Full Exposure: Opening Up to Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression (10 page)

Why do we think the storehouse is so small? Where does our certainty of deprivation come from? One stereotype comes from attitudes toward those who, for professional reasons, are said to have too much sex—whores, porn stars, the sex workers. Aren’t they glassy-eyed, wasted, their bodies little more than a shell for their bank account?

Prostitution has got to be one of the most personal and demanding service jobs there is; and on top of that, it’s done under the threat of arrest. I always said I could never be a full-time prostitute, nurse, or shrink—I’m not even a very good waitress. My impatience would never let me keep that smile on my face and the client’s needs in front of my own. Of course sex workers get tired of the work, the pressure, the stigma, the lack of respect. But I’ve never met a pro who developed an aversion to her own fantasies, to her own sense of touch. It’s a testament to the power of sexual creativity that even when you professionalize your sexual talents, your own unique erotic responses remain unassailable. I don’t think any of my lovers would say, “Oh, yes, bedding Susie Bright is just like reading one of her books, you just follow the bouncing ball.” I may have sold a thousand vibrators, but it doesn’t mean that I’ve always had an easy answer for how I wanted to be touched, or that I could explain the power of my orgasm with an on/off button.

I once read and performed, in front of an enthusiastic night-club crowd, a description of a wet dream I had about Vice Presi-

dent Dan Quayle. People expected it to be humorous, knowing the difference between our politics, but I don’t think anyone was prepared for just how erotic my dream really was. They screamed, and I almost knocked over my mike stand midway through. The stage manager greeted me when I came offstage to congratulate me with a special caveat: “You just have nothing left to hide, do you?”

I’m not hiding anything that I have intellectual or artistic access to, but does that mean I have no secrets, no surprises, no skin? Of course I do. Not only is my private life not on instant replay to the public, it’s not even understandable to me. I wouldn’t want it any other way. I prize my unconscious; I’m not trying to do away with it. Dan Quayle Meets Susie Sexpert is just one glimpse on the highway.

Of course, toting around an image that doesn’t fit you anymore becomes unbearable. I don’t want to wear a rubber dress tonight, I don’t want the trappings of tabloid sex symbols. The last time I went to a play party, a guy in a leather harness stopped me in the stairwell to pester me about an unsolicited manuscript he sent me; he was interrupted only by yet another hedonist who wanted to involve me in a frame-by-frame analysis of a porn movie we were both extras in about ten years ago. Who needs the exploitation? It certainly has nothing to do with my inner erotic life. Too many easy assumptions have made me threaten to wear a custom-made T-shirt that simply says, “Bad in Bed.”

I haven’t had an overload of sex, but I have had too much of the many poisons that circle around erotic repression. The more carefully we look at our fears of sexual gluttony, the more farfetched they seem. We spend such a small amount of time paying attention to our bodies in a sensual way, particularly after childhood. We’ve been taught to “keep our hands to ourselves”; we’ve

learned that our naked bodies are flawed, that our desires and curiosities are dangerous. As we grow older, we start to dismiss our first erotic ideas and inspirations as being juvenile or as an embarrassing tier of self-indulgence.

We basically give our erotic identity all the consideration of a three-minute fuck; then we point our fingers at the person who spends a whopping five minutes on their own sexual expression, and we warn them that they’re going to use it all up. How much is there to use, anyway? Why don’t we ever consider how challenging it might be to uncover the layers of sexuality, once you clear away the plastic wrappers and the parental warning stickers? This is going to take more than five minutes, and we have to have a sensuous faith that our creative well goes as deep as we need to drink.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
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NURTURE

I
f you never write a love letter, if you never speak publicly about your sexual opinions, if you never dress up as a naughty French maid for Halloween, still there is one way that you might uninten-tionally express your erotic disposition: become a parent. If you find yourself in a parenting role—whether as the actual birth mom or dad, or as teacher, sister, uncle, or baby-sitter—your attitudes about sex, fantasy, privacy, and desire will sink into a child’s early impres-sions deeper than a tattoo.

