Full Exposure: Opening Up to Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression (8 page)

• Poor people, people who are deprived economically and politically, have no pressing interest in sexual politics. Maybe after you gave them some democracy and a decent meal, then you could have the nerve to bring up sex.
  

  This is the political lie that evolved from the lie told at my childhood dinner table: “You must eat this (boiled spinach, boiled asparagus, boiled cabbage) because people in (Name of Devastated Country) are starving.” You must do your duty here, because people over
  there
  can think of nothing else and must suffer
  

  every day. If you think of your pleasure, they will suffer even more. God forbid we think about
  their
  pleasure, as only the most grim needs can be addressed.
  

  This is a comforting illusion for the puritans and blamers. It’s quite a denial of the “needs” that are felt by citizens everywhere. Hungry or not, people are sexual, they’re alive to their thoughts, they have more to express than a wish for bread. If all the disenfranchised peoples of the world had their own TV shows and Web sites and slick magazines, no doubt sexual issues would make a prominent appearance. Sexuality is not a frill, and it’s not a luxury appearance; it’s a part of your life whether you’re flush or famished, living under dictators or parliamentarians. It has its own unique relationship to history, and it will not shut up.
  

  I spent many years as an activist in political campaigns and causes. To a lot of my friends and family, the issues I was involved with seemed pretty unsexy, to say the least. I was particularly active in American labor unions, from farmworkers to Teamsters to coal miners. Every contract I fought for, every election I contested, every picket line I walked, was ostensibly about economic issues, democracy issues. Most outsiders think those kinds of issues are really wearing—and even tedious for anyone who doesn’t have an unusual penchant for class struggle.
  

  Yet I can’t remember a meeting I attended, or an after-hours bar-room conversation—and we’re talking thousands here—where sexuality wasn’t exerting its powerful influence. I’m not talking about discreet flirtations and tensions, either. It was blatant.
  

  The unions I worked with, by the nature of their size and diversity, threw together very different people who normally would never deal with each other on an equal level. Different ages, races, genders, and sexual preferences were all thrown into the same pot. We certainly didn’t win every battle, but in terms
  

  of confronting our personal prejudices, I don’t think a moment was lost. Our devotion to endless discussions couldn’t help but bring up sexual connections and questions that might otherwise have been politely avoided.
  

  I vividly remember a meeting where we were supposed to be choosing picket captains. Picket captain Joe Slobo said—later he claimed it was a joke—that he could “deal with one dyke on the picket line, but was every faggot in town going to be joining our cause?” At this point, Tom (who everyone thought was so stoic and who wore an American flag on his windbreaker) came out about his gay son, who had already been walking the line for weeks. He could hardly finish his rant, because it seemed like every single person in the room had to get in their two cents’ worth. Twenty years later, people who were there can’t remember what the fucking contract was about, but we can remember that night when gay liberation raised its head in that dumpy living room in Cleveland.
  

  Discard any stage theories you may have about how the sexual revolution proceeds in people’s hearts, minds, and genitals. One of the greatest songs of the American labor movement was inspired by a banner in the huge 1912 walkout of women textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, which said simply, “Bread and Roses.” The song, inspired by the heroism of the strikers, emphasized the sentiment of their crusade:
  

  As we go marching, marching, in the beauty of the day A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lots gray
  

  Are touched by all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses Hearts starve as well as bodies, give us bread but give us roses!
  

  Bread and Roses is indeed where it’s at, and those roses are the scent of deepest ecstasy and persuasion.
  

  I honestly meet few people today who seek sexual liberation out of a sense of social conscience, but that was always on the minds of the people who pioneered the fundamentals of free love. That consciousness becomes hard to avoid once you begin even the most self-centered path toward erotic expression. Even if you believe that sexual knowledge and discovery are only your private concerns and have no particular value for the rest of humanity, then ask yourself this:
  

• How can you accept the scope of your desires without accepting tolerance and empathy?
  

