, state and federal restrictions on what was deemed “obscene,” and the liberation movement began to flourish legally. Revolutionary figures such as Dr. William Masters and Virginia Johnson, Betty Dodson, Annie Sprinkle, Shere Hite, and Alex Comfort openly explored sexual frontiers that had hitherto been denied access by the establishment, and countless sex workers, researchers, doctors, psychologists, therapists, artists, and women and men of all sexual orientations joined the movement.

Abstinence and repression were traded for pleasure, and the infernal repercussions of carnal sin (according to Judeo-Christian credo) turned to ash in the flames of passion. Nurtured by the widespread acceptance of birth control, the decade to follow would mark the most sexually liberated era in history since the height of the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations.

But although the enlightened Dr. Kinsey and his successors managed to stretch the parameters of what Westerners once considered acceptable sexual behavior, even today many people continue to limit the definition of “normal” sex to predominantly genitally orientated forms of stimulation, which are initiated merely to enable penetration and provoke the release of sexual tension through orgasm. Extra-genital stimulation, on the other hand, is still commonly judged to be abnormal, or categorized as S&M, in spite of the fact that
the implements of full-body stimulation, like those who appreciate them, are no longer confined to the underground.

What I seek to dismantle in my Sexual Skills salons are the die-hard taboos associated with the categorizations of “normal” sexual behavior and with the related derivation of pleasure through extra-genital stimulation. Founded on restrictive Judeo-Christian morals, the codes of “normal”—and thus acceptable—sexual conduct were consolidated into medical terms at the turn of the nineteenth century by the German neuropsychiatrist Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing. In his still-famous and highly influential work
Psychopathia Sexualis
, published in 1886, more than two hundred variations of non-procreative sexual behavior are painstakingly described and essentially denounced as deviant. Some of the Victorian ideals that Krafft-Ebing propagated still sound familiar to many of us: “proper” and therefore “normal” women are passive; any act that results in pleasure for pleasure’s sake is sexually deviant, including masturbation, anal sex, same-sex encounters, and eroticized extra-genital stimulation; and sexual deviance is a disease that can, and should, be cured.

By the mid-1900s, the same treatments that were prescribed to “cure” criminals and the mentally ill were being prescribed to cure the “disease” of sexual deviance—treatments including lobotomies, electroshock therapy, and clitoridectomies. Krafft-Ebing’s
Psychopathia Sexualis
served as the foundation for sexual research up until the 1950s, and by criminalizing the principle of sexual pleasure, it helped to codify the condemning behavioral restrictions that shaped—and continue to influence—the Western world’s sexual perceptions today.

In order to shed the remnants of these oppressive codes of conduct, we must first delineate new parameters of normalcy. According to the philosophy of Paradise Found, any form or degree of erotic stimulation (genital or extra-genital) that is performed between consenting adults (whatever their gender or sexual orientation) and that does not infringe upon anyone’s desires, rights, wishes, or innocence is to be considered natural and acceptable sexual behavior.

This philosophy is key to the Paradise Found Sexual Ceremony. By creating a ritualized context for sexual exploration, extending the duration of the time of the sexual encounter, and engaging the entire body as a sexual whole, the ceremony aims to broaden the horizons of pleasure beyond that which may be experienced through “normal,” everyday sex. And a note on the word “normal”: to avoid the discriminatory undertones that the word implies, I coined the term “predominantly genitally oriented” (PGO) sex and will use it throughout
The Boudoir Bible
. (After all, no one fits the cookie-cutter category of “normal” … once you really get to know him or her.)

PGO sex typically results in fleeting encounters that last from three to fifteen minutes—we may from this conclude that overemphasis upon the genitals, and in particular the male genitals, is the number-one cause of “fast sex.” While fast sex may provide for the superficial release of sexual tension (and there are times in life that permit little more), such fleeting, genitals-localized pleasures, as a steady regime, do nothing to reveal anyone’s true pleasure potential. More often than not, fast sex has the tendency to reduce the sacred union to a compulsive, mechanical act that leaves one or both partners in an emotional void, physically insatiate, or utterly frustrated. Beyond a procreative function, this kind of sexual interaction serves a very limited purpose.

The Paradise Found Sexual Ceremony presents the antithesis to PGO sex. In order to reap the benefits it can provide, lovers will be obliged to put phallocentric role models and their allied behavioral patterns aside, as these do nothing to cultivate the full extent of our pleasure capacity, nor do they permit a sexual ritual to evolve. It is through the simple act of bettering sexual skills that lovers will learn to elaborate rituals that may unfold over hours, if not days. The longer the ritual lasts, the greater its overall effects are likely to be. The ecstatic results induce a sense of psychophysiological well-being that continue to radiate long after the ceremony’s end.

Self-knowledge is key to developing one’s potential in sex as well as in life, and so
The Boudoir Bible
enters “The Gardens of Earthly Delight” with the chapter “
The Anatomy of Desire: A Comparative Approach
,” which is an enlightening map to your own—and your partner’s—body geography. You will find that the similarities between the male and female genitals are as marked as their differences.

During the Paradise Found Sexual Ceremony, penetration does not serve as the means to an end but as a pleasure practiced over and over again, throughout the ceremony’s duration. Similarly, orgasm is not the only reason to initiate the ritual (though it is one of its greatest rewards, as described in the chapter “
Enhancing the Orgasm: Coaxing the Sexual Vibration
.”). The entire body, not just the genitals, is engaged as a sexual, sensual whole.

By removing the sole focus of attention from the genitals, and alternating between genital and extra-genital, or full-body, stimulation, you can experience and provide a wider range of ecstatic sensations. This radically extends the duration of the sexual ceremony and enhances your overall perception of pleasure therein. By inviting sexual tension to mount gradually over an extended period of arousal, your body, mind, and spirit will become charged with the sexual vibration. Regardless of gender or sexual orientation, extended “playtime” is the heartbeat of the Sexual Ceremony.

The ability of men to delay the ejaculation reflex during orgasm is crucial to the progression of the ceremony. The chapter “
Riding the Orgasmic Wave: Male Ejaculation Control
” explores many techniques that both facilitate the delay of the ejaculation reflex and build sexual tension. The chapter “
Navigating the Sacred River: Female Emissions
,” unveils the Holy Grail of female orgasmic potential, the G-spot. Techniques of genital and anal stimulation are described throughout this first section of
The Boudoir Bible
, including a special
dedication to the much-maligned “rosebud” in “
The Anthems of Anal Sex: From Hygiene to Heavenly Pleasures
.” These techniques will lead lovers to unprecedented heights of pleasure during the Paradise Found Sexual Ceremony.

Once the true extent of the body’s pleasure capacity is unveiled, PGO “quickies” will no longer be a sexual mainstay. As the saying goes, “Variety is the spice of life,” and our sex lives are no exception. The more varied our pleasure palette becomes, the more options and possibilities we have to choose from, and the more creative, less compulsive, and deeply satisfying our sexual relations will be.

Central to the philosophy of Paradise Found is the concept and practice of sacred sex. In some people’s minds, the association of the terms “ceremony” and “sacred” with the subject of sex might conjure up hedonistic, “anything goes” visions of salacious lechery. But the Paradise Found Sexual Ceremony—as any sexual activity, for that matter—has a very firm limit: it should
never
infringe upon the wishes, desires, rights, or innocence of anyone involved. Ceremonies are organized to honor special moments, people, and events, and the Paradise Found Sexual Ceremony is no exception.