The conventional thinking about parenthood and sex focuses only on the moment that you tell your kids “the facts of life.” It’s some monumental “chat” that you have at a key moment in the child’s life, or it’s something you leave in the hands of your paranoid school board to dispense in their classrooms. It’s

discussed as a religious issue and an etiquette issue—how to say just the right thing at just the right moment. You implant, almost surgically, the correct values that you want your offspring to absorb. If you have regrets later, it’s always about your choice of words or timing: the message that was too late, too early, lost in the puberty shuffle.

Forget it, all of it. The most essential message is the simplest one, and it’s something that begins at pregnancy and continues every day of family life. That is the simple acknowledgment that (1) everyone in a family is a sexual being, from the grandparents to toddlers, and that (2) the sexual aspect of each member of the family is to be respected and appreciated.

When I hear people say, “I can never imagine my parents having sex,” I wince. If that’s the way you feel about them, you’re well on your way to becoming that very thing you find so unimaginable—the parent or elder who can’t admit their sexuality.

Parents also tell me that they have discovered, to their anguish, that their kids are masturbating, that their kids have even joyfully told them that they have discovered something that makes them “tingly” all over. It ties me in knots when I realize that they think of their kids’ masturbation as a threat, a danger. Even if the prejudice that masturbation is sick has died, there are plenty who still find it worrying and unnatural. Why are we still in the dark ages about this?

My most daunting commandment for family sex education is to have the courage to say “I don’t know” when your kids ask difficult sex questions instead of falling back on religious superstition or le-gend. They need to know from their family that sexuality is not black and white, that sometimes you have to search for answers, and that even then it can be frustrating.

My daughter and I were watching TV the other day, and a scene came on where a boy tries to kiss a girl, and she protests, pushing him away. “They always do that,” Aretha said. “Why does the girl always push the kisser away?” And I knew what the next question was, because she also sees how that same darn girl ends up kissing that same boy in the end. Now I had my whole little spiel lined up, and I was ready to go about how sexist most movies are, and how women are always played for virgin fools or whorish demons. But Aretha’s question was so deep, deeper than my Hollywood critique. What do I want to tell her about being a woman, and about what women want from sex? I realize that I want her to know, right off the bat, that I’m still answering that question for myself.

But put the birds and bees aside for a moment. I know that much of the anxiety we have about addressing our sexual selves in a family comes from being so aware of our incest taboo; it’s our fear of being inappropriately close or confessional with our family. We are often unclear about where the boundaries ought to be and on why parents sometimes cross them. Few things sicken us as much as hearing about kids who are abused and molested in their family. For many people, the only way the family relationship feels safe is for it to be sterile.

But families who perpetrate sexual abuse aren’t reaping the consequences of having a free and honest sexual environment; tragically, it’s quite the opposite. Sex between caretakers and kids is almost always a secret, where brutal shame and the ugliest manipulation are used to rationalize the adult’s actions.

For me, it has been essential to question why our incest taboo is so powerful and relevant today. When I was young, of course I read the standard evolutionary discussion of how families must not breed together lest they become genetic misfits. I remember

reading histories of mentally retarded monarchs of the past who’d suffered from too much inbreeding; I heard the hillbilly jokes about a whole family of cousins who had six toes.

But our incest taboo is much stronger than simply a species imperative to keep blood relations from having intercourse. We don’t ex-cuse it when no pregnancy results. There’s a more universal reason why we protect our children, and it’s illuminating to think less about how this taboo protects them, and more about how it empowers them.

From the day we begin caring for the children in our lives, we are preparing them to leave. It’s the most difficult thing to face—a grand abandonment of our own devising. We bond with our babies, they are totally dependent on us for years, and yet the whole plan is one day to say, “Good-bye.” It seems diabolical sometimes; the timing is never right for both sides, and a certain amount of heartbreak is inevitable.

How are kids ever supposed to be free of us, in the best possible way, if on top of everything else, we control their sexual lives? People who have sex with their kids, whatever form that takes, are doing something worse than repulsive or pathological; they are handicap-ping their charges in the cruelest way.