• How can you embrace the range of your erotic life without becoming dismayed and exasperated with traditional male and female roles?
  

• How can you demand your right to see and hear, read and write, what you want about sex without having a stake in freedom of speech?
  

• How can you insist on a reverent place for sex in your life without questioning the priorities of materialism?
  

CHAPTER ELEVEN
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CELIBACY

All pleasures contain an element of sadness.

Jonathan Eibeschutz

H
ow do you throw down the gauntlet to a sexual libertine? You ask them if they’ve ever considered celibacy—or dared to practice it. If they say no, then it implies that there is some devastating truth that they have yet to discover. If they say yes, and it is clear that they are no longer celibate, then it seems to indicate a lack of moral toughness on their part, that they couldn’t cut it. Either way, celibacy ups the ante for the practicing lover, who wonders if there is something in abstention that is greater than all orgasms, more blinding than any passion. Do celibates know something that ordinary people don’t?

For starters, the first thing practicing celibates know is that they cannot agree with one another at all. Look at any Internet celibacy Web site. All that juice they took away from their sixth,

sexual chakra now revels in its own internal debate over what defines “true” celibacy. Still, the questions they ask themselves seem un-avoidable. Does celibacy include all sex? Or just intercourse? Does it include masturbation? What about sexual thoughts? Is celibacy always in relationship to God, and if so, which one? Who has lived the celibate life who could be a role model?

I realize that few people seriously take a vow of celibacy, and even fewer choose celibacy as a nonsecular lifestyle. Still, their choices intrigue and often impress other people, who think, “Well,
I
certainly couldn’t give it up, but sometimes I wish I could.” Many people have profound regrets about their sexual knowledge; they feel brought down from their ideal. It’s tempting, then, to imagine a sex-free life where you could live above it all—above the disillusionment, the obsession, and the hunger.

Finding role models and fellow travelers is difficult indeed. Celibates who promote their path do not readily accept people who fling themselves down at the doorstep and beg to be released from the agony of sexual relationships. Devastated by love? Want relief? You may not even get past the veteran celibate’s door. Better that you should wallow in a few Sex and Love Anonymous meetings, where you can begin the twelve steps of confessing that you are “helpless” over your romantic or lustful compulsions.

SLA meetings, as they’re called, became very popular in the 1980s, when the Clean and Sober movement began and the AIDS epidemic exploded simultaneously. I attended one meeting in San Francisco in those years, where each man present talked about fucking too much, and each woman present talked about pining too much. Each individual seemed to find his or her sexual behavior to be their unique disease, without any notice of how peculiar it was that they were divided by gender in their

obsessions: lustful gratification versus romantic love. They were looking for a way to find some serenity, some calm from their libido storm, a chance to have a different kind of relationship with their lovers and to make amends to those they had trampled over in their bed sheets. No one said it out loud, but I felt like the search for monogamy, not God or celibacy, was their Holy Grail.

You don’t have to go to an SLA meeting to find these sentiments. Twelve-step programs and celibacy seekers aside, people simply have so much shame and regret about their desires that they often feel they would be better off feeling nothing at all. Some of my friends have told me they were “taking a break from sex,” which seemed to be their code for saying that they’d been humiliated in sex and wanted out of the game. Others told me they were experimenting with redirecting their fantasies. But rather than being a high-minded effort, their celibacy was actually the result of their shame for fantasizing about anyone or anything other than their partner. Finally, there were those who told me they were trying to get rid of all sex in their lives, including masturbation, because they thought that maybe once you purged it out of your system you wouldn’t care anymore. All of these lovers were miserable because they felt their sexuality didn’t fit the strict description of what a “happy couple” was supposed to feel, the little twins at the top of the cake.

Celibacy purists, by contrast, are not interested in finding wedded bliss. “Celibacy is a freely chosen dynamic state, usually vowed, that involves an honest and sustained attempt to live without direct sexual gratification in order to serve others productively for a spiritual motive,” says one celibacy essayist, Richard Sipe.

