Blogging from A - Z Challenge April 16 N

N is for Nancy Friday

(for some reason Blogger won't let me add this video, so click on this link to watch it)

I have to thank Nancy Friday for her books over and over and over again. Not only are they open and honest, but they end up being very sexually thrilling. They include their own passions.

I've added this video of her in an old interview. It's not great, but its so lovely to see her talking about her important and interesting books, and also to see how far ahead of her time she was. Here she is talking about women taking the initiative. It is still something women have trouble with, and she is right when she says men need to understand how to turn women down with grace and gentleness.

If you are unfamiliar with Nancy Friday, check out her books which, even though old now, are still fantastically relevant and thrilling to read. 

Blogging from A - Z Challenge April 15 M

M is for Monogamy

A couple is a conspiracy in search of a crime. Sex is often the closest they can get. - Adam Phillips

Through all my sexual travels, experimentation, playfulness, in the end I've come to the conclusion (and I'm willing for life, experience or a really good argument to talk me out of this) that monogamy is the most most intensely erotic, most subversive, dangerous exhilarating and exciting form of sexual relationship.

I have been married before, but my first marriage was very ... traditional. I met my husband through the church in the course of our years together, we both left and once we put religion behind us, our differences became much bigger than our sames. Lust, while sexually consistent was not exciting in that marriage, and I really didn't experience sexual thrills consistently until I left that situation.

Given my experience, I was quite anti marriage, and particularly anti monogamy. I followed all the contemporary ideologies on the subject: not natural, against human instinct, impossible, the death of lust and desire etc. It was a few years later, that I fell in love with a man who was the first true monogamist I had ever met.
He would say to me:
You are every woman I have ever had and you are every woman I will never have. 

Monogamy for him was a work of art. Sex didn't die with its declaration, it was born with it. For him, sexual expression was a dangerous, exciting thing, that had to include deep intimacy. We included sex in all our moods, we did it when we hated each other as well as when we loved each other, and talked about it a great deal. We used it as a form of expression of the relationship, and tried, within the bounds of love and decency, to never refuse the other. Part of our relationship was a promise to each other to be completely responsible for our own sexuality, to bring it to the other, and be as open and vulnerable as we could. Sex with this man was by far some of the best I ever had, and it taught me a great deal about the beauty, passion and terror of properly expressed monogamy.

The relationship was only a couple of years long, but I have used the model we created as a template for all my future relationships. It has not always been successful, because it is a huge, radical thing for a person to commit to themselves at that level, and then to bring that to a relationship is even more shocking, but I do know every one of my encounters has been greatly enriched by the efforts to realize it. I don't like to talk too much about my current relationship, but it goes without saying, this is something we are both very deeply committed to.

Radical monogamy, does not necessarily have to last forever, but it is the most exciting connection I've ever experienced with any human creature.

Each of our relationships is different, and we are different in each of them. this is what makes monogamy so perversely interesting. - Adam Phillips. 

Blogging From A - Z Challenge April 12 K

K is for Kink.

You've heard that rather tasteless joke by Woody Allen haven't you - that one about eroticism is using a feather and kink is using the whole chicken? I may be taking a bit of poetic licence with that one, but it is something that I find rather amusing.

Sexual fetishes are complex things, and greatly misunderstood. When I was in the BDSM scene, there were people there who were experimenting (I fell into that category) and there were people there who didn't properly understand themselves and were trying to understand why they were attracted to something extreme (I fell into that category as well) and then there were the fetishists, those who knew as early as two years old that they were sexually different.

Kink is most interesting when you're dealing with someone with a true fetish.

Coincidentally, when I was first discovering practicing kink, a straight freight I had all my life came out to me about his foot fetish. It had been a great contributor to the death of his marriage ("it's disgusting, don't even talk to me about it" was what he lived with) and he lived in terrible misery with it. It was a consuming thing, overwhelming. If he sat in the wrong place in a crowd - such as in a cinema, or meeting at work - and a woman was in view allowing her shoe to slip down her foot and dangle off her toe, he would have at best a painful throbbing erection, and at worst, evident spillage.

My friend described being a small child, and calling his "teddy bear", "tessy bear", and dancing Tessy up and down his body as if she were walking over the top of him. His kink was connected to powerful women, and he adored Madonna for her overt displays of sexual power. He had been caught around the age of five several times, hiding under the display frames in department stores, sliding his hand out in the hope a woman would accidentally tread on it in her heels. Something like that, and the consequential masturbation, could satiate the fetish for a small while, and ease the throbbing need of it.

We were good friends, I was experimenting with sexuality and was not in any monogamous relationships, so for a while I agreed to walk on him, as he'd never had that before. It only lasted a while, his possessiveness and sexual intensity didn't suit me, and It was accurate to say that I was more interested in the sex (it was fascinating) than in connection romantically with him, so inevitably it imploded in a horrible dark intensity that even our friendship didn't survive. I'll always have a tender place for him, though, He's a very special, deeply intelligent man and I treasure the time I spent with him in my life.

In many ways, I envied him. Imagine being that clear about what you wanted sexually? All the time. Imagine if a desire controlled you to that extent? This is what fascinates me about kink. Men and women are definitely driven by desire, and they think about sex "all the time" but not to the point where you can orgasm at the sight of a naked foot, and mostly these drives are part of the noise of our mind, part of the day, and you "find yourself "crotch watching" (a truly embarrassing habit I have) or "cleavage glancing" or fantasising over bottoms. I'm not talking about these kinds of things.

I have felt the ecstasy of teen female transcendent love - and that is probably the closest one can come to a real fetish like my friend had. I think back very fondly on our lovemaking - it always involved me standing on him, hurting him in small ways, demanding he do things, and inevitably punishing him for non-compliance. Probably the best word to describe it was intense. It was a very intense experience, but one I am very grateful for having had.