Sexual intimacy is the most difficult tie of all to break free from. We look at longtime couples who say how hard it is to get over a divorce—how, after so many years together, they find it difficult to see themselves as individuals or to connect with someone new or to feel like there’s a future.

How much more difficult is it when the parent you’re trying to “break up” with is also your lover? The power inequality is so insur-mountable, it’s grotesque. For incest survivors, it is psychologically overwhelming to get a “divorce” from this kind of parent and to find their own independent sex life.

Once you see that the parent’s challenge is to make independence for the young people in their lives possible and successful, then you can see that the idea is not to keep all sexual discussion or understanding out of a family, but rather to realize independent and unique sexual lives
inside
the family. It means understanding that sexual abuse of children is foremost about control, whether the parent acts as a lover or a gatekeeper. Locking up your daughters is not usually seen on the same level as molesting them, but each intimidation has its own crippling consequences.

Want to see young people having responsible, healthy sex lives? Have a responsible, healthy sex life yourself—and let it be acknowledged by your family and friends. I’m not talking about doing a striptease at the dinner table; I mean a healthy sex life in the most basic sense. Stop lying. Show evidence of your own sexual health, rapport, and integrity.

I see many parents who go to tremendous lengths to convince their children that they don’t have a sexual bone in their bodies. They won’t be affectionate with their lovers; they won’t admire something that strikes them as sexy, or find humor in erotically vulnerable situations. When they have health concerns that affect their sex lives, they are utterly silent on the subject. They either don’t have any books or pictures in the house about sex, or they hide them (in places that ultimately will not remain hidden from busybody eight-year-olds). If they are caught by their kids while making out or making love, instead of saying, “Close the door, we want to be alone,” they invent some ridiculous fib about what they are up to.

If your worst nightmare is that your kid may ask you, “Why can’t I watch?” just tell them the truth—that your private life is not an entertainment program for their behalf. The same thing goes for them; they get to have privacy, too. So many adults are

hysterically equating closed doors with sexual misbehavior; they miss the point that sometimes we all want to be alone.

There are good parenting reasons for being honest with your kids about sex, but the benefits to your own life are also immediately obvious, even if they don’t immediately sound so noble. Parents who aren’t furtively hiding or lying about their sex life are spared the hypocritical humiliations that their children will eventually un-earth. They are blessed with the mental health that comes from honestly appreciating their sensuality, the respect that comes from living their lives without vicariously appropriating their children’s lives.

Usually, when we hear about a parent with a “sexy” reputation, it’s the worst sort of gossip—the irresponsible mother who drops the kids off at a stranger’s apartment so she can have an affair or the father who’s more interested in conception than any other stage of nurturing. It reflects the conflict we feel as parents: “Why don’t I ever get to have any fun?” versus our obligation to put our kids’ needs above our own.

I don’t think the natural sacrifices we make for the next generation are so impossibly at odds with having an intellectual life, an erotic life, or a community life that doesn’t revolve entirely around our offspring. Going out on a date—or having an evening all to yourself to enjoy a book or a friend—is a very different thing from child neglect. If you neglect your creative spirit, your children will reflect that right back to you with lack of respect or empathy for your concerns. In other words, yes, you can give it all up for them, but get ready for a complete lack of gratitude—and after they’re on their own you may experience an emptiness that’s even worse than the resentment that preceded it.

Lots of parents agree that they should have a private life, a sex life, but they have no idea where to begin. Especially with young

couples, the caution begins during pregnancy, where all of a sudden the mommy-to-be, the “baby carrier,” becomes part time-bomb, part disability case. She starts getting warnings from baby care books, and maybe even from her doctor, that certain kinds of sex are going to be impossible, dangerous, or just vaguely inappropriate. Of course, they rarely spell these things out; it’s that “sex” itself is threatening. When I first had my baby, I got the usual warning about not making love for six weeks after childbirth. But being close with my lover, physically, was one of the first things I wanted to do when I got out of that cold, creepy hospital room.