Celibates seek their own refinement constantly, and they question their own motivations from the start. If you’re a hurt

little lamb who got roasted in the dating game, dedicated celibates predict you will not last at practicing abstinence. They want you to wipe away your tears and realize that celibacy is not for the rejected and burned out. Rather, it’s a prescribed way of life for those who want a closer understanding of spirituality and self-awareness that is not clouded by a genital-oriented fog machine. Celibates want you to see that life without sex is the preferable choice, not the damned choice; and if you can’t see the nobility of it all above your own wound-licking, you’re morally no better than a nonpracticing whore.

Celibacy is a choice to remove oneself from the demands of the body, much like fasting or voluntary sleep deprivation. You
will
yourself to rise above your body’s yearnings and to seek a divine, or at least profound, wisdom in that altered state that you aspire to dwell in. Many people call that state an experience of being closer to God or to the essential truths of life and nature. I’m afraid I still call it an altered state, and like all levels of consciousness, more than one ticket will get you there.

I have never been celibate. Of course that doesn’t mean I haven’t slept alone. I’ve just never taken a vow or made a long-term plan to remove myself from my fantasies and refrain from sexual engage-ment. Yet my experiences of sex in relationships—rejection, infatu-ation, commitment, disillusion, reawakening—and the substantial time alone in between relationships, dramatically altered my original visions of romance and sexual fulfillment.

My solo fantasy life sustained me: the thoughts that came to me after relationships had passed, how I touched myself alone, and what I wrote in my diaries that no one ever read—these moments became like oracles to me, telling me things that I would never hear from a lover’s lips. I’ve listened and responded to my body, but that is not the same as being a slave to it.

It’s
temperance
that is missing in debates about celibacy; we already have quite enough pledges and avowals at both extremes. I found the most revolutionary advertising message of my life in that chocolate bar commercial that says, “Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t.” What a reassuring and brilliant ideal! But can we take it? We live in a culture that insists that people must either like nuts or detest them—that they are either nuts or normal. The candy bar ideology is far ahead of its time, and I only wish that such a spirit of acceptance would proceed just as fast in the noncandy aspects of life.

One thing that celibates and sex fiends share is a fascination with the temptations of the genital regions. They see the penis and clitoris as everything from magnets to little operatives with minds of their own. They imbue the cock and cunt with power and prestige. But as a sympathetic “sex fiend,” I have to say that I see my pussy as powerful not because I find it uncontrollable or the key to my pleasure, but because it is such a strong symbol of creation, of my womanhood, of my pleasure and my unconscious. Still, it is of little use to me unless my mind attends to it.

If I really wanted to stop being sexual, I would have to stop thinking, because it’s quite irrelevant what my clit is doing if my brain is still functioning. There is no mileage to be gained by vilifying my genitals as opposed to any other part of my body. As some celibates have discovered, you can have an orgasm without touching anyone at all—but some other noncelibates discovered that same fact through intense yoga training or a good hit of LSD or just sitting in the sunshine one day when all of a sudden,
boom!
Pleasure and creativity are coming at us all the time; it’s just a matter of being re-ceptive.

Some celibates are in favor of masturbation, or even take a Tantric approach to celebrating ecstasy and celibacy simultane-

ously. Their spiritual calling sees celibate chastity as a particular way of being a sexual person, not to be equated with asexuality. But why is the message so insistent that celibacy puts one on a special wire to nirvana? How do they know that promiscuity does not have its own divine level of spiritual communication? The celibates who offend me the most are not the ones who want to erase below the waist, but those who seem to be taking down the antennae.

Some of my favorite celibacy rants are the ones that concern the release from romantic illusions, from living as a prisoner in that peculiar state called “being in love.” An anonymous contributor to an Internet celibacy forum writes,